A Quote by Jason Fried
The risk of relying on a handful of customers is not just financial. Your product also is at risk when you're at the mercy of a few big spenders. When any one customer pays you significantly more than the others, your product inevitably ends up catering mostly to that customer's specific needs.
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The most common way customer financing is done is you sell the customer on the product before you've built it or before you've finished it. The customer puts up the money to build the product or finish the product and becomes your first customer. Usually the customer simply wants the product and nothing more.
Traditional sales and marketing involves increasing market shares, which means selling as much of your product as you can to as many customers as possible. One-to-one marketing involves driving for a share of customer, which means ensuring that each individual customer who buys your product buys more product, buys only your brand, and is happy using your product instead of another to solve his problem. The true, current value of any one customer is a function of the customer's future purchases, across all the product lines, brands, and services offered by you.
Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product.
Your business should be defined, not in terms of the product or service you offer, but in terms of what customer need your product or service fulfills. While products come and go, basic needs and customer groups stay around, i.e., the need for communication, the need for transportation, etc. What market need do you supply?
You don't need a big close, as many sales reps believe. You risk losing your customer when you save all the good stuff for the end. Keep the customer actively involved throughout your presentation, and watch your results improve.
Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. Their needs and wants impact every aspect of your business, from product development to content marketing to sales to customer service.
To create a new business that makes money, and more significantly, employs others, and more significantly, gives a product to a customer that improves their life, is our greatest challenge, our greatest opportunity, and the greatest gift, far greater than any charity that we can give our fellow person.
We grow by letting the customer tell us. So when the customer tells us that they're frustrated, that they just got their catalogue and we're already out of a product they wanted, then it tells me that we're not making enough. We let the customer tell us instead of creating an artificial demand for our products. Any time you're making products that people don't need, you're at the mercy of the economy, you're at the mercy of whatever is going on. So we tried to avoid that situation.
When you're thinking about your next product or current product and wondering how to make it different so you don't have competition, understand the job the customer needs to get done.
What the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is, what a product or a service does for the customer.
Setting customer expectations at a level that is aligned with consistently deliverable levels of customer service requires that your whole staff, from product development to marketing, works in harmony with your brand image.
Often, very talented technical people find it extraordinarily difficult to take the viewpoint of customers, who are often ignorant about the technology and who may have strong and perhaps incorrect prejudices about it. The technical people may believe, deep down, that they know better what customers "should" need. Customers, of course, have a different perspective. They want products that will solve customer problems and provide other customer benefits, and will do so without undue risk or cost. Not infrequently, customers view advanced technology itself as a risk.
Quality that significantly exceeds the customer's expectations doesn't seem to pay off. This 'delight the customer' stuff isn't rewarding. One has to be careful about delighting customers too often, because it sort of reshapes customer expectations.
Business is all about the customer: what the customer wants and what they get. Generally, every customer wants a product or service that solves their problem, worth their money, and is delivered with amazing customer service.
Apple has beautiful design, beautiful product, incredibly functional. But mostly, it's about picking product, getting behind it, marketing it, and introducing it to a customer. What they've done just inspires me.
As the owner, you have to look into the mind of the customer and see and feel how their relationship to your product works - not just that the product works.
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