By Nikki Viljoen – Viljoen Consulting CC.
Much has been written about the ‘how to’ of increasing your client base, so I doubt very much that anything that I have to say here will be new or any kind of revelation. That said, I have found over the years that sometimes we need to be reminded of things and sometimes it takes ‘just one more telling of the story’ before we actually ‘get’ the plot – so here it is.
We know that in order to increase the number of clients that we have, we have to:
• reach new potential clients with the offering that we currently have – be that product or service
• reach new potential clients with a new offering – be that product or service.
But how do we do this?
Well we need to ask ourselves some serious questions – these are (but not limited to):
• Who is our target market? Who are the people that really have a need of our product or service. Does our product or service meet the need of the potential client? Does our product or service save them time or give them some sort of additional value?
• How badly do our potential clients need our product or service? In other words, how much time do they spend on a daily basis, trying to find what ever it is that we are selling? In fact do they even know that the product or service that we are selling actually exists?
• How many of these potential clients are there and how do we actually reach them?
Clearly, in order to answer these questions honestly and fully, we would need to do some market research. In fact, before selling anything it is always a good idea to do some market research – it is the only way that we can accurately ascertain if there is a need for the particular product or service that we are offering and it will also educate us on what we actually need to know about our potential customers, like who in the organization is the best person to speak to, who are the decision makers and what we need to know in order to tell them about our product or service.
Knowing the culture of our potential clients, their likes and their dislikes, their needs and their desires, will make our quest to engage with them that much easier.
Nikki is an Internal Auditor and Business Administration Specialist who can be contacted on 083 702 8849 or nikki@viljoenconsulting.co.za or http://www.viljoenconsulting.co.za
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