It’s Important to Know Your Customer But Is It Right to Pry Into the Minds of Their Clientele?

Most small businesses seek large corporate and government accounts which fit into or anywhere near their current business model. After all, one big account or customer helps make things simpler, and having larger accounts, well that means making more money. Further, if you can get those large companies and government accounts to pay you on time, well then you have the cash flow you need to expand your company, so it’s all good. Of course, if you have those types of large accounts, something tells me you’d like to keep them going as long as possible, indefinitely even. Okay so, let’s talk shall we?

One way to ensure you keep those larger accounts is to constantly look around at how your products and services are being used by those larger customers, and how those things you provide improve what they do, and thus, how their customers perceive these added benefits if visible. Previously, before retirement that is, I ran a franchising company and we were in the service business with lots of large government and corporate accounts. I was always surveying my customers’ end users, and wondering what they wanted. Often without asking we’d upgrade our services to solve those needs for the end user.

Why you ask? Because I knew if their customers loved them because of what we were doing, then those large customers would never allow our service contracts to lapse, and they’d want more services not fewer and that our franchisees would most likely be paid on top more often than not, because we were that valuable. Some might say that a small business should mind its own business do what’s expected, nothing more, and follow the terms of the contract to the “T” and not “take it to the people” so to speak. Well, I just happen to be someone that disagrees with those who think like that.

Now then, since I speak from experience and with authority on this topic, I am going to pull rank on those who think otherwise and ask that you hear what I am saying, think on this and then act accordingly. Why you ask? Well, because our economy isn’t batting a 1000 last time I checked and the last think you need as a small business right now is to lose any of those mega-large accounts you have. To which I am sure you’d agree.

So, survey those end users, do it discreetly, and then go and work on the fixes needed to stay number on in your industry, then go out and sell some more accounts, because I bet your competition isn’t thinking here, or hasn’t had the opportunity to read this here article yet.

Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of nearly 100 eBooks on Business Subjects. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net