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Is your business growing?
I’m grateful a customer asked me this early in my landscaping career.
It’s a question on the minds of most people trying to decide if they should embark on a journey with a business that’s new to them. The next and usually unspoken question they have is whether that growth is good or junk.
Good business growth makes people’s lives better. Junk growth is survival-based and often short-lived. Given a choice, nobody wants to be part of it. That’s what my customer helped me understand.
Companies that are growing for the right reasons are winners. They attract people that want to be part of that customer journey.
Growing companies lift up their customers
The customer journey is the planned execution of a vision to take people where they want to go. You can think of it as a filter for what’s right for customers.
What makes their experience better is good. What undermines it is junk. To make it shine you have to learn from every single customer interaction.
Take your online reviews, for example. They often get to the heart of how your business makes people’s lives better. The words embedded in those five-star reviews are a goldmine of marketing goodness for attracting new customers. Mine them and use those exact words to laser-focus your marketing message.
Do you tend to ignore the negative reviews that trash your reputation? These are a goldmine too. Hug those haters, because they are telling you what you need to know to fix the breaks in your customer journey. If you do, you’ll transform it into a good growth-producing machine.
Junk growth scares buyers away. Good growth gets them excited about signing up for more.
Customer experiences are bigger than products
Last week my family celebrated my wife’s birthday at a restaurant I discovered from a friend’s enthusiastic Facebook recommendation.
It had amazing online reviews and was booked for nearly a month, despite hefty prices. That was enough to convince me it was for real.
The meal began with an unexpected beverage to toast the occasion. In addition to that, my wife’s menu was specially printed with her name and birthday on it.
Leslie was impressed that the waiter greeted her personally, not the entire table. This is an important distinction because it’s her birthday, not ours.
It’s a great lesson in target marketing.
As we chatted and glanced at our menus, another free bite arrived. Throughout the evening the service was attentive and genuinely helpful. On a couple of occasions, we were cautioned about ordering more than was appropriate for the four of us. The food was inventive and served with the same reverence Steve Jobs used to unveil the latest, must-have Apple product.
Sometime after dessert, the waiter asked a well-timed question. “What do think, have we checked all of the boxes?”
I was speechless because that‘s exactly what I was thinking. There was a minor issue with one of the dishes, but the overall experience was perfect.
Products and services can and will be imperfect, but the experience of consuming them can be bigger than they are if it checks all of the boxes.
When a business experiences growing pains it has the opportunity to transform its growth.
If it commits to fixing the inevitable breaks in its customer journey, it can create perfect customer growth in an imperfect world.
The post Communication Coach: The question that perfected my customer growth appeared first on Landscape Management.