Your customers are quite important, did you realize that? They can help you in lots of ways. Not only do they make you money, but those customers are rather important and strangely, their opinion of you is also rather important.
Do you realize that without a customer, you might as well not have a business. You won’t need any staff, or a bookkeeper, or phones if you haven’t got a customer.
So, what can you learn from them?
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First of all, do you want to learn, are you scared? I think we discussed being scared before. What are you scared of? Are you scared of what they might tell you?
Are you scared that they might tell you the truth? Well, let me point out something. You are an expert, you are an expert at what you do.
You might not realize it because you’re comparing yourself to even greater experts at what you do. But to your customer you are fantastic, otherwise, why would they be using you?
Why would they be your customer? Why wouldn’t they go somewhere else? Now if you think of all those customers that have bought from you, or used your services or bought your products over and over and over again, those are the ones you need to be speaking to, because their opinion is fantastic.
You want to know why they came to you in the first place. You want to know why they came back to you. You want to know why they stay with you.
Now these are questions that may sound scary, so if you actually went to visit that customer, sat down and said, “Can I ask you three questions? Why did you come to us in the first place? Why did you come back and why do you stay with us?”
You’re going to think, I don’t want to ask them that because what if they say something bad? But think about it, they are buying from you over and over, they think you’re great.
They are the ones with the best opinion because if you can find what appeals to them, and explain it to the others, you’ll get more of them. Do you see where I’m going? It’s the way it works; it’s the way it works.
So the other questions you can you talk to them about, because don’t forget, you need to ask them a bit about themselves as well, it’s not all about you; you want to get to help them you want to be able to solve their problems, but in solving their problems, you get to learn a bit about yourself.
So if you can also ask them during the conversation, so, what solution do I bring that helps you solve your problems? You can word it in any way you want, but you get the gist of what I’m saying.
Just understand that your customers’ opinion is really important. You shouldn’t be scared of asking them. Now you can if you don’t visit customers, you can ask them via simple surveys, such as surveymonkey.com, it’s free.
Go to Google Forms; so if you have a Gmail account or Google apps or Google for work, as it’s called now, account, you have Google Forms and it shows you how to make a survey.
Now these go out to the customer, you can embed them on your website, you can put them on a “Thank you” page after they bought a product from you and they got to a “Thank you” page, you can say, “Oh now a quick survey.
Why did you buy this? What separates our, etc ect.” These kind of questions. In Survey Monkey you’ll find a lot of suggestions.
In fact you can Google suggestions on what sort of things to ask customers. But I recommend that you make it short and simple.
The longer the survey, the less likely they are to be filled in, and if you make them short, ask say three, four, five questions, you can ask again and again because it only takes a few seconds to just tick those little things.
Don’t ask them ones that are too open-ended, don’t expect people to write things, try and give them some suggestions and then “other” to give them another.
Just make it easy because they are busy. You’ve got to respect their time; it’s not your time, it’s their time, you’ve got to respect them and their day and not interrupt them too much.
Ask things that are going to help you and then use the information that you learn. So many people get back information and don’t use it.
If they do say something that you think is bad, they are probably trying to help you. Remember, they buy from you, they are a customer, they like you, don’t be scared, honestly, I’ve done this before.
You will be amazed what people come back with.
But don’t bother on these things saying “male” or “female”, what type of food is your favorite food, this is not that type of survey, this is just getting the gist of what they like about you, so that you can find it, find the secret sauce and then apply the secret sauce to your other customers and get more of them.
There you go. Simple eh? Short and sweet today.
Monday Book Recommendation
It’s a Monday, and that means it is time for a book for the week. I love this book actually — it’s called “Trust me, I’m Lying” by Ryan Holiday and this guy is quite amazing.
At the time we’re recording, I think he is like 27 or 28 years old, but he’s very precocious and he’s a go-getter, he is behind other people’s successful books.
But he is best known as Marketing Director for American Apparel and created a lot of very very controversial marketing campaigns.
But in the book he explains how he manipulates the media; he uses the media for his own aims. Now most of us would love to get PR and press and he is an expert and he uses them in exactly the way he wants, but he understands how they work and it’s quite an eye-opener.
For any of you that spend a lot on advertising campaigns, in online direct, online sites and things like that, and if you’ve read Gawker and all these kind of sites, you’ll learn a lot from this book but it’s very interesting and gives great insight into the way you can get PR for good.
I recommend it and if you want to see more books by the way, go to marketingforowners.com/books.
Every one we’ve ever recommended is there and a quick summary of what we thought. If they are there it means I’ve read them and it means they’re good. See what you think.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
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What have you asked your customers about you?