Build company worth by truly knowing your customers
Want to sell your company one day and command a premium valuation? Ask yourself, how truly knowledgeable are me and my team about our customer needs and wants.
An interesting exercise to conduct with your team is to hand each person a dollar bill. Ask them to study both sides for a minute or two. Then take the dollar away and ask them to draw, from memory, what is on both sides of that dollar.
In trying to draw both sides, employees very often laugh because they remember some things, but forget most of the details that are on a dollar bill. What’s ironic, is a dollar bill is something people handle quite often and should be extremely familiar with, but we aren’t because we take what’s on both sides of the dollar bill for granted.
Now ask yourself and your team, what is it about our customers that we are taking for granted. We interface with them very frequently, but do we really understand them and their needs in working with us?
Here are some great questions to discuss with your team to determine where there could be opportunities to strengthen your customer relationships and find new growth opportunities:
- If we place our customers in 3 tiers of revenue (high, medium, low) do we truly understand how the needs of our tier 1 customers might differ from tier 2 or tier 3?
- Do we do a good job of segmenting our customers (every industry has subsectors) to know how the needs of one segment/sector might be different than another? Do we know these differences and address them effectively in our product/service offering and in our marketing and sales messaging?
- As we think about each customer tiering and segment/sector, when is the last time we assessed to understand their pain points in working with companies providing our type of product/service? Do we really know where they have headaches and those we might be causing and those we could help eliminate?
- What are the top 3-5 criteria our customers (again, think tiers and sectors) think through in deciding whether to purchase from us? Do we understand their criteria, do we address it well and do we effectively message that we meet these criteria?
Don’t commit “assumicide” by assuming you know what your customers/clients’ desires or needs are. Challenge what you and your team think they know about customers and in updating your understanding you will absolutely uncover areas where you could either protect your revenues and/or build the revenues and in turn build the long-term worth of your company.
