8 out of 10 first time small businesses fail. This is a grim statistic. That is an 80% crash and burn rate for every entrepreneur with dreams of winning and glory. It doesn’t have to be this way. What can we learn from the 20% that do succeed so we can steer out of the wreckage and into the clear?
One thing that all successful business do is build value for their customers. Businesses thrive and crush the market when they understand their customer’s needs, wants, and ambitions.
If you apply our Growability Maslow Principle™ tool, it will allow you to understand your customer base and build a solid foundation of value to stand.
Here are 3 easy steps you can implement now to attract customers and grow your business.
1. Build Personas
Who is willing to pay for your product or service? That is the first and foremost question you must consider. You need to know who is willing to pay you for the service you provide or product you sell.
The best strategy to use when mapping a potential customer is building a customer persona.
Customer personas are individual people or groups within a market who will pay to have a need met. These are fictional archetypes you create based on the values, behaviors, or traits of your target customer. You can generate these archetypes based on data collected from your own research, the internet, or your competition.
However, you can get started building them now by answering these 3 questions about your customers:
What is the problem that your value helps them overcome?
What is the cause of the problem?
What is their environmental problem?
Answering these questions help you determine three major advantages to explore: competitive, convenience, and consistency. This is a great starting point for building a customer persona but there are other aspects of a customer you have to consider.
How you identify the need is just as important as how you meet it.
If you use our Growability Customer Persona tool, you’ll know how to do this. You’ll be enabled with the tools, techniques, and strategy for building a customer persona. This is a critical step in building your organization. You have to know who you’re selling to.
Contact a Growability coach so you can get started immediately.
2. Build Confidence
People have an innate desire to belong. They want to be a part of something larger than themselves. In fact, that sense of belonging and confidence is foundational to who we are as a human.
One company that has crushed the market in creating that sense of belonging and confidence is Nike. As a shoe company, they meet a health/ safety need as well as a sense of belonging to their customer base.
“Just Do It” is a rallying cry that identifies the tribe of people associated with Nike and their marketing campaigns. Nike is super effective at making customers feel a strong sense of belonging.
But, they have one more key ingredient to their success and that is altruism and achievement. Nike has long positioned themselves as the brand of champions.
People associate winning, gold medals, Olympic athletes, and the like with the infamous “swoosh.” Nike’s customers associate Nike’s product not only with a sense of connection with others who wear Nike but with a profound feeling of accomplishment.
3. Build a Library
There is a symbiotic relationship between the seed and the soil. The seed is nothing without soil. The same goes for businesses. Without customers, there is no business. The best thing a business leader can do is start learning.
Businesses survive in an ecosystem of other competing businesses, customers, and employees amongst a variety of other factors. It is important for a leader to understand that an idea alone will not be enough to push the organization beyond the first phase. You must hit the books.
Your library influences your trajectory.
Expand your knowledge base by reading, watching, and listening. Subscribe to industry newsletters and top professionals in your field. Your competition may be the best source of education but so is your existing customers and employees.
Spend time learning from others and building an anthology of knowledge.
We would love to help you better understand your customers. Reach out to Growability and allow us to join you on your way to winning.
