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Creating Customers – a distinct process
Written by: Phil ShipperleeArticle Overview: Creation of a customer is a very different and separate process from that used when creating and pursuing opportunities. The process of creating a customer, as a carefully planned activity, helps you to build your customers’ understanding of the value of your proposition and the value of their relationship with your company.
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Creating Customers – a distinct process
Over 50 years ago, Peter Drucker said; "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer".
Creation of a customer is a very different and separate process from that used when creating and pursuing opportunities. The process of creating a customer, as a carefully planned activity, helps you to build your customers’ understanding of the value of your proposition and the value of their relationship with your company. If you are not perceived in terms of value then you will be perceived as a commodity, a price and expendable.
Creating customers is the role of the selling operation in a company and if the latter is not working, the former will not happen. Sir John Harvey Jones observed; "Most British companies fail not in their attempts to be innovative or creative. Most fail because they undervalue the importance of professional selling".
Look at your "customer" list and ask yourself; "are these real customers or are they just people who happen to have bought something from us?" Many so called customer lists are nothing more than lists of "users". A real customer is an advocate and more importantly, someone who sees you and your company as an essential part of their business.
What is a Customer and why is it different from an Opportunity?
This may hurt but, most people that we call customers see us (if they see us at all) merely as a source of a quick fix, there is no relationship, just a transactional exchange convenient to them at that moment. The responsibility for building the relationship rests with the supplier and it is you who must take the blame if your customers are fickle, or spend their time focusing on price and what discount they can extract from you. If you are not perceived in terms of value then you will be perceived as a commodity, as a price, and expendable.
A real customer is an organisation who sees you and your company as an essential part of their business. When planning projects, and other activities, the customer will often contact suppliers before formal tendering starts to warn them there is an opportunity on the way. I have won many projects over the years where I could not meet the customer’s delivery timetable or where I have been more expensive than other bidders. On one occasion, I won some £22m of business over a three year period when my price was 35% higher than the next most expensive bidder and 52% higher than the lowest. My customer understood what they would get for the extra money by buying from me – they understood the value.
Building such understanding between supplier and buyer takes time and requires attention to detail and it is this that turns the prospect into the customer and eventually into an advocate for your business. They will evaluate you in terms of your ability to deliver, your reliability and the level of risk associated with using you.
Once a trusting supplier/customer relationship exists, you can work more effectively inside the customer both during the pursuit of opportunities and also between opportunities. In fact, much of the real customer creation work is done when there isn’t an opportunity to work on. Once accepted as a supplier, you will be able to build an internal network of contacts that will help you to move around inside the customer’s organisation, often in places unavailable to your competitors who are less well engaged.
Tips:
* The two perspectives; what you have and what customers might want, leads to the creation of two lists of characteristics which when cross matched provide a profile of an “ideal” customer. From these create the questions that you need to answer both through desk research and in conversation with the suspects and prospect.
* Create weightings enabling you to compare different organisations and quickly identify those organisations who are unlikely to become customers so you can easily qualify them out and move on to more valuable suspects and prospects.
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