Customers – Page 16

How to Improve Sales with Community Involvement

November 9, 2010

Many small business owners focus all their marketing effort on advertising and promotions. As we mentioned in this post on 5 Fundamental Rules of Marketing; marketing is much more than just advertising and many times costs very little to do. One of the great marketing opportunities overlooked by small business owners is getting involved with the local community.
Community involvement establishes long-lasting relationship with your customers that will keep your business on top of their mind for a long time. A typical advertising, in contrast, only has a single transaction relationship where the customer will think of your business as a result of advertising flyer or coupon for a short time.
There are several avenues you can explore to get involved with the local community.
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Filed Under: Customers, Marketing, Sales Tagged With: Advertising, Community, Coupon

Demonstrate Confidence in Negotiations to Get an Edge

November 7, 2010

Post from Guest Contributor Chris Blanton, editor of Ingenious Business Guide.
Many business owners leave money on the table by reacting to pricing pressure by haggling or discounting.
Seasoned deal makers assert in a negotiation that the first person to name a figure loses. Information has value, and the one who possesses more of it is better positioned to come out ahead in a transaction. When one party is ignorant of their opponent’s expectations, the best strategy is to get the other party to name a starting price.
When, as in retail sales, the seller publishes the price, buyers are forearmed with the seller’s expectation but the seller is not similarly equipped with the buyers’. Thus a seller who exhibits price flexibility puts herself at a disadvantage because she better arms her buyer.
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Filed Under: Customers, Management, Operations Tagged With: Negotiation, Profit

How to “fire” Customer the Right Way

September 27, 2010

Post from Guest Contributor Chris Blanton, editor of Ingenious Business Guide.
Sometimes you just need to let a customer go. If a client is abusive to staff, or demanding but you’re unable to satisfy or reason with them, you may have to show them the door.
It can be valuable to periodically evaluate your customer base and jettison the ones that are no longer a fit. Many companies routinely rid themselves of their “D” class unprofitable customers. It is a valuable strategic practice that will not harm customer relationships provided you do it correctly.
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Filed Under: Customers, Management Tagged With: Customer-Complaint, How-to

Do You Understand Why Customers Buy Your Products?

September 11, 2010

Guest Contributor Chris Blanton is a former serial entrepreneur and business
advisor. He is currently editor of Ingenious Business Guide, a collection of proven practical techniques to ignite business growth and profitability. He can be reached by email and tweets under the handle @cmblanton. His guests posts appear here each Sunday.

One of the most important questions business owners should be able to answer is why their customers are buying their product or services. You have to determine what benefit your customers pay for. You can employ a skilled marketing consultant to guide you in this exercise. But if you’re determined to go it alone, you can get great mileage performing a thought experiment to uncover the true benefit your client realizes buying from you.
Our consumer culture so artfully manipulates us that we are often unaware of our own motivation. For instance, examine the process of buying a new car. Why does someone buy a new car? What wants or needs does it satisfy?
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Filed Under: Customers, Management, Marketing, Sales Tagged With: Advertising

How to Earn Additional Profit from Every Sale

September 6, 2010

Do you know that every company loses potential profit on every sale? It’s true. You could be earning much more income than you are now. The key is to reduce your price flexibility.
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Filed Under: Customers, Management, Sales Tagged With: Pricing, Profit

Why You Need Poker Face as a Business Owner

August 16, 2010

If you are not careful to check your emotions when running a small business you may stand to lose number of customers and sales. As a small business owner, you are not only the leader of your employees; but also represent the face of the business. Whatever emotions you show in front of employees and customers reflect upon your business. That is why it is important to have enthusiastic demeanor and smiling face when facing customers and employees.
Many small business owners and leaders cannot control their emotions, especially when things are not going right on a particular day. They get too frustrated with the pressure of the time and get upset with employees and customers. We have experienced this first-hand.
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Filed Under: Customers, Employees, Management, Operations Tagged With: Customer-Complaint, Leadership

How do you deal with “bad” customers?

August 2, 2010

All businesses have “good” customers and “bad” customers. We like to call “bad” customers the “undesirable” customers. You don’t mind losing them because they do not contribute much to your bottom line. In fact, they usually drain too much time, energy and money from you and your business either directly or indirectly. We showed how you can identify these “undesirable” customers in the previous post here.
As a business owner you do have a choice as to who you want as a customer. However, you don’t want to be seen as rude when dealing with these customers, even though at times you may feel compelled to do so. You have to figure out a subtle approach that gets the job done, while at the same time doesn’t appear rude.
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Filed Under: Customers, Marketing Tagged With: Coupon, Customer-Complaint, Customer-Service, Profit

How do you identify “bad” customers?

August 1, 2010

All businesses have “good” customers and “bad” customers. The “good” customers make you a lot of money – directly and indirectly; while “bad” customers do not make you much money and in some cases incur you losses. These “bad” customers not only make you lose money directly; but they also drain your energy and resources in other ways. For many small business owners, the “bad” customers appear to be helping your business on the outside; but when you scratch the surface you may realize that it may not necessarily be the case. They may be doing you more harm to your business than you may realize.
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Filed Under: Customers, Marketing Tagged With: Coupon, Profit

Hire Employees for Attitudes; Train for Skills

July 29, 2010

Mary Ellen Slayter at SmartBrief has an interesting article on how she successfully hired 10,000 people in her recruiting career and did a pretty good job of choosing the right candidates. Although, she did this at a large, public companies, we think it applies equally well to small businesses. We would argue that it is even more important to hire the right people in small businesses because it doesn’t take long for your businesses to go down when one or two employees fail to do a good job.
For any small business that is hiring employees for customer facing roles the need to hire people who are enthusiastic and outgoing is critical. Mary Ellen describes a simple test – “handshake” test – she used to do when hiring employees. She would walk up to the job candidate unexpectedly, smile and introduce herself to him/her. If they reacted with enthusiastic smile and greeted with cheer, it was safe to assume that they would behave the same way with customers.
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Filed Under: Customers, Employees, Management Tagged With: Best-Practices, Customer-Service, Hiring, Productivity