The only sensible way to grow your small business is to adopt a customer driven approach to sales. For that to happen, it is necessary to know the customer and to understand that over the past few years, his/her buying habits gave changed significantly.
photo credit: niiicedave
Because of the web, buyers are able to scope out most products and by the time they make contact with your business, they have most likely decided what to buy and have made a decision on how much they are willing to spend. This happens simply because of the proliferation of information on the web and the ease of finding it.
In short, you have very little influence on the buying decision unless you are able to study the buyer’s habits and this means understanding where the buyer congregates in today’s social world. So your marketing efforts must be tied to the buyers experience before, during and after acquisition of your product. Which basically says that your customer support effort must also come into play.
You need to follow your favorite customer on Twitter and Facebook to see what they are tweeting or posting about. You need to follow them on LinkedIn to see who they are talking to and what is being said and you need to follow them on Youtube to see what they are looking at. You can also see where they are frequenting by following them through some of the location-based applications like Foursquare and Gowalla.
Sales, marketing and customer support must interact closely and must all be tied in tightly to the customer experience. When you can make this happen consistently, you are on the way to a winning customer-driven growth strategy
