Love Your Customers... And The Money Will Follow
Guest article by Bob Negen, WhizBang! Retail Training
Love Your Customers...
To be a successful business owner today, you must enthusiastically embrace and fully leverage your unique ability to “show the love.” Stop looking at your customers as a single transaction – someone ready to make a one-time purchase with you – and start looking at your customer as a person with whom you have a deep and meaningful long-term relationship.
You have to make what I call "The Big Switch." You must fall OUT of love with your business, your goods, and your services, and fall IN love with your customers.
When you fall in love with your clients, all your business decisions suddenly revolve around what’s best for your customers, not what’s most convenient for you. Your hours will fit your customers’ schedules, not yours. Your product assortment will reflect what customers like, not what you like. Your policies will be written with your customers’ best interests in mind. Your return policies will be generous and not restrictive. Your staff will be thoroughly trained so your customers get the same great service from everyone that they get from you.
The list goes on and on, but it all starts with making “The Big Switch” and looking at everything you do through the eyes of your customers. How can you show them the love?
...And The Money Will Follow
By putting a customer’s needs, wants, and desires first, you will dramatically increase the “lifetime value” of that client – the total amount that person will spend with you over their life as your customer. When you love your customers and nurture your relationships properly, they will stay on as your client for more years, spend more money with you, and recommend you to their family, friends, and colleagues.
Let me share my personal “Ah Ha!” experience with you – the moment when this strategy was permanently embedded in my brain. I was working on the sales floor of my retail store (a kite and toy store) helping a young-ish grandmother pick out some gifts for her five grandchildren. Always one to do a little market research, I asked her when and how often she would be shopping for gifts for her grandchildren. I thought I was asking about the number of times a year she shopped, or on which holidays she shopped for gifts.
But her answer stopped me dead in my tracks: She replied, “FOREVER."
Of course! She would indeed be shopping for gifts for her grandkids forever. Now, my eyes must have glazed over as my mental calculator started whirring. She had five grandchildren, and there were at least three gift purchases a year that I could count on (birthdays, Christmas, and Easter), and our average sale was about fifty dollars... that’s $750.00 a year. And she would probably be buying gifts for at least another fifteen years. In an instant, this relationship was worth nearly $12,000, not just the $49 she was plunking down at that moment.
I knew then that I had to do everything in my power to love this customer and keep her coming to my store for as long as she was buying gifts for her grandchildren.
My goal? A customer for life.
My challenge to you today is to make the “Big Switch.” Fall out of love with your product, service, or business, and fall in love with your customers. Make it your goal to create customers for life. You're in business to make money, and the surest way to make money is to love your customers.
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WhizBang! Retail Training helps retailers of all sizes build great stores. Founded in 1999 by retail experts Bob and Susan Negen, we offer products and services designed to fit the needs of brand-new retailers as well as seasoned owners and multi-store chains. Learn more…