When a company knows its customers very well, it increases its chances of attracting and generating business. But how to increase knowledge about customers? What is really important to know about them?
There are, commonly, two characteristics in micro, small and medium companies:
- They want to increase sales, both to new customers and current customers.
- They have little knowledge about their customers and is sometimes out of date.
It is necessary to recognize the importance of getting to know your customers and your audience well: their preferences, motivations, desires, characteristics and personal data. When the proper importance is given to customer registration and keeping it up to date, when research and market monitoring is valued, it becomes easier to generate new business based on customer information.
In this article, we explore 4 tips for getting to know the business’s customers and using them for sales.
1- Ask questions and record the answers
Here’s a simple, inexpensive, and efficient method of getting information about customers: ask. Many companies prefer to guess and imagine what customers are concerned with rather than asking them directly. It is necessary to give space for the customer to express their opinions and express their preferences, and this space can be built from simple questions. However, it is not enough to ask, it is necessary to record the answers. Over time, as more and more information is recorded, it will be possible to do good data analysis and extract relevant information about your customers, about how they see your business, about what they are looking for. If needed, do some voting. Today, you can buy IP votes.
The questions can range from the simplest, such as “How did you get to our company?” or “What most caught your attention in our store?”, even more complex questions. The important thing is to ask and take note of the answers, regardless of whether they are positive or negative.
2- To know the customers, it is necessary to research
In our time, access to information is very easy and for the most part free. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to discover information on the internet, and sometimes information that the client has published. To neglect the internet’s ability to gather useful information is to overlook powerful information. For companies that operate in B2B businesses, for example, a good internet search can result in excellent information about their customers: where they are, what they are offering, who are the people who work at the company (including finding the position, time of home, and other information) and much more.
3- Keep data up to date
Many companies, at some point in their history, registered their customer data (in general, this moment occurs when there is some commercial negotiation). However, over the months and years, this data is not updated, and if an analysis is done, the conclusion can be distorted because it is based on data that has possibly already changed. It is interesting to update your customer data periodically. This must be done systematically, within a period defined by the company, depending on the type of business, but also whenever a change is detected. An important tip: if possible, don’t delete the previous data. They can be useful for analyzing evolution and change over time.
4- Go beyond your business, look at your competitors
There are other companies that offer products or services similar to yours. This means that the customer profile is similar as well. It may even happen that your company’s customers stop buying with you and start buying from the competition, or vice versa, or even the customer buying with your company and with the competitor according to what is best for him at that time.
You got the point? We hope these tips were useful.