Turn happy customers into an army of loyal marketers

The success of a business or a sales career depends on ability to attract and keep a reasonable number of customers cost-effectively.

Where customers are spoilt for choice, they are difficult and expensive to acquire and can easily be the single largest expense to a firm. A solid base of satisfied and loyal customers is, therefore, a great asset, indeed the most valuable.

Ironically, most firms spend a lot of money on product development but pay little attention to training sales team that will help the company attract, acquire and keep customers indefinitely.

A healthy sales team is what a healthy heart is to any living creature. Postmortems of many failed businesses reveal that the major cause is lack of enough sales to sustain the business operations profitably.

To create and retain a solid customer base, two things are essential.

First, you must position yourself in the market. This is basically placing yourself as the preferred provider of the services in your area. It is the place you hold in your customer’s mind that determines whether they will buy from you repeatedly and recommend you to others.

This will of course be based on whether they are satisfied with your services or not.

Second, differentiation. This is your ability to separate yourself and your product or service from the rest of the pack. It is the key reason customers should buy from you and not from others offering similar products.

This will give a competitive advantage and bring your advertising and promotion costs down. It is the invaluable goodwill that gives you advantage to enjoy free marketing from royal customers.

Many people think to differentiate a business must come up with new or unique products. No. Where most products are identical and almost of similar quality, the best way of differentiation is in customer service and mode of delivery.

This does not have to be a complicated or an expensive process. It could be something as simple as speed of delivery, reliability, opening long hours or walking an extra mile to care about your customers’ personal issues.

To succeed in customer service, position yourself as a loyal friend, expert, adviser, and a counsellor to your customers. This puts you in a position where desire to improve the life of your customer supersedes desire to make a sale.

When your customers are satisfied that your main interest is to better their lives and not to get their shillings, they will refer their own friends to you. This way, they become part of your marketing team without billing you at the end of the month.

Studies reveal that people trust recommendations of friends and others who have used a company’s products more than the best and most persuasive advertisements.

When a customer refers you to their friends, it is often interpreted by the other person as endorsement and it is 10 times more likely to be a successful deal than a cold call.

Having a solid base of satisfied customers provides a good market of launching a product.

It is far much easier to sell a satisfied customer something new than it is to sell something to a new prospect.

Mr Kiunga is the author of Entrepreneurial Journey: From Employment to Business. E-mail: [email protected].