Customer Interaction – Velocity Media

21 July 2014

How to identify what your customers love about you

While you know exactly what you love about your business and what you think are your biggest selling points – do you really know what your customer’s value and love about you?

More often than not business owners are selling what they want to sell rather than selling what their customers want to buy. To make sure you’re not one of them, here are four quick checks to ensure you’re not assuming what your customers want, but rather listening to what they value.

1. It’s in their frustrations

If you want to know what your customers and potential customers value, look at the common frustrations and stereotypes of your industry. What do people groan and complain about? What are the common bad experiences?

Now that you know what people don’t appreciate, list the opposite and you will start to see what your customers and potential customers will really want.

2. It’s in their objections

Don’t be put off by objections, objections are your potential customers way of voicing their concern and when handled right they give you the opportunity to make a more personalised sales pitch to get them over the line.

Though in saying this it is important to pay attention to them and make a note of the objections that keep coming up. Is there something that your customers and potential customers need that you aren’t providing? Are there benefits or features that you aren’t promoting that you should be?

Through objections your potential customers will tell you what is important to them, what they need to know and give you insight into how they make their buying decisions.

3. It’s in their testimonials

Look over the testimonials you’ve received from your past and current customers. What have they praised you for? What have they valued? What are the common themes through all of them?

Chances are that the key features, benefits and results that your past and current customers loved are also the same features, benefits and results that will appeal to your future customers.

4. It’s in their introductions

Referrals and introductions are also a great way to gain insight into what your customers and business associates value about you. More often than not when someone introduces you in business they will lead with what they see to be your biggest point of difference, key area of expertise or your top benefits.

So the next time someone introduces or refers you, don’t just focus on the new contact, focus on what they have said to get the new contact interested and wanting to talk to you.

When all else fails remember you can ask!

Amanda

3 February 2014

How to avoid burnout and burning clients in busy times

When you’re working late nights and early mornings, constantly pushing yourself to work harder, increase your clients, grow your business and meet deadlines, you can end up tired, stressed, overwhelmed, late with your work and can even lose the passion you had for your business to begin with.

So how do you maintain your health and sanity and your clients happiness during busy times? Here are six tips to help you avoid burnout and burning clients.

1. Take regular breaks

When you’re extremely busy taking a break can be the last thing on your mind. Not wanting to lose your place or momentum, you can think “I’m too busy to have a break”. But breaks are even more vital when you’re under pressure.

Even just sparing 5-10 minutes every 60-90 minutes to stretch or go for a walk, can help to clear your head and give you greater perspective, minimise your stress and the potential for burnout and make you more productive and efficient.

2. Break up your work

Break up your high concentration work with low concentration work and tasks that you enjoy. This simple change can often be as good as a break and you can give your mind the rest it needs to keep working at your peak – without utter exhaustion.

For the best results start the low concentration work or enjoyable tasks just before or just after your break as this will give your mind more of a break.

3. Accept a little imperfection

If you’re a perfectionist, you can often end up adding to your stress by taking up more of your limited time trying to ‘perfect’ your work. Though for your sanity and schedule you do have to let go of your perfectionist ways. Don’t get me wrong, still take pride in your work and ensure it is of the highest quality, it just doesn’t need to be ‘perfect’ all of the time.

4. Delegate and Outsource

As one person you can only do a limited amount, especially when you are juggling multiple roles within your business. To grow easily and efficiently and save yourself time and stress look for tasks you can outsource.

Build a trusted team of people you can delegate tasks to when you need to. Whether they are employees, contractors, alliances or businesses experts you’ve engaged, utilise their strengths and expertise for areas in your business that you don’t enjoy and aren’t strong in. When you have the right team in place you’ll gain more time and have faster growth and less stress.

5. Know how much work you can handle

One of the easiest ways to avoid burnout is to know how much work you can handle or comfortably outsource, and say “no” or “not yet” to the rest. While it can be tempting to say yes to every client and every opportunity you can run out of time, stress yourself out and risk not meet deadlines or giving poor service which reflects badly on your professionalism.

If you are a serviced based business try booking your work in advance so you don’t have to say no to opportunities. Just explain that you’re booked out for the next week/fortnight/month and give them the option to book your services on the next available date.

5. Build a life outside of work

It’s important to have a life outside of your work and the every day routine. Often when you’re passionate about your business and love what you do, you can view work as an outlet and it can become something you keep going back to in the spare moments you have.

But it’s important to remember that you need time for yourself in addition to time with friends and family, to have fun and enjoy life. Not only will you feel better for it, you will also be more relaxed and work more effectively.

How do you avoid burnout?

Amanda

1 December 2013

Five ways to stay in touch with your customers – and have them look forward to it

When it comes to increasing your sales and overall profitability, one of the best places to start is to increase your level of customer interaction. The more contact you have with your customers, the more likely it is that they will buy from you and refer you to others who need your products or services.

It shouldn’t be just any old customer interaction though. You need to be strategic, targeted, value-driven and compelling – without appearing to be desperate, spamming or annoying.

Not always the easiest feat, but to help you here are five proven ways to maintain regular customer contact and how to use them more effectively so your customers look forward to hearing from you.

1. Newsletters

While some will argue the trusty newsletter has had its day, I tend to disagree. If you are going to make it work in this day and age of endless emails though, you’re going to have to shake things up a bit.

When producing your newsletter, e-zine or e-news always come at it from the perspective “What’s in it for my customer? What information, tips and offers can I include that will make my customer want to give up 5, 10 or 15 minutes of their life to read this every month?”

Think industry insights or a market update, some key tips that could be helpful and implemented the day they receive your newsletter, a relevant article and a call to action by way of a special offer.

You want to keep it short and succinct, and where possible in the reading pane of their email. If you do have any long articles or pieces of information you want to include, publish them as a blog post on your website so you can provide a short sentence or two with a link to “read more” in your newsletter to save space and increase your website traffic.

2. Special offers and competitions

A special offer for the month can be a great way to stay in touch with you customers and get them buying from you. Competitions also have the benefit of getting customers to engage with you by sharing your brand both online and offline.

To hold your customers’ interests and ensure the best results, make sure your special offers are different each time and your competition prizes are desired items that are relevant to your business.

3. Emails using auto-responders

Not only are auto-responders an effective way of interacting with your customers, they can also save you a lot of time in the process.

You could have a set email sequence start from when a customer or potential customer first enquires, becomes a customer, signs up to your mailing list or downloads a resource from your website so there is a clear process leading them to a sale or repeat sale.

Or you could use it to give a quick weekly tip, update, thought, special offer, or all of the above to add more value to them.

For optimum impact, make it concise, poignant, relevant and educational. Also use a value-driven or fear-based headline in order to stand out in an overcrowded email inbox.

4. Social Media

Social media is perhaps one of the best ways to stay in touch with your customers as it’s the most accepted regular form of contact, and a more “social” form of contact, making rapport building quicker and easier when done right.

On social media, most people are anticipating regular updates from you – normally daily updates and possibly even multiple daily updates depending on your business. No other communication method has as much expected or allowed regular communication with a customer, making it an extremely valuable tool.

To use it effectively and maintain your customer’s interest, you need to do more than post special offers and sales pitches. Look to inform, entertain and add value to your customers first, and then add some business promotion in.

5. Blogging

While it is a slightly more passive way of communicating with customers as they are coming to you, when you post relevant, interesting and educational content regularly, you can build a loyal readership that will keep coming back for more.

To make it a little less passive, give readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog by email or RSS feed. This way they can have updates sent to them immediately instead of potentially missing something when they are left to come back on their own.

To monetize your blog and covert your readers to customers, add a call to action or special offer that relates to what you wrote about in the post as a P.S. at the end of your blog post.

How do you stay in regular contact with your customers? What works best for you?