Hide and Seek

Do you have the same diligence when you play hide and seek with your customers?Clients make or break your business. They spend their money at your store… that money pays your bills, puts food on the table, and sends your kids to camp each summer. Like the air we breathe to live, no business can remain open without the invaluable commodity of customers to keep them alive.

Your purpose as an entrepreneur should be to earn enough income to be profitable. That’s the main goal of business. How do you do it? That’s where your objectives, unique selling proposition, and business plan comes into play.

So how do you find more customers? Once you have those customers, how do you keep them? That’s a question that you should put on a sticky note and post it on your computer each evening when you shut down so you see it as the very first thing when you log on in the morning:

“How do I find more customers?”Each and every day, you should be thinking of ways to market yourself, improve your product or service line-up, improve your customer service, and make it easier for people to get in touch with you.

Brainstorm: I know one entrepreneur who, in his early years as a business owner, spent time every day brainstorming 10 things that he could do to make his business more profitable. He admits that he might get only a couple great ideas a week and a couple good ideas a week… but he’s also combined ideas from the past and created huge income for his business.

Improve customer service: Not only should it be important to us to find clients, but it should also be important to keep them. I don’t need to tell you that it’s cheaper to keep a client than it is to get a new one. So you should make sure that you have strategies in place to build loyalty into every sale… loyalty from your customers and loyalty to your customers.

Ask for referrals: If your customers love you, they will tell their friends about you. If your customers like you, they won’t say a peep. Do your customers like you or love you? If you answered “like” and you haven’t heard of very many referrals from your customers, how can you change that? Is there some kind of improvement in service or bonus product you can provide that will push their loyalty to you over the top? Are there bonuses you can give to a customer if their friends and family buy from you?Consult or speak in public: I know many people are scared of speaking in public, and I don’t necessarily blame them. However, I can’t think of a single speaker I know who is disappointed about their return-on-investment from speaking in public. I can say without a doubt that every single one of them finds speaking to be highly profitable to their business: it’s lucrative in itself but it also sends good business their way. Even those of us who own primarily e-businesses can build our local business with seminars or even use webinars or podcasts to build our expertise.

From the time you start your day to the time you finish, each one of us should be on the hunt for customers.