Before Selling Comes a Customer

Before Selling comes a thing called the customer. It all begins there. Amazingly, very few companies really know who their customer is, or what they like about their product.

Someone said to talk benefits and boy do we, but people don't care about the benefits we think are important. You need to find out what they think is golden: what they say in the privacy of their own homes. If you ask anyone who works at Harley Davison what is the most important thing about their motorcycles, for instance, chances are they will reply, the sound of the exhaust system. That is because they have asked, and asked and asked. More resources than you can imagine, more labor, engineering, planning testing has gone into understanding what makes that sound so unique, so every motorcycle Harley makes has it. That on top of the resources spent learning what the magic appeal of their product is to their customers.

But finding out who your customer is can be difficult for many companies since they don't sell directly to the end user, and for new companies it can be a rather expensive toss of the dice.

Though companies talk all of the time about how important customers are in their promotional materials, too often what people really get is thinly disguised contempt or worse.

How can you begin to design your company from the point of view of your customers? Who are they? Where do they live? What makes them tick? And what one aspect of your product could become the "sound of the muffler" for your product or service.

There is a way to get a pretty good idea, even for a new company. This short course is the first step in that process. Truly, before you can begin selling, you have to have customers.