The BIGG Successs Show
Are You Fishing for Customers in the Wrong Hole?
A bigg action item that's sure to help you get some bites for your business. Read our show summary at biggsuccess.com.
Welcome to The Big Success Show. Today we ask, are you fishing for customers in the wrong hole? The Big Success Show, with George and Mary Lynn. And Landers said, "If you want to catch a trout, don't fish in a herring barrel." Makes perfect sense, doesn't it, Mary Lynn? Now, I'm going to tell you something. I've been fishing at times when I think I would have been happy just to catch any fish. A minnow? A minnow, a trout or a herring, right? But have you ever been fishing? And it seems like you're not getting any bites. But the guy standing just a few feet away from you is catching all kinds of things. Oh, man, that's so aggravating. I've even found out what they were using as bait or the lure and changed mine, but I still didn't catch any fish. I guess I was just fishing in the wrong hole. That's the sound to fish it in the wrong hole, I guess, isn't it? This is carplunk. Yeah, pulling up a snag here in a little bit. And we do the same thing when we're fishing for business. If you're in sales or you own your own company, we sometimes fish for new customers and we don't get any bites. Makes for a long day. It may be that the customers aren't there. They're in another hole. Hey, there's a fish. You caught one, Mary Lynn. Well, finally, for example, maybe your customers are primarily shopping for your product or service online, but you're only marketing offline or vice versa. And that reminds me, Mary Lynn, I remember once having a debate with one of my business managers. And this happened to be a plumbing business. And we were discussing how to allocate advertising dollars between various media. And it seemed to me like we needed a bigger online presence. He insisted that customers wouldn't go online if they had a plumbing emergency, which actually, to me, intuitively kind of made sense. But I just thought that we should test it. And so after surveying calls that came in, he reported back to me that a great deal of our plumbing emergency calls actually came from people who found us via the internet. Yeah, sometimes we think we know where our customers are, but our perceptions are clouded by our own bias. Fortunately, there's a way to find out for sure. And that's coming up our big action item for the day. Today, we're talking about fishing in the wrong hole and how sometimes we're looking for customers in the wrong place. So here's our big action item to make sure you're fishing in the right hole. Hey, look at there. We caught something. Survey your customers. That's our action item. Find out how they learn about new things. The odds are, your future customers are probably a lot like your current customers. And there's a great example of how to do this that I heard about. It was a car dealer. And I thought this was ingenious, Marilyn. When you take your car to get serviced, someone has to pull that car into the garage, right? What they did was they had their employee who pulled the car in listen carefully to what radio station was on. Then they recorded that and tracked it. And over time, they figured out which radio stations to use based on what stations were on in the cars they were pulling in. What a simple and inexpensive way to find out where to spend your ad dollars. Absolutely. So is there some way in your business where you can naturally find out what media your customers use? If there is, develop a system to track that information so you know which, hold a fish in. Hey, that's a big one. We're definitely in the right spot. Here's another example in my service businesses. Our mailing service was able to take our customer list and paying the national databases to see where our customers fit in. Now, once that happened, we had a good profile of the people who were already doing business with us. And that helped us figure out how to target the people that we wanted to do business with us. You may just have a survey form that your customers fill out. Offer them some incentive to take the time to complete your survey. It could be a product or service you offer that's relatively inexpensive. Or cut a deal with another merchant. Maybe you even work a trade to offer an incentive to your customers. For example, tickets to a movie, maybe dessert or maybe even some gas. Well, depending on which kind you're talking about. Oh, I got enough gas to get the Pittsburgh. (laughing) Well, that might reel them in. That's right. (laughing) Well, we have a link on our blog today. It's a great article about customers being golden and how you can mine your database for business. You'll find that link on our blog today at bigsuccess.com. Next time, we'll help a first-time manager deal with an underperforming employee. Until then, here's to your big success. The Big Success Show at viggsuccess.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]