Tweet

Best of the Janes: Gaining a Deeper Understanding of Your Ideal Customer

Guest post by: Michele DeKinder-Smith

Article Overview: When a female entrepreneur sets out to get to know her ideal customer – and therefore increase her business – she will achieve greater success if she follows several specific guidelines.

Best of the Janes: Gaining a Deeper Understanding of Your Ideal Customer

When a female entrepreneur sets out to get to know her ideal customer - and therefore increase her business and customer loyalty - she will achieve greater success if she follows several specific guidelines:

1. Get to know "the" ideal customer, as well as what he or she needs and wants - and then learn even more about him or her to hone in marketing materials and develop new products and services.
2. Ask compassionate questions. In general, female entrepreneurs genuinely want to help their customers. They want to provide solutions to their customers' challenges or help their customers achieve their dreams. To best serve her customers, then, a female entrepreneur must ask them open-ended questions that truly seek to uncover their greatest challenges, to elicit a deep understanding without creating judgments (entrepreneurs must take care to ask questions in a way that do not bias the results, but instead elicit the "real" answer to their questions).
3. Be an effective listener. When a customer shares information with an entrepreneur, the entrepreneur must listen with an open mind, with the intention of developing empathy by stepping into the customers' shoes.
4. Integrate customer understanding into the business at every step along the way. Make customer understanding an ongoing part of the business decision-making process. In other words, an entrepreneur will better meet her customers' needs (and therefore grow her business) by basing any decision, product, service and price on what she knows to be true about her ideal customer.
5. Temper customer understanding with understanding of self. Entrepreneurs who build their businesses around what serves their customers AND what serves their own hearts, find far more personal fulfillment, and therefore love their businesses, which lets their passion shine through. For example, an entrepreneur who is terrified of public speaking shouldn't let her customers talk her into public speaking if she'd far rather write her material - in that case, her passion wouldn't shine through in public speaking and she wouldn't serve her customers as well.

As women business owners seek to grow their businesses, they must get to know their customers - and well - while remaining true to their own hearts. By following the above guidelines, female entrepreneurs can grow their businesses while fueling their passions.

Related Articles
  How to maximise your sales account opportunities
  Tips on Building Customer Loyalty
  Knowing Your Ideal Customer – The Key To Developing Products and Services
  A Secret to Closing More Sales
  How To Recognize Your Ideal Client, Tips From Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach
  Losing Clients: Two Types of Women Entrepreneurs, Two Types of Responses
  3 Steps to Filling Your Pipeline with Eager Clients and Customers
  Ask Questions to Build Better Business Relationships
  3 Key Questions to Ask Yourself Before Starting a Social Media Marketing Campaign
  Huge Growth: Two Women Entrepreneurs, Two Ways To Deal
  Understanding Your Evolving Markets
  A Must Before You Recruit
  Your Ideal Client – A Key Concept for Solo Business Marketing
  Literacies of Global Leadership – The art of understanding and connecting
  What Business Are We In? If you said “solutions”, think again.
  Improve your business with key performance indicators (KPIs)
  Who Is Your Ideal Client?
  "If You Really Loved Me, You Wouldn't..."
  Why Should I Buy From You?
  Through the looking glass

Article Tags: female entrepreneurs, ideal customer, market research strategies, small business growth, women business owners
Referred by: http://www.MichelePW.com



Related Forum Posts
Re: Two Useful Books To Help You Focus On The CLIENT - Hi David, To add to your thread, I'd like to recommend Jonathan Tisch's "Chocolates On The Pillow Aren't Enough: Reinventing The Customer Experience". Tisch's book includes content on "Welcoming Customers", "The New Art of Customization", "The Challenges of Customer Diversity" and "Offering Something Extra to Your Customers" to name a few.
Re: Paypal process $315 million in payments per day. - I agree with you David, their Customer relations suck. This mean other payment systems like 2CO and WORLDPAY should work on their customers relations to take more slice of the market.
Re: Welcome to Entrepreneur University! - Hi Evan and GT, Can you clarify? If you join the "Preferred Customer" you are not entitled to commission? Why? This is the the $79.95/month account, I don't understand why you are not getting commission from it?
Re: Email Marketing Benefits - Robert, Many lists consist of more prospects than customers. Customer lists are the best, but they are created because prospects successfully transform into customers.
Re: Do Your Prospects / Customers Trust You? - All good points everyone and I'm learning as I read through. Gaining trust takes a lot of time and even if you're an expert or a startup in the field that you're promoting or excelling with, still, you have to put enough attention on how you'll be able to establish value among your prospects and customers by giving them what they need (contents, contacts, ventures, etc) and not only by offering them services and selling them products. Thus, customers do trust us with the way we give them satisfaction first before they give something back in return.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

The Difference Between Management And Leadership

Understanding Influence

Maximum Impact Restaurant Greening

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.