Have you signed up for one of the conference calls yet? Details will follow today’s guest content from David G. Johnson of Epiphany Marketing…

So far this week, we’ve focused on you and your identity as a business. Now it’s time to do something every bit as critical and just as important, if not more so: focus on your customer.

Something that continues to amaze me is how easy (and common) it is for businesses to lose touch with their customers and clients. Just as you must know your own identity, you must also get clear on the identity of your customer. This is both harder and easier than it sounds. Customers are diverse, which is why it seems to be a daunting task to keep in touch with who they are. That being said, it is critical to look for and discover the common factors in your customers that are keys to the big question: why are they buying from you?

One of the easiest - and most often overlooked - means of getting to that answer is to very simply ask the question. When was the last time you got a list of some of your best customers and called to ask them, out of the clear blue sky, “Why did you buy?”

Let me guarantee you something. If it’s been a while since you’ve done something like this, you may have some ideas about what they’ll say, but the answers will surprise you. You will learn something. And what you learn will be important.

The fact is, we tend to give lip service to the idea of listening to our customers. Listening to and getting to know them is something that occurs only deliberately and with focused, intentional effort. It’s a lot like a marriage. If it’s going to last, it’s going to take work. Sometimes it’s easier to let customers slip away due to neglect than it is to face the painful fact that they may tell you something that you don’t want to hear. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather hear that thing I don’t want to hear because I asked than by letting them speak with their dollars.

I may have to give up my pet project that is missing the mark. But, when there’s a good match between my identity (which I’m hopefully now clear on) and what the customers are begging for, shouldn’t that be my pet project anyway?

More on this subject tomorrow…

In case you missed my invitation, please join David and me for one of our conference calls tomorrow and Friday. Some of them are already nearly full, so you need to choose your best time slot right away!

My fellow marketplace warriors…
I want to invite a few of you to a special conference call at the end of this week. Let me tell you why and then please let me know if you can make it. As you may know, our mission is to help believers worldwide build successful businesses so they can in turn (with their profits and influence) make a significant and lasting impact on the culture within which we live. How you make that difference is up to you. Helping you succeed in that calling is our privilege and our mission.

A mere 18 months ago…
Our business was dependent on me going out somewhere in the world and doing consulting or training. Product sales were minimal and not much of a focus. The revenues generated through our website were limited to five or six hundred dollars per month. Insignificant. I began applying some of the rainforest lessons to business and it grew substantially. Then we retained on a consulting basis, David Johnson of Epiphany Consulting to really help us establish a long term, reliably growing stream of income using the internet.

Last quarter what used to be less than a couple thousand dollars per quarter, was over $100,000 using the internet. That’s 50-fold increase! Our ranking on search engines has also improved significantly, our number of e-mail subscribers has more than doubled, and many good things are occurring. I know there are many of you who could benefit from his knowledge so I asked him last week if he would be willing to get on a conference call with me and share some of his wisdom and experience with you. He agreed with one stipulation…

He wants to focus his input…
…on folks who have an established business or who are responsible for generating leads or demand for an established enterprise. For example, one of his clients is a specialist in the medical profession who got virtually no business off his website and was skeptical that people would come to him via the internet. But… he was wasting money on ineffective advertising and he knew it. About a year later, over 50% of his patients find him from the internet, due to the help David was able to provide.

David and I have set aside several time slots this Thursday and Friday to discuss specific strategies to help you experience similar results. This is not for everyone, but if you want to grow your business using 21st-century strategies, you are welcome to join us. Register here now so you can be sure to reserve your spot on one of these conference calls. (As always, we are limited on the number of callers we can have on each conference call, so it’s a first-come, first-served basis.)

Warmest regards…

Michael Q. Pink

P.S. Get your calendar out and choose your best meeting time now… these calls will fill up quickly!

Today, we continue with guest content from David G. Johnson of Epiphany Marketing.

Yesterday, we talked about getting clear on your identity. Knowing who you are is absolutely fundamental to marketing - no matter what business you’re in. So… what business are you really in?

The Starbucks example is a fun one (thanks for the great feedback, by the way). They definitely sell coffee. They make a variety of beverages. Legal addictive stimulants are in virtually every beverage they make (does anyone really buy decaf?). And they truly create an experience designed to bring pleasure to the senses… to truly entertain. Of course, this is the factor that adds the most value to the commodity they sell and… yes, it’s why people pay more than they have to pay every single day. Starbucks customers are not buying just a commodity. Are yours?

Given that they could key off of any of those options (there isn’t a “wrong” one in the list), do you see the far-reaching implications of their choice? That simple, critical decision will determine virtually everything about the marketing decisions they make. And yet, simple as it is, when you’re working on this for your own business, this step can be one of the most difficult. Why? Because most of us are dealing with some degree of fuzziness about our identity.

If you are fuzzy about your identity… how can your customers and future customers possibly be clear that you are the right choice to meet their needs? Fuzzy logic may be great in mathematics, but in marketing it’s deadly. It’s the difference between nailing the bullseye and missing the target entirely.

Don’t make another marketing decision until you settle this essential question. You’ll get your best results on this work when you pair up with someone outside your business who can serve as a “sounding board.” As my clients and trainees have all heard me say, you can’t read the label from inside the bottle.

Tomorrow: who are your customers?

Don’t miss the upcoming conference call on marketing that David and I will be holding. All the details will be in your inbox shortly!

None of us got to where we are without the help of others. One of the people who has contributed to the success we had at Selling Among Wolves in 2007 was David G. Johnson of Epiphany Marketing. His specific area of influence had to do with the growth of our business using the internet. Because his input was valuable to me, I thought his input might be valuable to you as well. With that in mind, I have asked him to contribute the content for the blogs this week. He is limited to just a few blogs this week, so I suggest you don’t miss a one of them.

In my work with clients over the years, one thing I’ve observed is that most marketing mistakes made by businesses both small and large come from a fundamentally poor understanding of the real identity of the business. If you don’t know who you are, how can you properly introduce yourself to your future customers? In truth, how can you have any real clear idea about who your future customers are if you aren’t crystal clear on who you are? It’s an extension of a personal identity crisis that gets carried over into the business world, and it’s much more common than I ever would have imagined had I not observed it first-hand again and again.

To illustrate this phenomenon, I’ll let you in on one of the processes that I take nearly every client through to help them better understand who they are. It’s actually a very simple process, but is typically overlooked. It begins by asking the very simple question: what is your true product or service?

Before you respond with the most obvious answer, let me ask it a different way. What business are you really in?

Most companies (and this is particularly true of small businesses) define themselves too specifically and do not think about the answer behind their answer.

To illustrate this, let’s use a well-known company as an example. Starbucks roasts coffee beans purchased from growers all over the world and sells them primarily by making drinks out of them in their local retail stores. What business is Starbucks in?

a. Coffee

b. Beverages

c. Legal Addictive Stimulants

d. Entertainment

Be sure to watch your inbox for details of an important marketing meeting David and I will be holding very soon!