Marketplace Focus Part 2
This is the sixth article in a series dealing with the fundamentals of operating a small business and the second of two concerning the marketplace.
Continuing our small business course theme, here’s your next question: Describe the things that wake your customer up in the middle of the night.
Why is this important? Because the challenges of your customers will directly or indirectly affect you.
The classic Pareto Principle is alive and well in the marketplace, where it’s often true that 80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your customers. For a small business, this can be particularly dangerous, because that 20 percent for you represents such a small number of customers. That means the next unfortunate turn of fate for one of your best customers could become bad news 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 see at least two benefits:
1. Your customer’s bad news won’t catch you without warning.
2. You can contribute to their solution, which strengthens your 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. Another method is to employ that classic fact-finding method – ask.
Ask customers what keeps them up at night. Your customers will like it when you show an interest in their challenges.
When a challenge or an 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.
Read, ask, listen, learn and integrate. Then respond with strategies that will help your customers get more sleep. It’s the straightest line to customer loyalty and consistent success.
Integrate? Yes, and it’s the operative word in our next question: Describe how your company integrates 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 inside to the end-user?
Create your own ideas by turning the way you do business with your customers upside-down and see if any integration opportunities fall out.
How much should you charge for this level of service? Ask your customer 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
©2008 All Rights Reserved
