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Think Like Your Customer: The Secret to Business Growth

You have less than 5 seconds to attract attention and resonate with your prospective client before they click off your website, or stop listening to you speak. The secret to business growth is to think like your customer, so you can attract and convert your best clients.

Your potential customer is looking for you. Consumers are constantly seeking out solutions to their problems or looking to fill their needs. Think of how many needs you fill on a daily basis.

Research tells us that the average adult makes approximately 35,000 remotely conscious choices or decisions a day!

Consumers are seeking out information and searching for help. They are looking for somebody like you to help them solve a problem or fulfill a need they have. What will your prospective client find when they look to their trusted sources of information and people of influence in their circle.

Will they see you? Are you findable? Are you searchable online? What does your brand convey about who you are? What emotions do your words and your message conjure up in people?

Are you resonating with your market as a viable solution for what they think they need?

It’s your responsibility to understand your customer and present yourself in the right way, so that that particular group of people can find you, see you as a potential option, trust your expertise, and take action.

You can’t make the impact that you want to make in your business – IF you are not able to attract and convert your prospects into clients. And whether they see you and are confident that you can help them – is completely up to you. You have the power to influence that.

Buyers are either compelled or repelled to work with you. It’s one or the other.

So, if you were to objectively take a look at the way you’re presenting yourself and your business in the world (your website, your marketing materials, your verbal introduction) – are you repelling or compelling people?

And if you are compelling people – how well are you doing that, on a scale of 1 to 5. Is there room for improvement? Could you compel a steadier stream of clients and not just a random trickle?

The secret to business growth is to THINK like your best customer. And to do that, you need to know them – intimately.

There are 3 main ways that business owners sabotage their ability to attract and convert their best clients:

Not understanding your role as a salesperson

If you want to succeed in business, you need to learn how to excel at sales. This may be a muscle you personally have to exercise, if you don’t fancy yourself a salesperson. Having said that, sales skills are inherent in all of us, they simply need to be nurtured.

Simply put, selling is the emotion management of the other person (the person you are selling to).The function of selling is to identify people’s unique needs and help them achieve their desires.You are the provider of the solution they seek, so your role is to facilitate the buying process.

I see many business owners fall into the trap of talking about what they do versus telling their prospects why what they do is important to the needs of that specific person. (This applies to both verbal and written marketing communications.)

Not understanding how people buy

People buy based on an emotional response, and justify their decision with logic later. As a consumer yourself you can feel it when you have an emotional connection with something, and how that influences your decision to buy it. You can also feel it when people are trying to ‘sell’ you something that you don’t need.

Position yourself to tap into the emotions of your target market and sell your services based on filling the emotional need that they specifically have. If you don’t know what that need is, then your first step is to understand your market much better than you do. Your goal is to know your customer inside and out.

You should know what keeps them up at night, what they care about, and what ‘good’ looks like when their problem is fixed. Be insatiably curious, ask a lot of questions and listen to the responses, the clues will start to present themselves.

Not speaking in your customer’s language

You have less than 5 seconds to attract attention and resonate with your prospective client before they disengage from listening to you or click off your website. The majority of business owners make the mistake of talking too much about themselves, rather than engaging in a dialogue with their customer.

The truth is that nobody cares more about your product or service than you do. What people do care about is how your product or service will help them, save them time or money, or make their life easier in some way.

Get out of your own shoes and put on the shoes of your target market. What do they care about? What is important to them? What are they struggling with that you can help with? Remember to use their language when you are reflecting your marketing and communications back to them.

The more targeted your message is, in answering these specific questions, the more successful your marketing efforts will be. Think of the difference in effectiveness between having a one-on-one conversation with someone, compared to yelling in a room full of people. Your message should be targeted enough to the point where it sounds like you are talking to one person (your ideal client).

Don’t make the mistake of trying to be everything to everyone, because in reality you’ll resonate with nobody by following that strategy. Just because your product or service is applicable to everyone, that’s not the way you should be selling it.

Truth is, successful business owners watch their competition, but listen to their customers.

Learning to think like your customer – is the secret to your business success.

To your success,

 

 

p.s. Listen to the audio version of this blog on my podcast.

About Michela Quilici

International Business Growth Coach, Award-winning Marketing Strategist, Best-Selling Author, Speaker and Forbes Coaches Council. Known as a Business Navigator, Michela works with growth-minded business owners, service professionals and CEOs who want to ignite their businesses and accelerate growth, while building a business aligned to who they are.

She is passionate about creating roadmaps that ignite leaders to take inspired action to navigate their growth on purpose using strategy, systems and self-leadership, so they can get noticed, get clients and get profitable.