Building your Business Growth Strategy Around Customer Value Creation

Every business success revolves around its customers. The product or the service that a business has to offer must meet the needs of the target consumers. Therefore, if you are envisioning a long-term success, you must focus on creating value for your customers. By increasing customer value you grow your business.

One of the primary rationales why businesses fail is a lack of touch with customers. You must devise ways to show that you truly value your customers. The first step is to understand that your customers are imperative to your success. Your customers hold the key to your success deep in their behavior, pain, values, and dreams they try to accomplish.

Therefore, you must walk 1000 miles in your customers’ shoes to understand them. When you feel their pain, you will be able to focus on solving their problems.

Place Customers at the Heart of Your Work

Create a Buyer Persona

Considering the customer while creating your product, doing marketing and sales enables significant business growth. The first and foremost action in this step is to know who they are. This essentially means you don’t target everyone. You engage no one by targeting everyone. Therefore, create your buyer persona suitable for the business. Don’t expect to market to someone aged 20 yrs the same way you would to another aged 45 years.

This person of your choice should be someone you can describe, a person you will build products for, market and sell to. How can you differentiate this kind of a person from others? This is the right question to ask yourself. You should consider the deals you have closed over the last one year. Who were the key stakeholders, who reached out to your first?

Answering these questions and a lot more will help you profile your buyer persona. You will need to keep verifying your persona over time. Once they are ready, you can incorporate them in your work context. Like you can ask yourself if whatever you do is helpful to the buyer persona.

Develop a Customer Journey Map

Start by understanding what a customer wants from you at any one time and note it down. Mark all essential touch points you will have with your customer over their life cycle. Evaluate how you serve them at every stage. Also, consider the actions the user need to take, questions they may need to answered and the time-frame.

In the interaction with the customer, what are the positive moments that improved their experience? Also, what are their frustrations and what opportunity do you have to enhance their experience? Mapping out the stages and considering what they mean to your persona will help you in the following:

• You can develop a comprehensive list of their needs

• Identify the content to create to assist them to find you and your product

• Articulate the actions to take to help customers gain a satisfactory experience

Perform an Internal Alignment

Customer value creation can only take roots in your company if your workforce is supportive. You must ensure that everyone in the sales, marketing, product, and customer support departments agrees. Everyone should have a similar perspective of your ideal customer. Monitor how your colleagues understand your buyer persona. You will prevent a scenario whereby this persona has an entirely different life across various departments.

The persona and customer journey map provide a direction towards a significant customer-centric growth. They determine what to prioritize and how to engage the customer. The marketing department will know what content to create to bring good sales leads. The production department will know the feature to keep or improve to serve these customers best.

Lead Scoring and Customer Satisfaction Index

The next important step will be to study the prospects or existing customers. This step aims to know the relevant course of action in winning leads. Here you need to relate the actions a customer take with your persona to determine any match. Then decide which team should focus on who. Determine if it is marketing qualified lead or sales qualified lead. It could also be a case for the customer service team.

The lead scoring should, therefore, define the take-over for the marketing or sales departments. On the other hand, a customer satisfaction index should help the customer service team utilize resources productively. Determine the identifiers to use and courses of action to be considered. Decide how every identifier will weigh in rating the fit for a prospect.

You can use a score from 0-100 and calculate the several ways a customer can earn up to 100 points. Define what it means when a customer gets various scores and how they impact your working with them. You can do lead scoring on an excel or google sheet to manage your leads.

Below is a sample of lead scoring.

Instituting Strategies for Keeping Customers Longer

You can increase customers’ lifetime value by lying down strategies for retaining them for longer. This endeavor reduces company costs as it is cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. You can use the following tactics to retain a customer for longer.

Rewarding Loyal Customers

Several ways exist that you can use to reward loyal customers and help them extend their loyalty. They will go a long way to grow your customer base. One way of rewarding your customers is celebrating them. You can honor them by featuring customer of the week or month. You can feature them on your website, social media or a sign-up in your office.

Other ways of rewarding them include inviting them to a special event and giving a bonus for referrals. Other companies have used the early access program as a way of honoring them. This could be offering a service that is not yet open to the public or a product that is not yet launched.

Customer Education on Your Products

Customers can leave your product or service for a competitor’s offer. This move can be caused by believing that your product lacks some features though it has. The best way around this challenge is to educate your customers about your product.

Customer value concept is very critical in driving growth of your business. Customers are your business lifeblood. Valuing them will not only help you make better profits but also create a foundation for future growth. However, consider value creation according to your current financial abilities.

Here are other interesting articles you should read:

How to Survive Beyond the 5 Stages in a Life Cycle of a Business

Tax Planning Tips for Singapore Tax Residents

Should You Really Get That Co-branded Credit Card?

(By Racheal Muriithi)

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