Get Inside Your Customers' Heads: 3 Ways….3 Essential Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Cultivate

By Clive M. Siachiyako

Understanding your customers is the universal rule for entrepreneurs. Successful businesses understand their customers' characteristics, demographics and buying habits. Exceptional businesses gain additional insight into what their customers see, hear, think and feel.

Knowing your customers so well that you can anticipate their needs and exceed their expectations is the key to securing customer loyalty and beating your competition. There are three key steps to achieving deeper insights into your customer base:

1. Make better use of your data
How well are you leveraging the customer data you currently collect? This data which may be stored in multiple databases across your business holds valuable information around customer characteristics and buying habits, as well as your ability to serve them. Analyse the data to understand when and where customers make purchases. Identify customer segments that are most profitable and what characteristics set this group apart. Analyse your customer service performance, including response times, profitability on contracts, and overall customer satisfaction. This information can help you to identify your customers’ needs more effectively. Keep in mind, however, that this analysis will only address existing customers who are using existing product or service offerings.

2. Shift to a more customer-centric business model
To better meet evolving needs and improve the customer experience, you must shift away from an organisational or product view to a customer-focused view. A few questions to ask yourself:

• What does my customer need to accomplish and how can our company help?
• How can I better serve my customers?
• What relationships do my customers expect me to establish with them?
• How do our customers prefer to be reached and how do we fit into that routine?
• For what value is our customer base willing to pay and at what price?

Answering these questions requires customer analytics informed through data, understanding your business through the customer’s eyes and process improvements that focus on the customer. Visit shopping malls and scan the population of buyers and see what they mostly buy. Assess the packaging of such products and see how you can improve the packaging of your own products to attract more customers as well.

3. Explore what your customers truly want, not just what they are asking for
The ability to view your business through your customer's eyes can lead to the discovery of new opportunities. As automaker Henry Ford said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses.'" While "the customer is always right," they may not always be asking for the right solution. This is where innovation comes in. Innovators are able to see what their customers actually want, rather than what they are asking for, which usually reflects what your competitors are already offering.

A better approach is to anticipate your customer's challenges, by identifying patterns in customer behaviour and paying attention to the differences in local, regional and global customer needs and desires. As you identify these patterns, take action to develop a solution that will meet unmet needs and deliver it to the customer. The key takeaway here is that customers often do not understand the value of a new offering until they see it.

Developing a better understanding of your customers will help you identify areas for improvement in your business model and give customers what they really want at the price they are willing to pay. That's the best way to get a leg up on your competitors.
 

3 Essential Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Cultivate 

If you are an entrepreneur, you have got your hustle on. You do not work normal hours, every day is spent on your business and you are doing all you can to make it go. You know how to work hard, but there are other skills that great entrepreneurs need too. Let us share three essential skills every great entrepreneur needs:

1. Quiet your lizard brain

Whether you know it or not, we all have a lizard brain. The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump called the amygdala near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive. The lizard brain is the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, or compromise.

The resistance is a block which puts jitters. Every project that ever shipped late is because people could not stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door. The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That is because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.

Quieting the lizard brain is a constant struggle for entrepreneurs. It is a skill that needs to be developed. But as we tune into the frequency of what we feel is the right decision and tune out the lizard brain we will be able to truly test our business plans and hypothesis.

2. Think like an artist

Most of us put ourselves in one of three categories: either the chef, cook or bottle washer. Chefs run the show, they hire and fire, make plans and big decisions for their subordinates. Chefs have all the power. Cooks are the executors; they get it done. Bottle washers are often disrespected. They are the grunts on the front line in the trenches doing the dirty work. Which one are you at this particular day and time?

Think beyond the norm and become artists. “It is not art if the world (or at least a tiny portion of it) is not transformed in some way. And it is not art if it is not generous. And most of all, it is not art if there is no risk,” it is said. The risk is not the risk of financial ruin (though that might be part of it). No, the risk is the risk of rejection. Art requires the artist to care, and to care enough to do something when he knows it might not work.
Thinking like an artist instead of like chefs, cooks and bottle washers opens up a whole new world of possibilities for change, progress and success.

3. Connect the disconnected

Connecting people on the surface might feel like old-school networking events where everyone just exchanges business cards. We are living in the connected economy…the era where we needed to care about catering to the masses is gone. It is about connecting people who are disconnected, then connection becomes a function of art. The opportunity in the Connection Economy is about finding the problem (where people are disconnected and cannot find a solution to their missing need for their satisfaction).

This is an essential skill that might require significant effort. How much connection did you just make? That is one way to measure whether or not the work you did made a difference...e.g. when you make a daring comment at a meeting, when you produce a video or application or an idea that spreads, when more people visit your farm stand because they cannot get enough of the way you engage.  Source: StartupProfessionals