“WHAT !!” I hear you scream. “Have you gone insane? How is that even possible?”
In this economic climate, all I hear people saying is that we have to get out and sell more. Does that sound familiar?
“I have one word for you
….LISTEN”
Spend some time with your existing customer base and instead of telling them about your new offering, start asking questions and listen for a bit. You’ll be amazed at what they tell you.
There are ample opportunities for you to provide your customers with exactly what they are looking for, if only you knew what that was.
Here are a few ways to help this listening process along:
- One on One: Call them up and arrange a time to buy them a coffee. Make sure you don’t do all the talking, have a few exploratory questions prepared so that the conversation keeps flowing. This is a time consuming option but you are most likely to get the best responses.
- Survey: Setup a survey and send them to your customers. Don’t make it too long. You can get to a heap of targeted people quickly but expect many not to respond. Think about adding an incentive to reply to up the response rate.
- Web Polls: Put a poll on your website. Make it highly visible and make sure you have a great question as typically you can only ask one. The is an effective way to get heaps of responses in a short period of time. The audience is not as targeted but statistically you might get the largest number of responses.
- Email: My least favourite but still an effective way to get some answers. Personalise the email to the recipiant and make sure it is relevant enough that the person is likely to respond. Again, you might not get as good a hit rate but it is fast and inexpensive to do.
Remember, the key here is to STOP SELLING and LISTEN and you might just surprise yourself as to how much more people will buy from you if your products or services meet their needs.
