The most important ingredient for growing your business

The most important ingredient in growing your business is to understand what matters to your customers. If you understand what matters to your customers, you’ll know what to sell, how to sell, and how to market. But first you have to understand how to apply your insights.

Discovery

Before you build your business around what matters to your customers, you have to be able to articulate it. Before you can articulate what matters to your customers, you have to discover it. If you have sufficient empathy, you can imagine what matters to your customers. But there is no substitution for discovering that directly through interaction with your customers.

Don’t skip this step or assume you already know what matters to your customers. You may have a lot of experience, but your customers are living their own experiences, and they often think differently than you do. You need to learn to see the word, and your offering, through their eyes. Whatever you think matters about your offering, you need to be able to channel what matters to your customer about your offering.

You need to be able to do this before you start applying your insights. If you jump straight into application based on your own perspective, there’s a high probability that you will be wrong. And even if you’re not completely wrong, you probably won’t have a full picture, and your decisions will suffer as a result.

Application

Applying your insights about what matters to your customers is how we make better decisions. It’s how we build our business around what matters to them.

Application for creators

Creators make things. Mostly tangible things. Things that have to be picked up or delivered. Possibly things that have functions. What matters about them to the customer will depend on the nature of what you offer.

For example, does durability matter to the customer? Do choices matter? What about the pick-up or delivery experience matters to the customer? What about the thing itself? Or how it is used, consumed, presented, cherished, or possessed? How do the things that matter about the thing impact the customer’s expectations and the sales process? What matters to the customer becomes what interests them, what concerns them, what they need to know, and what they do. All of these are key to marketing and making decisions.

Application for Coaches

Coaches help, improve, and guide people. What matters depends on the people being coached. Logistics like when and where matter. But things that are far more subtle like how to look at things matter even more for coaches. And the customer, especially at the beginning, does not look at them the same way the coach does. Coaches have to market to the “before” version of the customers to help them become the “after” version. And the sales process depends on the customer’s intangible clarity and motivation. A coach has to go beyond understanding what the customer believes matters and discover how they turn belief into action.

Some coaches have a gift for this and do it subconsciously. However, there is value in coaches being fully aware of it so that they can bring it into their decision process and structure their marketing and sales processes deliberately and intentionally as an extension of what they offer.

Application for Consultants

Consultants overlap with coaches quite a bit, but tend to be more focused on specific goals or outcomes. Sometimes a consultant’s customer is a company and not just a person. It depends on the consultant and the nature of what they offer.

Some consultants specialize. Some have a process they guide customers through. And some conduct discovery and develop solutions to unique problems that their customer has and may not even be fully aware of. As a result, some consultants start off with clarity about what matters to their customers and some do not. This is why the sales process for consultants can be long and require personal interaction. Even when there is clarity about what matters to the customer, consultants may benefit from personal interaction in their marketing and sales processes.

Tailoring the application

The nature of what you offer and your customer relationships determines how you apply what matters about your offering. Creators, coaches, and consultants who read the above may see themselves in the other sections. This is good. Because creators, coaches, and consultants are not firm categories. Creators can provide coaching and consulting as part of their offerings. Consultants can include their own creations in what they offer. Coaches often package their offering like a creator. And other combinations are certainly possible.

The takeaway for this is that the differences between creators, coaches, and consultants described above go all the way down to the individual level. Building a business around what matters to your customers means creating something as unique as they are. And that is how to discover the best form of differentiation for developing a competitive advantage.

To explore the nature of what you offer, how to determine what matters about it to your customers, and most importantly, how to apply it to making better decisions about your business look for our course announcement coming soon…