Episode 4
with Simone Douglas
The bread & butter, cream and dream customers: how to recognise them and what they mean to your business
This week, Simone will be looking at:
– understanding how the customers are buying and their paths of travel to your door,
– who are my best accounts or business family members
– and why cost of acquisition in comparison to top line sales is a critical factor.
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Chris Irving 0:10
Welcome to the confident networker podcast with your host Simone Douglas. In each insightful episode, Simone does a deep dive into the strategies, tactics and tools that will help you be a confident networker.
Simone Douglas 0:34
When you consider who your best customers are? How do you define them? For most businesses, it’s safe to assume that the best customers are the ones with the highest level of engagement, from referrals to social shares to click through rates. These shoppers are committed to the brand your business and are always happy to get involved. repeat purchases are a huge part of this. Customers who returned to your store or your business to make another purchase demonstrate a strong commitment to your products. But that’s not the only factor to consider. Once you’ve identified who your best customers are, you can then begin to intentionally build emotional relationships with them. These relationships go beyond simply making a purchase and have the power to supercharge the valuable interactions they already have with your brand and your business. Today, we’re going to go through understanding how the customers are buying and their pas have traveled to your door, who are my best accounts or business family members and why cost of acquisition in comparison to top line sales is a critical factor. It’s easy to get distracted by all the noise in the business world at large. But jump day is your chance to settle in and work on your business in ways that allow you to make the most of your opportunities today, tomorrow and forever. Sure, we need to get an understanding of the six phases of customer journey. So we’ll take a look at how you identify these today. But then we’re going to really start to categorize and put some solidity around what are the three types of customers look like? In other words, who falls into each of our key categories, your bread and butter clients. These are the ones who buy your basic entry level product, your cream clients who buy your middle level product or package and your dream clients who buy your high ticket offer. That’s one way to look at it. How do we really get to know them and provide the ideal solutions and the ultimate customer experience which as we know is going to be the key differentiator in 2021. When it comes to sales success. Today, we’re going to take a really close look at who your best customers are from a time resource and profit perspective, and why understanding your best customers helps generate more revenue for your business. Then we’re going to look at how understanding your best customers helps you attract new customers to your business through being able to replicate them. Although acquiring new customers is necessary for business growth. maintaining good relationships with your current customers is just as important. It costs organizations six to seven times more to attract a new client and then it does to retain a current one. Understanding a client’s needs and being able to meet their demands will give your business a competitive edge in more ways than you would think. So let’s take a look at what the key issues are from a business owner perspective. First up Why do you need to know who your best customers are? Well, knowledge about your best customers their attitudes, purchase patterns and demographic profiles is key to developing and implementing successful marketing and customer relationship management programs. Such knowledge helps you effectively target your promotional advertising and marketing campaigns as well as develop upsell and cross sell programs and long term customer loyalty retention and rewards programs. Who are our best customers, the ones most likely to respond to our offers. If you manage sales and marketing or customer service, you want an answer to this question. In fact, you want to know more about all your customers from the best to the worst. That’s because planning and implementing successful cost effective strategies for every customer segment is critical to increasing business profits. odds are they’re your low profile customers, that is your best customers. Great customers often fly under the radar because they quietly make big purchases and drive substantial portions of your profits. They aren’t the ones making demands or complaining. They may not even be your most frequent buyers. In fact, frequent customers often cost businesses money because they require discounts or other incentives to buy. Your most profitable customers will invest in your offerings regardless of incentives. And while they may not buy in bulk, or place an order every month, you can depend on them to buy just about everything you have to offer. Many businesses struggle with the concept of focusing on high profit customers because they worry that they’ll end up losing money by minimizing their reach. The reality is that 10 to 20% of your customers eat up your profits in complaints and Customer Service which reduces your ability to focus on your top 20%. Hassle Free big spenders. To identify your most profitable customers look for these loyal few who pay full price for your higher quality products and services, by everything you offer and proactively refer you to others, then we’re gonna want to know what are the characteristics of your best customers, when you are focused on growing your business, the last thing you want is to have bad customers on your side. If you want to really grow, then you should be on the lookout for the best customers who will come along with you on this journey and be partners of yours. Many companies don’t think about filtering through various customer types to find the right ones. But that’s exactly what you should do. You should be able to afford to be picky about which customers you bring on board. When you get the right customers, they’re going to stick with you through the best of times and the worst of times helping you generate that all important profit.
So the seven key things to look out for in terms of those characteristics are your customers value what you do, they’re great at communication. They’re willing to pay for your service. They appreciate what you do, they are pretty easy to work with. They expand your knowledge about both their industry and your products and services, and they can bring you in contact with new customers. Once we’ve got some clarity around what those customers actually look like. Then we need to figure out how do we find more customers like our best customers? There are many ways to prospect and look for new clients. But is there a way to find new clients that are similar if not exactly like your current best clients? One of the quickest ways to expand your client base is to get laser clear on who you serve the best and who serves your business the best. The clearer you are on what you want, the more likely you will get it. Having an effective referral marketing strategy is a common challenge for most businesses. And throwing token gestures at your referral partners that are generic and one size fits all are unlikely to garner the results that you’re looking for. The goal is to start to identify what types of people or businesses you’re good at serving and what their interests are. Is there a pattern, you can develop your niche around? Do certain potential connections tend to repeat themselves? Or does a specific activity, profession or charity offer you away to build your own connection to a group. This will help you establish a successful referral marketing process. And once you devise your segmentation analysis, potential niches and ideal client profiles, then you need to think of lead generation as a farming instead of hunting, planting seeds by building networks within your niches and systematically communicating your value proposition. It doesn’t matter where you are in your business. Right now is definitely the time to be taking a solid look at exactly where you are and making some realistic decisions about where you want to go in 2021. All of this whilst keeping a finger on the pulse of the last quarter of the year. One thing for sure in order to deliver a positive experience you have to know your customers better than ever before. Thomas G. Stemberg said forget branding and positioning once you understand customer behavior, everything else falls into place. In business, it’s about the quality of your customers, not just the quantity. There are good customers high maintenance customers and not worth it customers. Any small business owner recognizes these categories. Today we’ll be going over not just how to recognize them, but what to do once you’ve figured it all out, and how you replicate these customers to grow your business easily over time. We’re now going to take a short two minute break and when we return, we’ll get into the detail of what we really need to be looking at in order to successfully assess and classify your best customers. Honestly, I’m taking a look at three ways to identify and keep your best customers. The six fate phases of a customer journey, the difference and importance of three types of clients understanding who is talking to your best customers before you and after you and finally how to replicate those best customers.
So in business, it’s about the quality of your customers, not just the quantity, there are good customers high maintenance customers and not worth it customers and as we said before any small business owner recognizes these categories. So let’s take a look at three ways to identify and keep your best customers. While you’ll probably keep C level customers at your baseline of impressive service, your D customers are different. The smart strategy here is to identify them as D level customers and maintain a positive brand image at the same time use this knowledge to turn away future D level prospects. So the first thing that we need to do is replace our assumptions with a data driven process. A lot of marketers think they know what their best customer looks like the products they buy the services they like their demographic profile, but customer bases are always changing. and only an ongoing data collection strategy can accurately track that evolution. The first type of relevant data is cold, hard numbers based on your metrics, what’s the revenue baseline that qualifies a great customer? What are the criteria that identify a fertile engagement? The other type is what I call in your head data. It includes both your team’s knowledge of your customer as well as the customers feelings about your product or service, you’re going to need to get all of that down on paper in order to be able to map out who your best customers are and what they look like. Then you need to balance your resources strategically between all of your customers. So without question, all customers should receive great service attentive, enthusiastic service should be the baseline for every customer, even the bad ones. You can’t afford to have brand detractors in the marketplace. But you should take that great service to an even higher level for your best customers. So they’ll take your brand and your business to a higher level with their sphere of influence. So we need to reward value with value. The common denominator for customer retention is hyper value. So look at your A and your B clients and figure out what’s going to make them view you as the best option in town. How can you differentiate yourself from competitors? What’s the precise need that you’re solving? And how can you make that solution even better? If you work to establish superior response times and have an internal process that is based on accountability and consistent communication, then every client will get an entire team that’s dedicated to their success. So once we’ve established this, then what we need to consider is the six phases of the customer journey. There are six steps in that relationship, that is customer lifecycle discovery, evaluation, purchase, user experience, bond and advocacy. Almost any company with a reasonably incentivized sales team can get through the first three, or maybe four parts of the lifecycle. But when they get to bonding, many companies fall down. So let’s take a bit of a look at what all of these six phases mean, in the discovery phase, what you need to consider is that discovery is an almost entirely customer driven process that identifies a need and then a solution that fulfills that need. But understanding moments of truth can give you a greater visibility, even at this early stage, asking what happens before discovery is like asking what happened before the Big Bang, it’s a mystery. Then once someone’s discovered you, they’d move on to evaluation. Some evaluation has to happen. Whether you intend to buy a solution online, or through a conventional sales process involving retail stores, or professional salespeople, you have to wait out what you don’t want and settle on what you can afford. Today’s customers perform discovery and depending on the product do much of their evaluation independent of a store environment or the charms of a salesperson, so your digital channels, and the way that you present yourself is going to be critical in the discovery and the evaluation phase. Then we move on to purchase everyone loves the purchase phase, vendors love it because it brings in revenue and puts another unit into the world. Customers love it because it satisfies a need to say nothing of the tiny bit of dopamine, or pleasure hormone released into the brain of the buyer. So I think we have a good handle on what the purchase phase looks like. Most importantly, though, then we have user experience. So the bliss of purchase is followed by the joy of use and knowing that you now have a solution to that problem that surface the last time you were happy. The first use experience is a tricky time, it often involves a learning curve for the customer. So smart business owners learned long ago to do everything they could to provide customers a positive first experience. This is a critical aspect of the customer journey. And then we move on to bonding. So happily engaged customers bond with their products and then their vendors or business owners, a bonded customer is more likely to contribute to a positive net promoter score for the business, product or even the brand. If business has missed this bonding step it can lead to a big time failure. So while bonding might be listed as a phase in the lifecycle, this can be deceiving because customers don’t bond all at once. bonding is the accumulation of positive experiences that can come either directly with experience of the product or service or from the satisfaction of having a problem taken care of promptly. If we’ve done all of this well we move on to the advocacy phase so happy customers are all alike. They got as far as they did unscathed, sometimes by luck, but other times through the didn’t have a vendor or business owners perseverance. So customers become advocates to one degree or another. They’re alike because everything that could go wrong In the discovery, evaluation, purchase, use and bonding phases didn’t, all because failures were detected and repaired before they cause lasting damage. Because it’s a life cycle, Nothing ends when you get to the advocate stage. Instead, advocates help recruit the next wave of customers through word of mouth, or word of mouth. Better yet, they buy even more. So, once you’ve got a handle on where your best customers sit in those six phases, then I guess we need to get clear on the difference and importance of the three key types of clients. If you don’t know who your ideal clients are, you won’t be able to tell people who to keep an eye out for. And you can’t identify strategic partners who are in touch with those clients. So the here is where we look at your bread and butter cream and dream clients and get real clarity around who they are, and who they interact with. So you need to start mapping these things out to work out with your bread and butter clients. These are the ones that pay the bills, you’re happy to see them come through the door and you’re happy to sign them on. Your cream clients are the ones that are highly profitable. So they’re low on time and resource use and big on profit. And then your dream clients are the ones that change the face of your business. So you are bragging to the rest of the world when you land one of them and your competitors are really jealous. And then we move on to understanding who’s talking to your best customers before you and after you. Many people form strategic partnerships promised to send each other clients and then fall out of touch and gain nothing from their efforts, you need a strategic and long term plan for nurturing these relationships. Good client relationships make you feel like a true partner to your client, they trust and listen to you and feel good about the work you do for them. As a result, your relationship builds and expands into bigger and better things, either through longevity, additional projects or business are the biggest compliment referrals to other clients. The same should be true of your referral relationships over time when nurtured the right way. And by fostering Win Win relationships with proactive introductions on both sides of the fence, your business will grow exponentially. So we need to identify who these people are. And once we’ve done all of this, then we can start looking to replicate your best customers. So make a list of the clients you would love to replicate. If you could make sure these are the types of clients you want to grow your business with for years to come. There is not a one size fits all definition of a top client but rather several factors to consider. So we need to spend some time thinking about at this point where our bread and butter and our cream clients sit at this point. Okay, who is it that is in touch with these clients on a regular basis? And how do we provide value to those people who can potentially refer us ongoing. This is also where you might want to start accessing different networks, and ensuring that you have a depth and diversity of your network across the board. And what I mean by depth and diversity is you need to have
multi generational networks you need to have multicultural networks, multi industry, and multi vertical. So you also need to jump in and out of structured and unstructured networking in a way that allows you to have a network that can solve your problems and help you grow your business at any given time. This includes being able to solve your clients problems as well. So the mark of a master networker is their capacity to solve any challenge for any person in their network really just by making a phone call. So when you have got yourself in that position, and you’re regularly in touch with those referral partners in a way that builds trust, that’s how you replicate your best customers or your best customers will refer you to more of their network, which will tend to be more people that look like them. So we’re gonna take a short two minute break. And when we return, we’re going to cover off on what you need to do to action the key elements contained within these topics and why they matter to you in your quest for an epic 2021.
So what do we need to do today after everything that we’ve talked about so far? Well, first up, we need to analyze your CRM and existing customers and categorize them as to where they said bread and butter, cream or dream. your bread and butter clients are great, we’ll need them. The clients who stick with you through thick and thin and while not being the biggest spenders, they pay their bills on time every time meaning that you can too. They’re the lifeblood of any business and will be your loudest cheerleaders always ready to share a social media post or drop your name into a conversation hitting the middle spot of the cream clients. These are the clients who if you land a contract with them, it would make your month while they spend well with you. They’re maybe not as forthcoming when it comes to packing on the public displays of affection on the social net works as your bread and butter clients. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a great testimonial from them on LinkedIn and of course, repeat business. And then we hit your dream client and land these and it makes your year. These are the ones you’ve been chasing for ages you’ve dreamt about them, your competitors will be sick with envy when they find out that yours, they spend well rave about you online, and then of the first in line for any services, upgrades or products that you bring out. Where are the commonalities, and have you been giving these verticals or personas, enough attention in your overall sales and marketing strategy. So once you’ve got some clarity around these, then you will start to identify niche industries that you’re servicing. And this becomes really important. So if I use social media AOK as an example, we have three key markets that we serve really well. And they all fall into that cream client aspect. So we specialize in the hospitality and tourism space. And these clients are really quick to onboard and they are really sticky when it comes to retention. So that makes them a good choice for us. We’re also fantastic when it comes to allied health. But these tend to fall more into those dream clients, often large private hospitals, clients that we end up servicing, so they’re fantastic. Because there’s a lot of credibility around them. There’s a lot of profitability, and they tend to be happy to pay the retainer. So you can see that getting some clarity around who it is that you like to work with, and why becomes really important. So as you get that clarity, then you can start getting ready to replicate those clients. It’s important though, that we assess where you fall down and where you excel on the customer journey. So we’ve covered this a lot this season already. And that’s because it’s important. But going back to the basics I covered earlier in the show today, who is on the cusp of bonding or not bonding and moving into the advocacy stage, and what else can you do to help them get there. So you may think that you have a whole heap of clients that live in that advocacy stage. But as discussed last week, if you’re not putting out customer satisfaction surveys, or polling people’s net promoter scores, then you’re not going to have a lot of clarity around that. So one of my other businesses is a BNI. Franchise Business Network International. And we are judged as franchisees or executive directors were judged on our net promoter scores. So those are polled with our members quarterly. And thankfully, you know, my net promoter score currently sits at 78, which is reasonably healthy. But I pay less attention now to that big score and more attention to how many people were surveyed who fell into the detractor category or the neutral category, because that tells me that I have more work to do, you’re never gonna get 100% of the people or 100% of the time. But paying attention to where there are opportunities for you to improve in the surprise and delight category of service with your customers is going to help you succeed. We also need to identify who in your networks you need to be more strategic with and engage better. Harvard Business Review found that networking creating a fabric of personal contacts who will provide support feedback, insight, resources and information is simultaneously one of the most self evident and one of the most dreaded developmental challenges that aspiring leaders must address. The key to a good strategic network is leverage the ability to marshal information support and resources from one sector of a network to achieve results in another. Strategic networkers use indirect influence convincing one person in the network to get someone else who is not in the network to take a needed action. More over a strategic network is don’t just influence their relational environment, they shape it in their own image and work to create networks favorable to their business goals. So why is all of this relevant? Well, we need to map out and shedule what your relationship based sales strategy is for 2021. So we need to categorize your contacts by who are the influencers? So who has the most say, on the future of your partnership? Who are the users in your networks? Who actually use your product or service? And how do you help them succeed? Who are the leaders, the executives that have the power to raise concerns or to put up roadblocks and who are the decision makers? So who controls the resources? We also like to be friends regularly with the budget holders who have a financial stake. But then you have to consider a couple of other things about these people in your networks. Are they a supporter who is on your side? Are they a detractor who doesn’t like you and actively tells people as much are they a champion who absolutely loves your company and sings your praises even when you’re not around? People that do the selling for you. And finally, think about the quality of your relationships. I like to use the color coding system so radicals weak, Amber is good, green equals strong and after going through this exercise, you made a to cover, there’s a bunch of people who aren’t as important as he thought, take them off the list, you don’t need to worry about them. For now, there’ll be others where you need to do a bit more digging to understand the relationship more. But what you’ll be left with is a solid list of where to engage, and should only be those people who are critical to your success that then fall into this relationship based sales strategy. From there, you can work out how many touch points you’re gonna have with those people and what those touch points look like across the year, are you attending their events, are you hosting your own events and inviting them along, all of those things are going to fall into place once you have that clarity of action. So as we work it back, what you really should have is some really solid customer profiles of our best customers, we need to understand the characteristics of those best customers. And some of those characteristics are going to be personality traits or types. So if I use myself as an example, I am a high D on the DISC profile, I think I’m high D high i 5050. Split. So what that means is I really do well with bullet points. I’m not great on small talk, and I’m not great on waffle. So if I’m working with my best customers, they fall into that same category on the DISC profile, because they will happily engage with me and work with me, and with my communication style. So we’re a good fit for each other. So they’re my best customers in terms of who I work with. But then I have other members of my team who sit in the S and the C aspects of the personality profile. And what that allows me to do is if I have a customer that comes to me, that is a C type customer, and I mean C type, those who see on the disc profiles are very methodical, and research driven, then I will pair them up with my team members in the account management team, who are built to keep those people happy. I’m not built to keep them happy, because I don’t like to go into that level of detail. So it’s important that you have that understanding with what it is that you’re doing. So you need to plan to spend time putting lessons learned and aha moments into practice. And let me know how it goes. Because the best types of relationship based sales strategies involve building relationships. So you need to go back and talk to your customers find out how solid the ground is that you’re on with them. Where are the opportunities for you to go and make friends with their networks and expand your opportunities from that perspective. And one of the smartest things I ever did was have regular conversations with my key accounts around where they network, what events do they regularly attend, and why and I uncovered all of these fantastic industry associations that were actually opened for professional partners. That was what sold me become a member of the franchise Council of Australia and now sit on the State Advisory Committee. It’s because this is an ideal network for me where I can talk to my clients and replicate those clients all the time. So identifying all the industry associations that are attached to your ideal clients, is another great way to start that process of building networks and replicating. Okay, so we’re now going to take a short two minute break. When we return we’ll bring it all together and look at why any of the things we have covered so far matter and what the direct impact can be to your bottom line.
Okay, so we have covered as usual and epic amount of content and need to tie it all together. So let’s take a look at your key actions for this week. Remember the questions we need to be able to answer. Why do you need to know who your best customers are? The most important thing in marketing is to retain your most profitable customers. nurturing your customer relationships should be the only goal to build your brand. Satisfied Customers are more prone to remain loyal and return as repeat clients. So customer loyalty programs, promotions and surveys can be modified to both your budget and marketing goals. The most important thing in sales and marketing is to attract and retain your most profitable business customers. To accomplish this feat, you must devise and implement a customer strategy that builds fosters, nurtures and extends relationships with your customers. Your company profits only when the earnings from retained customers exceed the costs to acquire and to service customers over time. So having clarity around who your best customers are allows you to focus your resources effectively in a way that helps you to grow. And the thing is we need to cement our growth at the same time. So understanding as we do from last week’s show that customer experience is the key differentiator, understanding who your best customers are allows you to tailor a customer experience that is personalized to them. That gives them what it is that they’re looking for over time. So So, the other question we needed to answer is what are the characteristics of your best customers. Don’t mess about with this, spend the time and get it right. encourage your customers to talk. And analytics are a great way to know your customers and how they interact with your business. But it won’t be better than getting the answers directly from the customers themselves. By knowing your customers expectations, you can ensure better customer experience. According to the walker study, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2020. So customer experience is important as it increases customer retention rates and improves customer satisfaction. So we’ve spent a lot of time looking at how you map out bread and butter, cream and dream customers. We also need to have some clarity around their personality types and how you make the most of who you map your clients to within your organization. From an account management perspective. All of these things are going to fall into play, you will find that there are all sorts of different verticals that you play in. And you will need to get referred into all of those verticals differently. So again, understanding who they are and how they fit into your business and which ones are more important to you, allows you to have a marketing plan and a sales plan that is effective in growing the business over time. Once we’ve done all of that, how do we find more customers like our best customers, keeping your customers happy and satisfied is important for all businesses. Connecting with your customers on a personal level is the key to establishing a long and trustworthy relationship with your business. According to Monetate 79% of organizations that have exceeded revenue goals possess a documented personalization strategy. Personalization increases loyalty drives higher conversions and ultimately increases revenue. It is understandable that the path to the personalization for some companies is challenging. And as a result, marketers have created segmentation strategies. Rather than building a truly personalized experience, I’m suggesting that what you want to do is level up. In order to do that you can consider these steps and build a strong customer relationship and achieve brand success. First up match your tone with your customer personality. So we’ve talked about that a little bit today. Some customers prefer short conversations, some like lengthy ones, you can learn about your customer personalities. And it will help you to know how to speak and personalize your relationships with them. You need to use advanced customer engagement tools. With live assistance tools like CO browsing and video chat, you can collaborate with your customers in real time and identify issues faster. Now more than ever, we need to be able to deliver effective personalized solutions in the first contact with direct communication, you can build friendlier customer relationships, where people feel like they’re not being treated like a number. You need to know your customer preferences, listen to your customers to identify their needs, try and learn their preferred contact channels and how they would like to be addressed. Give your customers the option to choose while enabling them to opt out when they wish. Knowing your customers preferences personalizes the experience and builds their confidence in your brand. The same can also be said, of your referral partners. So in short, we need to sit down and get real clear about who has sent us our most referrals this year, who are our best business friends? And then how do we continue to build on that relationship. So they send us even more referrals and just like we’re trying to replicate our best customers, we need to replicate our best referral partners. So for me, that is advertising agencies, you know, so people who don’t have the area of expertise that we do in social media advertising in particular, or Google ads, agencies that want to outsource those aspects of their client work are fantastic ongoing referral partners for us because we make them look good. And we’re not caught up on needing to be seen and be heard. So we work behind the scenes with them on their clients strategies to ensure their success whilst making plenty of money for ourselves in doing it. So again, understanding who your customers are from that perspective is going to be really important because we need to talk to them in a way that is effective and efficient. So once we’ve done all of those things, we need to get some clarity around how we measure up so you need to go away and test against the basics that we’ve covered today. And lastly, a final word on where to from here. successful brands are not built in a day. A lot of perseverance is required to build a successful business and at the heart of a successful business are its customers. To become a successful business owner. You must know your customers and offer them the possible experiences. Not only that, you then need to be able to teach your teams how to do the same thing. One of the biggest challenges for a stage three business owner is that we are often transitioning from being fully customer facing into a more strategic role. And as we do that, it’s important that we communicate that ethos that got us to this point in the first place. So this is why it’s important that your six word story still plays out across your customer segments, but in different ways. So treat your customers as family members and get to know them as much as you can craft experiences that will help you build lifelong connections with your customers and take your business to the next level. Successful entrepreneurs have already started engaging their customers. So what is it that you’re doing that will allow you to do the same, acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. So how you maintain good customer relationships determines your customer loyalty. By fulfilling the customer’s demand for high levels of customer service, you can boost and inform their level of satisfaction. And when customers are happy, they go on recommending your brand with positive word of mouth. When you replicate your best customers and own your niche you are on the up track to long term success. They assimilate into your business quicker, their onboarding is smoother, your retention rate will be higher and your churn rate will be lower. At stage three, we are learning how to cement our customer and referral relationships throughout messaging, sales, collateral, and most importantly, our people. We’re in the process of leveling up. And that means fixing our gaps, refining what’s there and playing the long game in terms of our marketing. There are always a few quick wins to be hard. But the reality is it’s the long game and the hard yards, that gets you to stage four, which means we need to do the work. So from that perspective, make sure that you spend some time between now and next week identifying and getting real clarity about the niche markets that you serve best. Okay, so if I use the Duke of Brunswick, my pub as an example, we have a very clear idea of who our customers are our best customers. And this is going to shock people a little bit because it’s not what you would expect from a pub. So our ideal customer is women between the ages of 45 and 50. They’re successful, they generally own their own businesses or they fulfill a management role of some description. They like the finer things in life because they’ve earned them and they don’t like to walk into a venue that is full of gambling noises, and men that stare at them as they walk in the door. They used to hold in court on their own terms. So when I had an approach from somebody who wanted to start a first beer club, and encourage 20 something year old men to come in for their first beer free I said to him quite clearly, you’re wasting your time. This is not my ideal market segment. And I don’t want to talk to 20 something year olds, they’re nice human beings and they’re best suited to the pub at the bottom of the street or at the top of the street, not the one that I own. So again, understanding your niche allows you to ensure that you’re not partnering with people that are going to upset the applecart when it comes to what your customers expectations are as well. So remembering to anchor yourself with your six word story, and get clarity around those best customers and how you service them.
Chris Irving 38:34
Thank you for listening to the confident networker. You can find more episodes and information at bnian.com.au/podcast
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