SBSC and Marketplace Fundamentals - Part II
This is the sixth article of the Small Business Survival Course, or SBSC, which is designed to help you operate your business better this year, and the second of two articles about helping you become a better marketer.
The first SBSC topic is another one about your customers -- more specifically, what wakes them up in the middle of the night. The reason this is important is because your customers? challenges will directly or indirectly affect you.
The classic Pareto Principle is alive and well in the marketplace, where it's often true that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. For a small business this can be particularly dangerous, because that 20% for you represents a small number of customers. That means the next bump in the road for one of your best customers could turn into a wreck for you.
But if you pay attention to what's going on in your customers' industries and their sectors of the marketplace, you should be able to accrue at least two benefits:
1) Your customer's bad news will be less likely to catch you by surprise.
2) You can contribute to a solution, which strengthens the relationship.
There are a number of ways to find out what's going on with your customers, including reading their trade journals, which have news and trends about their industry. But the best method is the classic one -- ask.
Ask customers what keeps them up at night. They will like it when you show an interest in their challenges. When a challenge or opportunity causes a customer to make fast adjustments in the 21st century, they'll only take their fastest vendors with them. Make sure that's you.
Integrate? Yes, and it's the operative word in our next topic: Integrate your company into your customers' operations.
If you're merely a vendor you're like that "one-every-six-minutes" bus we talked about last week. But when you're integrated into a customer's operation, you become as important as an internal division.
For example: Instead of just delivering your products to the customer's loading dock, how would their operating efficiencies improve if you took the goods all the way inside, to the end-user? Create your own ideas by turning the way you do business with customers upside-down to see if any integration opportunities fall out.
How much should you charge for this level of service? Ask how much it would be worth. But don't forget to discount it by how much becoming integrated and indispensable is worth to you.
Opportunities abound for those who see integration possibilities and think like a big business, while delivering the efficiencies, versatility and nimbleness of a small business.
Write this on a rock... The marketplace is alive, evolving and moving fast. Are you keeping up?
Jim Blasingame
Small Business Expert and host of The Small Business Advocate Show
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