The missing link

Discussing with a friend, the conversation was “how much attention do we pay in order to attract customers that really interest us.”

Now, let’s get into the shoes of an entrepreneur, we have a portfolio of products and services and we receive orders for one segment of the market, while we don’t from the “interesting one.”

Seeking the root of this issue is like trying to find the missing link in our value chain. My reflection goes into another questions: which clients should we care? Just the ones that leave us most profit? or those we serve them better?

I lean toward the latter one. The key is to align the segment that we best serve with the profitability that keeps us afloat. To do this we must identify, define and differentiate our key competencies.

The next step will be to discover what the customer needs to do well to meet their needs (objectives) of business with our products or services.

That’s where client education comes.

If we can build a cause-effect diagram, from right to left, starting from the end of business need and translate it into customer education requirements (learning objectives) and then identify which of them we can meet with our competencies, we will have identified our ideal customer.

All other customers will cost us a lot of energy to capture, retain and get us recommended.

What do experts have to say about that?

PS: It is important to understand that the concept of “client” encompasses all actors in the chain of knowledge required to bring a product or service from producer to user or consumer. Even the smallest micro-companies have “intermediary actors” such as prescribers or others.