Share your knowledge about your product or service with your customers. You will find that teaching customers will help you learn how best to build and manage your business.
Imagine yourself as the customer desiring to purchase a wedding cake. Your first step may be to visit a local bakery who you know bakes cakes and other goodies. The bakery employee listens to your request for a wedding cake. He or she may show you pictures or actual cakes they produce and give you a price for each. You choose a cake, and arrange for delivery or pick-up. You leave the bakery shop. The visit was professional and courteous. You will probably receive a satisfactory wedding cake. You might return to this bakery again the next time you need a wedding cake or any other kind of baked goodie……or you might not. There was no particular connection in this meeting and transaction.
Now choose a bakery that specializes in wedding cakes. Perhaps when you walk through the doors you immediately feel as though you are at a wedding reception. The shop is decorated with several different themes of weddings. There is nothing but wedding cake samples everywhere. You can take a sample home with you if you like. This shop is perhaps a family-owned business for more than 100 years. Most of this family is unmatched in their knowledge about baking and wedding cakes specifically. The owners have authored or co-authored cake cookbooks and maybe even own some patents related to utensils used for baking cakes.
If you express interest in their wedding cakes, whoever waits on you will most likely ask you about the specific wedding plan. They will inquire as to your preferences for taste and texture. They will show you a variety of wedding cake themes. When you make your choice they will also offer a selection of other items or services associated with weddings, wedding cakes, wedding receptions. They may have copies of books they authored or co-authored or they recommend about weddings in general and the wedding cake. When you leave their bakery, they will hand you a business card with their contact details and website address in case you have more questions when you get home.
Visiting this bakery was a wonderful and gratifying experience and you will have the same sort of feeling when you visit them online. Their web site will be filled with helpful information and beautiful photographs of wedding cakes they produce.
This type of wedding cake bakery is a prime example of a business that embodies the single most important principle that has fueled the success of many business owners. The principles can be applied to any type of business. The central message is “connect with your customer.” Love, cherish and listen to your customers. Teach your customers everything you know so you can learn from your customers how to serve them better. You can be satisfied that you are offering quality services or products that customers truly need, enjoy, but above all “want.”
If you are truly interested in building a successful business, there should be no one more important to you in your business life than your customers. Connect with your customers via the internet, via publications and articles, via television, magazines and newspapers. Remind yourself that serving valued and essential customers is your number-one priority and is the key to a successful business.
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