Everyone is not our customer. We should stop selling to everyone. Yes, that is right. No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that we can serve everyone, it is not true.
For an entrepreneur, it is important to understand the nature of the product very well. Because that nature of the product will attract the same nature of people. People of another nature will be least interested to buy our product. If we push too hard we might convince some to buy our product. But it will not be an organic process. After a while, it will result in a disaster.
The nature of the product or service can be derived by analyzing the product itself.
- Who would get the most value from our product?
- To whom the product would be the most useful?
We should focus on the “most” factor.
Selling to everyone is a loop. If we run in circles, we will go nowhere.
Suppose, we are selling shoes. We have set lower-end prices for the shoes so that everyone can buy our shoes. We are thinking, keeping the shoes cheap will open the door for us to approach every class of people. But that is how we are thinking, not every class of people.
People with high financial standards will not buy our shoes as they are more interested in high-class brands. They are used to it. Either for quality or to show off. Sometimes both. Even if we are selling shoes of the same quality as those high-class brands, we might not win. We do not have any trust factor. How would they trust us? This is called brand value. It requires both time and money to build a business brand.
Now we have mid financial standard and low financial standard people remaining.
People of mid financial standards might buy our shoes. But if they want they can also buy higher-priced shoes. As they have this alternate option, the bargaining power remains with them. First, we will have to convince them why they should buy lower-priced shoes. Then we will have to convince them why they should buy from us over our competitors.
We can imagine that the convincing part will take a lot of time and effort in the business. Here, a synergy is missing between the product and the customer.
Finally, we have people with low financial standards. They will naturally buy shoes at lower-end prices. So, budget-wise it is a natural fit. Now let’s think, among those people who will naturally buy our shoes. Suppose, we have a showroom and we do not sell online. That means people having low financial standards and who are from our neighbourhood are our natural prospects.
Now let’s think deeper. Among those people,
- Who will buy shoes over slippers?
- Where they live?
- Their age?
- Profession?
- Gender?
- Behavioural patterns?
The deeper we go more visible our customers will become to us. This is called a buyer persona.
If we have a detailed buyer persona then the moment we see or interact with a person, we will understand if the person can become our customer or not. We will know whom to approach for a sale. We will know where to do marketing. This will help us to effortlessly run our business in many ways.
Once we have created a detailed buyer persona, we can define the features of our product according to the taste of our buyer persona. It makes the product more lucrative for our buyers. This helps to make the product sell for itself. This is called product positioning.
All of these are not very hard once we learn and start to implement them in our business. Happy journey!
