Don't Fall Prey to Everyone is My Customer

Everyone is not your customer

The number one reason businesses fail, regardless of size, is that they don’t know who their customer is. Therefore, they take the easy route, defaulting to everyone is my customer.

Technically, this could be true. But practically, you have to figure out who your customer is. 

The easiest way to do this is to remember the statement: Less is more. Rather than looking at the whole world as your customer, you should instead narrow down your customer focus. This, in turn, helps increase your sales.

What to do if you don’t know who your customer is

Businesses can ask themselves the following three questions to try and think about who their customer is:

1. What is your customer's pain, challenge, or problem? How does your product/service trying to solve this?
2. Who has that pain/challenge/problem? For instance:

• What kind of businesses have that pain/challenge/problem? 
• What kind of people are within those businesses?
• Will they pay to solve the pain/challenge/problem?

3. Where do they live? For instance:

• In a certain geographic area?
• Within a certain functional area of a company (HR, Accounting, IT)?
• In certain divisions within the company?

I’m already successful. Why should I change?

Is this success based on a new product/service/unique software that has just hit the market? This will lead to high initial sales, but you should be cautious. 

Such high initial sales are normally driven by customers’ curiosity as they test out the new product/service. But after a while, this curiosity runs dry and you hit a ceiling. 

It’s then important to figure out why and how your success happened. This is always a challenge and source of frustration for most companies because they don’t know who their customer is.  One last piece of advice:  talk to your customers and find out why they made a purchase. 

In summary, don’t fall for the lie that everyone is your customer. Less is more--narrow your customer focus.