It is about the customer! This is why I love Zappos, everything is about making the customer experience as good as possible. Model yourself after top-notch customer-centered companies such as Zappos.
Today what we’re going to talk about is the customer is the bullseye.
People always ask me in business, what do I need to prioritize? What’s the one thing? Well, I don’t necessarily think there is any one thing but the most important thing is to have your customer in the center as the bulls-eye. If you build everything around your customer and you succeed at it, you will have a successful business.
I’ve always asked, What is the one promise you could make that if you could deliver on it, your target customer would chase you down for your business?
Once you know what that is, you build your whole business around it. Hire staff that can fulfill it and create a culture that likes providing it.
Zappos is consumed with customer service. That is their customer proposition. Their value proposition is, it’ll be the best clothing shoe purchasing experience you can possibly have. And as somebody who’s experienced Zappos, I would agree with them. I never go to Zappos for pricing. They’ve won me over to the perfect customer experience. You get everything with the 24 hours. Returns are accepted within a year. The customer to Zappos is the bulls-eye.
So I’m encouraging you to put the customer in your bulls-eye.
I’m going to take you through some questions that, if you ask, help you create this customer-centric focus. And I’m the guy who said the customer is not always right, I remember that I said that, but the customer can always teach you something, even the crazy ones. Yeah, there are some that you’ll never make happy but let’s start this business with the customer in the center. I’m going to take you through things.
What Problem, Need, or Desire Can Our Product and/or Our Service Meet?
That’s how you start with the customer in the center.
What problem can I solve for my customer? Help them sleep better, help them lose weight.
What basic needs can I meet? Groceries, milk, a car, transportation.
Then you have desires. A great vacation, a Disney vacation, a Rolex watch.
Customers basically have three needs. They want you to solve a problem, to meet a basic need, or satisfy a desire or want. We gotta meet one of those three.
Who Is The Target Customer?
See, now you’re bringing it into the bulls-eye, you’re creating this target customer and you’re putting them in the bulls-eye. Too many businesses just target anybody. It’s too expensive to do that. I’m always narrowing down my target customer.
I love to teach people how to start and grow businesses. We somehow think that demographic is typically people right out of high school, and college. Did you know that only 4% of all businesses are started by people under the age of thirty?
I know that, so, I target people over the age of thirty. I’m happy to help people under the age of thirty, but statistically, you’re likely to start a business over seventy as under the age of thirty. The person who typically really starts to business is the person who becomes disenchanted with their job. It’s between forty and fifty-eight.
I’m showing you that I understand the target market.
Another one of my companies, a digital marketing company, our target market is a small business owner. A person that can say yes today. We don’t have to go through all the corporate ladders. We can get in front of the decision-maker today. That’s our target customer and our entire value proposition is in satisfying that customer.
I own a home improvement empire. I joke I’m the Pablo Escobar of construction. I try to create the perfect home improvement experience, whether it’s replacing a lock on your door or building you a million-dollar house. We want to provide the perfect experience, so we have a target customer. It’s obviously not somebody with low income. It’s typically somebody in 90% of the situations that already owned a house.
What Would Be The Perfect Buying Experience For This Target Customer?
Amazon’s trying to create that with click and boom! You wake up from a nap, and the product is there!
So once you have your target customer, now you’re trying to create the perfect buying experience for them. How can we make it easier, faster?
That’s where sometimes I allow customers to pay in payments, as QVC does or the Home Shopping Network. They know their target customers and how to make it easier to buy from them.
Where Is The Competition Failing?
Where is my competition failing in providing for my target customer?
When I started my home-improvement business, I knew from personal experience that I could not get anything done in my area. Nobody would show up, nobody would honor their contract, the job would drag. So I wrote down what I thought would be the perfect customer experience. I’ve made millions and millions of dollars delivering on this because my competition was failing. They could not provide consistent customer experience, and that’s what opened up the marketplace.
How Can I Reach This Customer?
This is your advertising vehicle. So I have a target customer. If you created a toy to sell, you’re marketing to parens a certain time of the year to buy it as a gift AND you’re marketing to a kid. Kid’s cereal commercials are done a certain way and they’re done at a certain time. You typically don’t see kids cereal adverts during prime time. So once you have your target customer you’re going to build your ads around that target customer.
My target customer is somebody who typically owns a home. It’s a higher income person. We do a lot of our advertising between 4 PM and 10 PM on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. That’s a great demographic. Another thing that we’ll do is we really buy a lot of golf events. For whatever reason, it’s a very inexpensive buy by for the quality of customers we get.
Once I know my target customer member, building my business around this one customer, then I can know what advertising vehicles would best work.
What Message Would Make This Target Customer Buy From Us Over the Competition?
Now I’m creating a marketing message. What do I need to say?
An example would be like GEICO: Give us 15 minutes and we will save you up to 15% on your car insurance. Their big promise, basically is we can save you money on your car insurance.
See, it’s all built around the customer for them. Their commercials do nothing but a pattern disruption. They just try to get your attention, break your pattern of whatever you’re doing, and immediately transition into their message. It’s a simple message and they’ve been doing it for twenty-five years or longer.
What Type of Employee Would Best Serve My Customer?
You’re trying to create this perfect customer experience and you want to be able to repeat on this. What type of employee can provide it? The type of employee that can work in a McDonald’s and work at a high-end restaurant is probably different. There’s nothing wrong with that either. I’d have no problem owning about ten McDonalds.
But the point is it’s a different type of person. Because of their system, they can plug in a teenager and make it work, where that may not work at a high-end restaurant. They have different clients.
In my home improvement business, I knew from the beginning that I needed very experienced people, so I didn’t hire anybody without a minimum of ten years experience and then I sat in on all the interviews.
I still kinda sign off though my partner kinda knows what I want in a person but in our TV commercials, I promise our customers that I wouldn’t put anybody in their home that I wouldn’t have in mine.
What am I kind of saying there? I’m not going to put somebody is going to make you feel uncomfortable. Why? Because I’m trying to create the perfect home improvement experience. And certain people don’t want a creepy person working in their house. I’ve overcome that with my messaging. I’ve said this for 20 years to my customers. I won’t put anybody in your home that I wouldn’t put in mine, and then I show a picture of my family on at the end of the commercial.
What More Can I Provide For This Customer?
I have my target customer. Well, I gotta keep expanding, I gotta keep offering them more.
MyPillow. Now he’s offering bedsheets and little pillows and things of that nature because he knows his target customer is somebody who had trouble sleeping. And now he’s expanded that target customer to anybody wants a better betting experience.
Once you have a target customer, you need to figure out how you can expand it.
How Can We Show Our Customers That We Appreciate Their Business?
In our business, we mail them a $5 Starbucks gift card with a little survey because we tell them: We want to give you the perfect experience, please answer these four questions.
We’ve been doing this forever.
Another one we’ll do is that when we do a high-END remodel for you, we send in a cleaning crew afterward to clean your house. We want your house to look better when we left than when we showed up. It costs us about $200 to provide this.
How Can I Get Them to Share Their Experience and Tell Others?
Well, you might want to do an email link to a rating service, a feedback service, or a review site. You may want to give them rewards. We want to give them a reason to tell others about our business. We want to give them a reason to keep buying from us. We want to constantly tell this customer we are so thankful for your business. As a matter of fact, we’re looking at more and more things we can provide to you.
What we talked about today was just the customer in the Bulls-Eye. I build my business around a certain target customer that I can either solve a problem, fulfill a need me, or satisfy a want or a desire. That’s why people buy. And then once I know who that is, that’s my target customer. I build my business around creating the absolute perfect customer experience. I spend my entire business, trying to attract that target customer. I don’t care about the people that aren’t interested in me. I know what my target customer is. Now I build my messaging. I want to reward them for doing business with me. I want to keep meeting their needs. I want them to tell everybody in the world how great we are and I want them to keep using it again.
