Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Why should you interrogate your customers?
Hi, I’m Brian Pombo welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live coming to you live every day here from Grants Pass, Oregon.
Today we’re going to talk a little bit about why you should be interrogating your customers. Why you shouldn’t just be talking to them.
You shouldn’t just be communicating at them or even with them. You should be questioning them. You should be having them in an interrogation and pulling every morsel out of that interchange as possible.
Are you recording your conversations with your customers?
Are you having conversations with your customers?
I know what the answer is.
The answer is no, you are not having enough.
And here’s how I know you don’t think enough about your customer in general. I can make that a blanket statement.
I could find that to be true. So tonight I was working, doing a little bit of a help with some people who ran a political campaign, just a local political campaign, nonpartisan. And they were wanting help on where to go next.
I’ve known them for awhile and the answer is always the same. The answer is find out what the voter wants.
Because in a political campaign, you’re not as much looking for our customer issue are looking for a donor. You’re looking for a volunteer, you’re looking for voter, you know, you’re looking for a little different action.
You’re not necessarily needing money to be exchanged for a product. The product is the candidate, when it comes to politics.
So in this case it’s a candidate, and in the particular case we were talking about, it’s a voter. They’re looking for a vote in exchange for what the candidates going to do for them.
It’s common human nature.
They create what they’re about first before they talk to the end customer, the voter.
And it’s like, wow, yeah, well they’ve got to have something about them first.
Well, yeah, you have to already know who you are about and everything else, but you should not design your marketing until you find out what they want.
Then you take where you’re at and where they’re at and you meet in the middle somewhere.
You find them along the way so that you could communicate to them first about their needs and their desires and what they’re looking to accomplish first. It’s not about pandering, it’s about true communication, which is putting the other person first.
Here’s a great book on it.
I know I’ve mentioned this one before. It’s a little book. It’s a little simple book but very powerful because he uses statistics to back up his point of view here.
It’s all about Customer Centricity by Peter Fader.
This is a focus on the right customers for strategic advantage.
It’s put out by Wharton Digital Press. Good book. Very straight-forward.
Let me see if I can find something, something quick. I should have looked this up ahead of time, but let me see if I can find a quick quote in here. Because I tend to get pretty good at highlighting good quotes here.
Says here, in the end, putting customer centricity into practice demands a good bit of work and a willingness to suffer a short-term hit in the pursuit of a long-term goal.
In other words, you’re not going to be able to put out your concept of what you’re wanting to do right away.
You’ve got to put the customer first. It doesn’t mean the customer’s always right. It means for you to be able to have a conversation with them.
You have to acknowledge where they’re coming from first before you can bring them to where you’re at.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a candidate running for office or whether you are a someone trying to get people to go to your bowling alley or whether you’re selling a hamburger.
It’s the same thing no matter what.
If you’re communicating with someone and you’re attempting to persuade them to do something that they’re not currently doing, then you’ve got to acknowledge them first. Acknowledge where they’re coming from, and then show them what you are doing.
The product you provide, the candidate you’re supporting, how they can help get them there.
It’s the same thing. No matter what is all more about communication than about traditional marketing or how you would normally think of it.
This is probably my favorite quote out of this book. This is a customer centricity is a strategy to fundamentally align a customer’s products and services with the wants and needs of its most valuable customers.
That strategy has a specific aims, more profits for the long-term.
So this is specifically business, but you could take the same concept and tie it into whatever you’re doing.
That’s the end game.
So how you do that, how do you put the customer first?
It’s like I said, interrogate your customers, interrogate your customers, get them on the phone. Ask them if it’s okay to record the conversation and then move forward with asking your question.
Find out what they’re all about, why they tracked you down, how they tracked you down.
What other things are they looking for that you aren’t currently providing them?
What do they use your products for?
What did you know you’d go on and on?
I’m going in a very broad sense right now, but you can get more specific depending on your specific situation and you could brainstorm a bunch of questions and just get ready to ask.
Follow up questions, listen to the answers they’re giving you.
Record the answers they’re giving you, transcribe it, get it all written out because you’re gonna start seeing similarities over and over again of things that people suggest.
That’s the next product you should be creating or finding out there and delivering to your marketplace.
In the end, your goal as a business owner should be to get that market what they want, not to sell your product or service to them.
Selling your product or service to them should be secondary to them getting what they want.
Then you can add in everything else that you want to. Afterwards you can put in your concept. You can try and persuade them to your way of thinking or to get them to do something else on top of that, but you have to acknowledge where they’re at and you can’t create that desire.
You have to meet that desire. The desire is already there.
You’re not going to create it in them. Candidates for political officer. Perfect example of this because it’s something we can all see in business.
We can’t all see what’s going on in the business owner’s head because sometimes they don’t advertise enough or anything else and but most advertisements show this to be true.
Most ads are…..I’ve got this thing that does a bunch of things with it and it’s all focused on them, their product, their service and all the features and very rarely do they say, Do you have this issue? Do you have that issue?
Here’s a way for you to solve it.
This is a solution to the issue, to the desire you already have. You got to realize you can’t cause a desire to happen. It’s already got to be there somewhere.
You could connect up that whatever base desire, they haven’t connected with what you have, but you can’t create that desire. It’s already in place.
So that’s just some simple principle thoughts to keep in mind.
It’s one of the most common misconceptions I run into over and over and over again when people are attempting to communicate. When they’re trying to persuade people to do something and nothing is more of a larger persuasion on a more constant persuasion than the persuasion of business, of you trying to sell your products and services to other people.
So hopefully that’s helpful to you.
If you’d love to talk about this further and dig in a little deeper as to far as your business, because I’m sure you think that your business is completely different from everybody else’s.
I’d love to be able to talk with you and help you out, especially if you’re in the self-reliance field.
You can go check out DreamBizChat.com it’s about the Dream Business Transformation.
It’s a very simple phone call that we get on the phone or over the internet or an online video chat. It’s free.
Go check out DreamBizChat.com for more information.
We’re going to be back tomorrow with another one of these quick little tips and back and forth talking about principles, strategies, and tactics that you can use in your business for standing out. We’ll see you tomorrow. Get out there and let the magic happen.