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It Can Be Christmas All Year Around

“Christmas is coming and the geese are getting fat.......”; but is your bank balance? Every year we are told, “this year, Christmas is going to be an excellent time for retail business”, yet you could have customers beating a pathway to your door every day of the year. How? By clearly understanding what your customers really need.

Consider this scenario. You believe you have a really great product or service that you are especially passionate about but you haven’t actually discussed with your customers. If you take this approach, you will probably spend a lot of hard effort for little or no reward because you are trying hard to “sell” such products or services and convince your customers. So is there a better alternative?

Yes.

Before developing the new products or services, you can clearly identify your customers’ real needs by finding the answers to the following for questions:

• Who are your customers?
• What do your customers really require from you?
• Are you providing what they want?
• Are you supplying in the way they want?

The process is not as hard as you think. You will already have a good idea about the profile of your typical customers. Their age, income, gender, location, spending patterns etc. Now you can group them using some of these known similarities. You will end up with a number of profiles of several customer types, your target markets.

With this basic information you can now move to the other questions to determine what they really want from you. You need to actually ask your customers and this can be achieved a several ways. From your database, phone a number of your customers or send out a questionnaire to find out what they like and dislike about your products or service. This easy action will highlight exactly what your customer is looking for. You may prefer to run a customer focus group, where a skillful facilitator will be able to bring out your customers needs and concerns.

With these secrets revealed you are in a powerful position to give that outstanding customer service that is a vital ingredient to you business success.

You now have the magical formula that puts you streaks ahead of your competition. You can give your customers exactly what they want and in the way that they want it. If you start today to look for those opportunities within your customers’ needs, they will have that unique service that nobody else is providing. You will have a bigger bank balance and it will be like Christmas everyday.

Have a prosperous and safe Christmas as we again look forward to a successful New Year for business.

Copyright © Julian Campbell 2007

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