Improve your sales? Improve your product.
Everyone wants more sales. Many CEOs search for a secret sauce — a unique product or service that will set their companies apart. There’s a much more basic and longer-lasting solution.
Your customers’ experience is your REAL product
Stop thinking about the product or service you’re delivering. You’re probably doing fine with that. Your most important product isn’t your product or service at all. It’s your customers’ experience in doing business with you. If you want to improve your sales, improving your customers’ experience. It will transform your business.
The secret for improving your sales
If you want to improve your sales, start by improving your most important product — your customers’ experience!
Becoming easy to do business with
How can you provide the kind of experience that your customers get everywhere else in their business and personal lives? Start by finding ways to make it easier to do business with you.
Perhaps it will be an easy ordering process, or providing fast and well-informed answers to customer questions. It might be flexible scheduling or a faster delivery cycle. And it could be developing a set of solutions that you can easily adapt to customers’ varying needs.
Making your company easy to do business with will change your customer relationships in the most fundamental way. It will help you to keep more of your existing business and win more new business. It will fundamentally improve your company’s competitiveness.
Start by examining the most basic ways in which you do business. Look for things that get in the way of positive customer experiences, and find ways to show customers how good it feels to do business with you.
Turning something ordinary into something special
Many car dealers have figured out how to turn something ordinary into something special. They know there’s no way to perform a better oil change or wheel alignment. So they make the rest of the customer experience better — by making it easy to schedule the appointment, check in, pick up and pay.
In fact, they make the experience into the product. Not only do they have happy (and profitable) service customers, but there’s compelling evidence that those service customers are much more likely to return to buy their next vehicle.
Becoming easy to do business with
If you’re looking for a real competitive advantage,
start by showing customers how good it feels to do business with you.
Added benefits Becoming easy to do business with has sales benefits, but it offers equally important operational benefits for you. That’s because making things easier works in both directions — outside, for your customers and inside, within your own operation. Making things easier will produce operating efficiencies, reduce your costs and improve your responsiveness at the same time.
Your operation will be more effective inside and out. You’ll quickly see that it’s better for your customers and better for you as well. It’s a real competitive advantage — and a profit advantage too.
Quite a pay-off, indeed.
Why not get beyond “we delivered everything on time and with no mistakes” to a higher standard: “Our customers love doing business with us,” or at the very least: “Our customers feel really good about doing business with us.”
