Wouldn't it be exciting if
every prospect that walked into your store or office had an indicator, say
something like an LED lamp on their faces, showing how strongly interested they
are in buying your product or services? I believe that you will agree with me,
that in this way you will not wear yourself out trying to convince someone who
has sworn never to patronize you; rather you will save your energies for the
real customer. Unfortunately, prospects don’t come with LED indicators that
make it easy to distinguish them, so a wise businessman needs to learn what to do
so as to maximize the limited number of hours he has each day to make the
sales.
Let’s acknowledge from the onset
that everyone who comes into your store or office is a likely customer; if not
on that day, maybe sometime in future, therefore they must all be treated with
the same level of courtesy and professionalism. In addition, someone who never
does business with you can send a lot of referrals your way who will make
big-ticket purchases and they can also do a lot of damage, badmouthing your
business if you treat them poorly.
Aside from that group, it is safe
to assume that the other prospects that walk through your doors are there for
business. They are the ones I like to call, “Oranges at various stages of
ripening”. But as they come into your store/office, they do with their unique combination
of desire and capacity and both requirements must be at the optimum before any
sale can be made. It is therefore the duty of a businessperson to learn how to
optimize both the customer’s desire and find ways to enhance his capacity so as
to remain competitive. Let me explain.
If a young man walks into the
store and asks for a Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt and dashes for the T-shirt racks
like a puppy zeroing in on his milk bowl when you point them out to him, he is
a prospect maxed out on the desire factor. After scaling that first hurdle, he
then needs to fulfill the capacity requirement. He might have enough money to
purchase the T-shirt and he might not; if it is the latter, no sale is
recorded. Similarly, a foreigner who is preparing to return home and goes to
the same store with a wallet bulging with a wad of notes, has the capacity to
buy. But if he doesn't fancy any of the apparel in the store, no sale is
recorded because he is wanting in the area of desire.
I was talking to the owner of a
supermarket about how to optimize the customer’s desire and he said that a lot
of planning goes into achieving it. Starting from the store layout, to the
positioning of items on the shelves and the little things like lighting and
sounds. He told me that a few droplets of water on some fruits can add a
luscious look to them and be the determining factor on how quickly they will
move. And a school headmistress told me
that she purposely schedules appointments with prospective families when the
school is on lunch break; she then draws the blind so that they can see the
pupils as they happily frolic on the playgrounds. She told me the school
reported a high sign up rate since she included that single arrangement. You
need to carefully consider how to max your customer desire. Your brochures,
ambience, customer services and advertisements are some of the things to
consider.
After addressing the desire
requirement, we need to work on the capacity. We shall address that in the next
post.
Woww
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