But, what do their customers think about the company?
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Many companies rely on gathering information about customers by developing special programs for their employees who interact with the customers. Salespeople are usually a superb source for customer information and work closely with the marketing department. Other sources are people in management, officers, suppliers and vendors, business associations, business publications and websites, and so forth.
If you are a small business with limited resources, there are a variety of ways to learn more about your customers and prospects. Stop and think. Place yourself in the customer’s shoes. What do you like about your product or service? Why? Price sensitive? A particular benefit? Customer recommendation to others? Better than the competition?
Back in the day, it was called a unique selling proposition.
Buying our product and getting this important benefit was the reason to build a unique selling proposition. The idea was to use benefits and not features. Companies who relied on benefits as their selling proposition are more likely to be a customer focused marketing company. This combo works well together in a small to medium-sized business.
Can you buy a unique selling proposition? Yes, but we but we have a better idea. First, to talk to your customers. But wait, before you do that, here are a few tips to get you going:
• Take a few minutes and jot down a couple of benefits you enjoy and know what customers like. Then go ask your team, a few employees outside of your marketing team and some of your suppliers what benefits they know about.
• For the last couple of years, many companies have been achieving success by centering their products and services based on understanding their customers’ needs and wants. While every businessperson knows a lot about their customers, companies that use customer centric marketing realize customer knowledge is the tie that bonds future growth and leads to new products and services.
• Companies spend time asking questions and learn quickly from their customers’ answers. They develop solutions from their products and services, giving a company a memorable “uniqueness”. Competitive service advantage (CSA) is fact-based around unique reasons for someone to buy from you. A unique CSA is one that is, without serious question, singular to your company. This is crucial for building a successful CSA!
A company should make fact-based competitive service advantage statements about:
1. Quality of service and people
2. Lower fees, such as no pay shipping
3. Guaranteed results
Be patient. You may not have the answer right away, but when you do, it is like winning a lottery.
