Which New Customers Should You Try To Attract?
Topics: growth, sales, salesman, saleswoman, salesperson, innovation, business model
Most salespeople are encouraged to add more customers. They often receive commissions based on the volume they deliver. Change those commissions to reflect customer profitability, and you’ll see quite a change in which customers your salespeople go after.
Unless you support those sales efforts with the right offerings and marketing, however, you won’t make as much progress as you might. What should you do?
You want to grow. So you direct the salespeople to make calls twice as frequently on their accounts. Not much happens.
Next, you increase your advertising budget by 10 percent. Not much happens.
Then you increase your promotional budget and customers increase their immediate purchases, but sales droop as they work off the increased inventory they are carrying.
There has to be a better way to grow. What is it?
Attract new types of customers to purchase your offerings.
Most organizations answer the question of who else needs their offerings by describing more of the same kinds of customers or beneficiary recipients in some other location. That answer is helpful as far as it goes, but it doesn’t exhaust the potential.
Keep going. Who else?
Rather than just scratching your head, invite customers, suppliers, distributors, partners, employees, and those in the communities you serve to help you.
Procter & Gamble (P&G) got a tip from an employee’s family member about a great product available in Asia for removing scum from bathroom tiles. On further investigation, the product was discovered to be made of automobile insulation produced by BASF, which was already a P&G supplier.
It’s highly likely that BASF didn’t think of P&G as a potentially large user for its automobile insulation material. The story ends happily for BASF thanks to that P&G family tip.
I once met a marketing specialist for a large company whose job was to find new uses for the company’s products that would attract more customers. When asked how many new customers this activity had attracted, the specialist stroked his chin and softly said, “One.” When asked how much product this one customer had bought, the quantity turned out to be tiny.
Based on its track record, this company would have done better to have abandoned its inside-out search.
Here are some questions that may help you find new users as you reach out to your stakeholders for ideas:
1. What other attributes does your offering have that no one is yet using?
2. What new, valuable attributes could be added to your offering?
3. How could your offering be adjusted to substitute for something else?
4. How could your offering be combined with something else to add benefits for new users?
5. What can you eliminate from your offering to make it less expensive to use than a currently preferred alternative?
Good luck with your hunting for new types of customers!
Donald Mitchell is an author of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist and The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution. Read about creating breakthroughs through 2,000 percent solutions and receive tips by e-mail by registering for free at
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