Understanding your customers well

FOR any businessmen or rather entrepreneurs, you must know and understand your customers on a deep, emotional level. If you want to really sell your products, if you want to establish a business that brings profit this year and beyond…. then you better are prepared to know your customers better than anyone else in your marketplace. In fact, you should know your customers better than their close friends do. Better than their spouses. You should know and understand your ideal customer more than they know themselves. In other words, you know those persons who is most likely to buy your products and services.

Believe it or not: It’s not as complicated as it sounds. You need to diagnose your client’s problems. There is really that power of understanding the root causes of your customer’s problems. If you really can identify and diagnose your customers’ problems, it shows you understand your customers in a deeply intimate, personal way.

And by describing your customers’ problems tells them three important things: Understand where you and your customer are at; know where you and your client want to be and you are going to help your customer get there. Think about it: If you can describe the pain and struggle your customer going through in incredibly specific detail, in a way that no one ever has before…Wouldn’t you believe that you know where he is coming from? That you understand the pain? That you understand your customer’s overall goals?

More than that, it also implies that you have the solution to his problem. In other words: you are going to help the pain stop. You are going to get where your customer want to be. By this time, you have to focus on how to get to know your customers and their problems first. Strangely, understanding your customers’ problems is not as difficult as it sounds. Most people don’t spend much time thinking about their problems.

They certainly don’t spend any significant time thinking through all the great consequences of those problems, or how a single problem may be affecting all other areas of their lives. As a business owner, that’s something you should be doing. I would encourage you to give this some serious thoughts: What are your ideal customers’ problems?; What are all the wide-spread symptoms of those problems?; What kind of life do they have as they’re living with those problems?; What emotions are triggered on a regular basis because they have this problem?

If you’re having trouble thinking this through, the best starting point for understanding your prospect’s problems is YOU. Your own experience, knowledge and understanding of what your clients are going through. Think about it. You’re in the business for a reason. In all likelihood, you’ve struggled and overcome many of the conflicts your prospect is struggling with right now. You’ve probably felt many of the same feelings and experienced many of the same emotions that your customer lives with every day.

When yours truly conducts lectures and facilitates seminars and trainings on entrepreneurship development to upcoming and entrepreneurs with existing businesses, modesty aside, I was honestly telling my own story. I could articulate and relate with my prospects’ problems in a deeply personal way because I had been through it myself. I’ve said this many times before: That which is most personal, is most general. Your own fears, your own hope, your own struggles, your own frustrations and in summary, your ups and downs in business and in your life are probably very close to most others in your niche or market.

Keep in mind: A problem you’re struggling with right now may be how you reach your target clients. Well, I pose some very challenging questions to entrepreneurs and prospective customers for you to ponder and ask yourself; Was this article useful?; Does it help you with where you are in your business?; Have you ever spent time thinking through your customers’ problems?; Have you ever used your own story to articulate problems? With all these, you will really know and understand better your customers than anyone else…..thus you are earning more sales, more profit and of course establishing your customer’s loyalty!

A blessed Monday, everyone!