Ways to serve your customers rather than sell in 2009
I was inspired by a twitter post from @sparkspace about thinking about how to best serve your customers rather than just sell to them in 2009 and beyond.
So here are a few of the things I thought about for my biz coaching coaches. Hope they start your creative spark going!
- Continue the work I have been doing to find out more about what my customers want - I have been using survey monkey for this.
- Listen to what they tell me in the surveys to help me tailor what I do even more effectively to their wants and needs.
- Follow this up where it seems useful with specific one to one conversations with individuals about how I can best serve
- Keep on top of coaching and best practice by being an active member of the UK and International International Coach Federation
- Share what I have learnt along the way with top tips about how my customers can apply the learning to their own business
- Be an active connector and share my connections. I've been loving finding out more about twitter and facebook and sharing this with others to help make life easy
- Focus my resources on where I can make life easier for coaches - making life easy = more chance more coaches will be able to stay in coaching as a career
- Have great free resources that really make a difference - by recognising that the economy does make a difference I can help people straight away and have additional resources that are available when people are ready to invest at the next level
- Have a better product funnel. I've got loads of ideas for Grow as a Coach in 2009. I think this will serve my customers better as feedback suggests that having a free offer and then full coaching is simply too large a gap. I want to serve my customers better in 2009 by giving them a way that they can work with me for shorter periods for specific kinds of projects that they have told me that they want to work on
- Be more focused. I love doing a whole range of things however this may be confusing for my customers and is definitely confusing to SEO! If customers can't find me because I am not focused enough then I definitely can't serve them! This means working to get much clearer about every single theme I talk about, write about, video on etc so that it has a clear outcome and message - people should be able to know exactly what they will get from everything they work with us on
- Following on from the last point, be much more focused on understanding What's the Point? Focus on what the outcome is - what will be different after someone has worked with me, read an article, seen the blog, watched a video etc?
- Continue to know how I serve my current customers and what I can do to serve them even better - use Survey Monkey to work with them to find out what adds the most value - and do more of it!
- Be to the point - use the twitter method to keep focused on my key point!
- Use the blog to post great links I find on other social networks
- Work to my key strengths so that I can be at my best with my clients:
