Get rid of supporters and get real customers.

As an entrepreneur, it always feels good getting mentions and recognition from friends, social network, media and alike about what we do. Comments and media headline like “you made it, see you at the top, you’re inspiring us’ all are the greatest joy to an entrepreneurship journey. I call these ‘supporters’. This includes awards, press, retweets, likes, mentions etc. All these are essential in fueling the energy we need to get our business up. But the truth is none of these will help our business running.

Don’t get this twisted, we all need that positive energy from supporters but as they say in Kiswahili kila jambo na wakati wake (There is a time for everything). Its crucial as an entrepreneur to know when we need supporters and when we need to get rid of them and focus on getting real customers. Customers are the one who makes a real difference in business.

An easy way of getting rid of supporters and get customers is by having a true reflection of our business and see what do we have?Supporters or customers?

Who are the customers?

Customers are people who are ready to pay the real price of what we sell because it has value to them. Customers will enable us to create jobs, pay taxes on time, pay utilities, pay ourselves and scale our business.

How to get to our customers?

One step to get to our customers is to assess what we offer and ask ourselves what value does it bring to the customer? Does it align with our customer needs? What are our current customers’ needs? Is it gaining more profit, emotional satisfaction, efficient to the job, more time to do other things or an easy life? is it something can they live without? Where else can they get it?

I know just like me, you have heard enough of this, but the truth is, customers needs and preference tends to change over time. To ensure we don’t lose focus on our customer’s needs, a constant reflection of our customer changing needs is unavoidable.

Now we know everything about our customer. It’s time to have a self-reflection.

Do we have what it takes in terms of technical capabilities and energy to meet our customers’ needs? What do we have at hand? How can we maximize it?

Having all this information at our fingertips will put us closer to our customers and paving a way in building a sustainable business while achieving maximum support from both customers and supporters. Sometimes the real customers are the one just next to us, but our lack of knowledge makes us use extra energy focusing on unreached customers and ignore the ones who needs it badly and are just next to us.

What do you have: Customers or Supporters?

For more talks and tools on customer analysis and building customer- centric organization reach out to me at samweljoyce97@gmail.com