Who are your potential customers?
Do you know?
No matter how good your product or service, not everyone is going to buy from you.
A critical factor in the success of your business is identifying the people most likely to buy
from you and targeting them.
You probably already have an idea who your potential customers are.
For example, if you're selling cloth nappies, your customers are likely to be people with
young babies who are cost-conscious and are environmentally aware.
Or if you are a business offering a Welsh translation service, you'll be focusing on
businesses and organisations either based in Wales or operating in Wales and who want
to offer their information in the Welsh language.
You can see from these examples that these groups of customers are very specific and
have common characteristics.
What are the common characteristics that your potential customers share?
You'll find a diagram in this module to help you.
It has a series of questions you can use to identify these groups or segments.
The questions are a little different depending on whether you are selling direct to consumers
or to other businesses.
Let's look first at the questions.
First the basics - who are they?
For consumers that means their gender, their age range, where they live, work or play,
their preferred language, ethnic origin and so on.
You may find it useful to know what motivates?
What hobbies or interests do they have?
When selling to businesses, you'll want to know - the type, size and location of the
businesses you plan to sell to, as well as the job title of the person who makes the
buying decision.
Of course, you should also check if there is anyone else involved in making the purchase
- often someone else in the company may be asked to gather initial information and the
person doing the purchasing will make the decision based on that.
The second area you want to find out about is where they get information about products
and services like yours.
And also, as they can't have your product or service yet, what are they currently using,
how often do they buy and where do they buy?
Next you want to uncover what it is about this sort of product or service that is important
to them.
In business that may be their buying criteria.
It may be useful to find out what result or outcome it is that they are looking for from
your product or service.
In our example, you may discover that the environmental benefits of cloth nappies is
top of the list for a certain group of people and far outweighs the cost-savings they can
make.
They really want to take a small step towards 'saving the planet'.
For customers of the Welsh translation service, it could be the accuracy of their translations
that is critical.
Be aware that there could be 'hidden' reasons why people make purchases, as consumers and
in the business environment.
Their decision could be based on how good it makes someone look or because it's the
latest or most up-to-date product.
These 'hidden' reasons are just as important, but often much more difficult to uncover,
so make sure you listen carefully to their responses.
Price is an important area.
You want to know how much your prospective customers are willing to pay.
It's useful to work in price bands here rather than set prices - you want to be in the right
price area, not find out to the penny!
One key factor that is different in business is that some organisations use buying consortiums
or have a formal procurement or tendering process.
If you didn't know this, you may waste a lot of time and effort with no chance of success.
Use the template provided in this module to start pulling together information about your
potential customers.
A clear picture of who your customers are will give you a sound base on which to build
your business.