Your Customers are your Sales Team
Word of mouth works well. That is, all the time the words are positive. But the power of negative talk among your customers is like the wind that fans the flames of a forest fire. Small micro businesses and time-starved solopreneurs do not always have the budget nor the head space for developing let alone managing a full-on market strategy that reaches out to new customers and spreads the message of your great services and products far and wide. When you have a small net, you can only cast it so far, but if you only cast it so far, how are you going to catch the fertile shoals? And what if an unhappy customer or a negative review stirs up a storm in your waters?
Customers are the beating heart of all business, large or small. They have insight into how you operate and they experience the standards of your services. If you are struggling to get a positive message to the right people, get your customers on board and they will be just as effective as a switched-on sales team. Here are five tips on how to do that:
Build Trust
In a world where trust in media and truth has been eroded, we find that most people will trust what their friends and family tell them about a product or a service across all the ranges that exist: a holiday destination, a design project, a veterinary practice, a nail bar, a wine bar, a coffee bar, a beauty salon, a kitchen gadget, a tradesman...the list is as endless as there are product. We are no longer as susceptible to glossy images and jingle as perhaps we once were and this is one of the reasons why online ‘influencers’ are able to earn a small fortune from simply ‘influencing’ i.e. telling their followers, with whom they have already built a relationship based on trust, that a product is to their liking. And sales of that product are boosted.
So if you want your services to reach out to as many potential customers as possible, make sure your customers trust you. They have to trust you to:
Deliver what you say you are going to deliver
Deliver on time when you say you are going to deliver
The quality of your product or service is reliable and constantly good – so they keep coming back to you each and every time
When they are sure they can put their trust in you, you can be sure they’ll be telling their friends all about you.
Make them fall in love with you
Love is a strong emotion and one that is never forgotten. If you love a place, you go back. If you love a product, you buy it again. If you love a service, you keep asking for it from the same source every time you need it. So make your customers fall in love with you by:
Listening, understanding, then fulfilling their desires (sometimes you have to help them understand their own desires but that is where your skill and expertise comes in)
Making every interaction with you enjoyable, from pleasant phone conversations to making the ordering and delivery system flawless – if they have fun when buying your product, they’ll do so over and over again. And then they’ll tell their friends.
Have them love you so much, they won’t want to break up with you, even when that gorgeous new product is also available, or that amazing new shop offering similar products has opened up right across the road from you.
Foster loyalty – your loyalty to your customer is repaid tenfold through their loyalty to you, especially when they also introduce their kith and kin to you.
Help them save money
Everyone loves a freebie, and giving something away once in a while is often repaid many times over through return sales and referrals from happy customers. Think loyalty discounts, unexpected little bonus gifts. Even little personalised thank you messages inside parcels make a difference. Your customer will feel valued, and will feel that they are receiving value for their money when they spend with you.
But avoid the pitfalls of cheap and tacky gifts – cheap and tacky reflects on your service and a tacky pen with your name on it does not look good nestled at the top of their waste paper bin. Give a little something of real value and then listen to them sing your praises.
Stay in mind and in sight
Sometimes you need to give your customers a little reminder of who you are and why they loved interacting with you. Encourage them to sign up to your newsletters so that once a month (don’t overdo it with emails, this will only serve to have them unsubscribe) they see your name in their Inbox. Engage with them in person from time to time if that is possible for your business – a VIP invitation to an event hosted by your business to showcase a new product, for example, a pause for coffee if you have a reasonably good personal relationship, perhaps (that particular tactic helped me trial out a new service and gained me two hot little deals).
Stay visible and stay relevant by updating your website regularly, posting articles that your client base will find genuinely useful and use social media to showcase your skills, your brand personality and to prove that when a customer interacts with you, they love what they find.
Referral prizes
More often than not called a referral discount, I like to think of these as prizes – you get me a new customer, you win something because I win something. Prizes are much more fun than ‘discounts’ (although you can use discounts as a prize if you want). Be careful that this does not come across as tacky or desperate – you want your loyal customer to understand that you really do appreciate the referral.
And what if it looks as if one unhappy customer might rock the boat? We’ll address this in a future article, but essentially, nothing beats the human thing – own your mistake (if it was a mistake that caused the unhappiness), listen to the grievance, apologise and show true humility (a fake apology is usually worse than no apology) and do your best to put it right. Sometimes, when you are able to fully resolve their problems the unhappy customer can become your greatest advocate.
Do any of these tips help your business? Get in touch and let us know!