Part 2, Three Best Ways To Spoil Your Customers

So how did some of you leaders do after reading the last post?  Did you get started?  Did you set out to cruise the initiative sunrise all by yourselves?  Good deal, if you did.



Let's Improve Water Use With Less Money!

The first step of this process is to get your focus in line with what you plan to do.  The focus is to develop a laundry list of "spoiling tools" you can initiate into your customer relations efforts that will help those customers develop a feeling that they need to return to get their "spoiling" fix.  If you are an irrigation company that has new technologies to provide more efficient water use, and lower 'power-to-the-pump' costs as a result of using this new technology...how do you plan on "spoiling" your customer?

I Like Milkshakes!

What kind of "spoiling tools" can you put into place as you begin to develop new relationships with those users?  Does your staff have any good ideas?  Do you have a website?  Do you have a simple blog?  What kinds of things can you provide on those sites that will increase the desire for your user to be attracted enough to become a repeat visitor.  How will you "spoil" them.  I like coffee, ice cream, milk shakes and discount coupons for coffee, ice cream and milk shakes.  I like baseball caps.  I like good work gloves.  I like recognition.  I like opportunities to increase sales.  I like opportunities for increasing my income.  These are clues.

I Like Coffee!

Find the clues in your customer bases and begin using those clues for helping you to develop your "spoiling tools."  Let's snag one for this example...let's begin meeting a group of farmers, who use a lot of irrigation, for a fun chat session every Wednesday morning at 7 A.M. in their favorite coffee shop and bring to them their favorite chocolate candy to munch on with their first cup of the day.  Make sure you come as a guest...not the salesman.  It is their show...all you are doing is "spoiling them" with the chocolate.  That's it.  With this simple step, one "spoiling tool" is now under your belt and done.  And if any of you in business does not have a full understanding how relationships matter in the world of successful business...you have been missing one of the key ingredients to success ever developed by mankind.  

Now if you have a website and cannot physically connect with those farmers...get connected with a local utility employee in their town and see if you can produce a 'webinar' segment that is short and sweet, showing the cost reductions your product will provide.  Have little tid bits of local interest embedded into different clips as you rotate the content from time to time.  Add a clip or two of the local high school football game highlights.  Farmers enjoy that kind of deal.  "Spoil" them.  Why does it always have to be business featured and data base driven?

Make Simple Video Clips.

Have a comments link added to the base of the 'webinar.'  Offer them a gift when they send a comment.  Describe this on your website.  Each time a farmer replies with an online comment after viewing the video clips, you send him a gift certificate from the local coffee shop he frequents.  This gives him an opportunity to buy a round for his fellow coffee mates once in awhile.  The coupon can even address this step!  This gives him a free 'pop' for coffee, an opportunity for recognition with his contemporaries and may open the door for him to network the irrigation products for you. 

Can you imagine what your business would become if you had 30 "spoiling tools" like this working at once in every one of your business regions?  I heard someone tell me that these things take time and require a lot of work.  My answer to them was, "AND?"

AND?

Remember not to get too wrapped up with the trials of the method.  You need to get more wrapped up with the benefits of the rewards!  We are so naturally programmed to evaluate the depth of the methods and will more than often forget to consider the rewards they provide.  I much prefer the higher rewards.  It has always been a lot of work, however.

The first best way to "spoil" your customers...develop a new focus to do it.

Next time, we will cover the second step to "spoil" your customers.  Now get going, shake it up a bit...check out the ideas your employees had...now get started and try something.  Quit waiting for your customers to make things happen.