As Chalestra offers it's communication and strategic business consulting services to it's customers, it's quite shocking how many people don't understand what a customer is. But understanding what customers are and what they do is vital to trade, and even more vital to successfully pitching for business.
In order to keep this simple, I'll take the case of estate agents, which inherently have got it wrong. The reason estate agents do so much trade is because people desperately want to own their own properties. Which is great, most of the time.
But estate agents fail to identity their real customers. Traditionally, estate agents are paid by the seller of property: nothing wrong with that. But those sellers are not the customers, for the simple reason that they don’t enable the trade.
Those sellers do nothing but hand money over, good money, no doubt. But handing that money over does not action a trade.
The real customers are the buyers when they buy a property. The reason being that it is they who have enabled the trade. Until the buyer buys, the estate agent will get nothing.
Many business people seek people or businesses that have money to be their customers. It's an understandable process, but completely wrong. To get people to be willing to part with their money they need a clear reason to do so. This rarely comes from the people with money: that's why they have money.
Business people ought to be seeking trade enablers to be their customers. True, potential customers must have financial backing to complete the process of becoming a customer, but most people will find the money if they have enough of a reason. More people, you will find, are trade enablers, and it is they who must be identified and found. Estate agents, for this example, would fair much better if they identified their customers more accurately.
One new customer of ours trebled their pitch success rate and turnover just for changing their view of what a customer is. Call Chalestra if you are having difficulty in finding trade.