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THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR CUSTOMERS

Knowing Your Customers
Your customers are the blood of your business, so it is important that you have proper understanding of their nature. Below are ten things you need to know about your them.

- Your Customers Need You
It is true that without your customers, you will not be in business. It is also true that without what you are offering, your customers will be miserable.

- Your Customers Want to Look Good
Things are kind of scary out there. No matter the industry, from fashion to entertaiment, things aren’t the way they used to be — not for you and not for them. So what they want from you, over and above what they’re asking for, is that you make them look good; that’s your real job.

- Your Customers Are Lazy
That means you have to do some of their work: help them find you, help them contact you and then, of course, help them work with you. The fewer obstacles they have to surpass, the more likely they are to follow through, and the more likely they will continue to buy your products.

- Your Customers Have Got a Lot Going On
Don’t lose sight of their big picture. In the office, there are interruptions galore. They can’t get anything accomplished, their desk is a disaster area, their e-mail is stacking up. Things are out of control. You are just one of the many things they are trying to focus on. Now try to ask: why is it that they have not responded to your new product or service?

- Your Customers Act On Impulse
We all do this: we see something interesting, we get excited, we call for information and when it comes, we put it in a pile. Don’t write them off entirely; just put them on your list and let them come back to you. Real needs and desires will stand the test of time.

- Your Customers Wants To Shake You of Your Feet
Although you hate it, let them do it; in fact, help them. Give them a box to put you in, and a label to put on your box. (I’m speaking figuratively here.) There’s plenty of time to tell them more later about your full range of services.

- Your Customers May Not Know What They Need
Listen to them and provide a solution to their self-defined needs. Offer a few alternatives for them to choose from. If necessary, explain, without trying to persuade, why what they say they want might not be the best thing for them. Then, let them decide.

- Your Customers Need Time
It is not always a put off. Believe them when they say they have to think about it, or that they have to sell the idea to someone else. We all need time to think, time to get ready, to adjust, to clear our plate. Give them the time they ask for, and then keep in touch, reminding them that they were interested. And remember that some things will never come to fruition. That’s life.

- Your Customers Are Human
Your relationships are not with companies; like it or not, they’re with human beings. And relationships are more important now than ever.

- Your Customers Are Just Like You
Don’t forget: you are a customer to someone out there too. Which defenses do you use? How do you want to be treated when someone is marketing to you? How often do you want someone calling? How much freedom and time would you like to have to think about a product, to ask questions and to make your decision? How do you want to feel about the process when it is over?

Let these ideas guide you. You Will Succeed!

TESTING THE VIABILITY OF YOUR BUSINESS IDEA

BUSINESS IDEA
You have a great business idea, and even got started on a business plan. But now you wonder: is my upstart business model really viable? How do you test an idea? How do you find out if people will buy it or patronize it?

Here is a five-point test to tell you if you should forge ahead with your business idea.
* Confirm The Demand
Before you introduce a new product or service to the marketplace, you need to make sure that there is or there will be a solid demand for it. It is clear that the product will sell.

* Seek Out People In The Same Business
A very important strategy in testing your idea is to seek out people who are already doing the same business and ask their opinions of the product or service. In the multitude of counselors there is safety. Share your idea with them and ask for their honest opinions. Don’t be afraid that someone will steal your idea. There are a thousand and one ideas out there for anyone to use.

* Check With Family & Friends
Family and friends are very good targets for market research. Ask your family and friends if they would buy the product or patronize the service. How much would they be willing to pay for it? Listen to their questions, criticisms and concerns. If you can’t answer their questions and concerns in a logical and convincing way, it could be that there is something wrong with your idea.

* Create A Selling Promotion
A selling promotion is like an advertisement for a publication, a series of sales letters or emails. In the promotion, you would announce the product or service, and also tell people the particular time it will be available. Then you would give prospective customers the opportunity to pre-purchase at a discounted price with 100 percent money back guarantee. The key here is not to make money but to see if your customers or your marketplace will respond to your product.

* Use The Seminar Approach
Organizing a seminar for your potential customers could be a great opportunity to test your idea. It will help you to have first hand information on the needs and concerns of the people. Take Action Now!

YOUR PASSION YOUR BUSINESS

I’ve seen several “ordinary people” who have taken a hobby that they love and transformed it into a viable business venture.

Four Simple Steps To Turn Something You Love Into A Viable Business
Your Product
Brainstorm all the different ways to create a business around what you love. You have a wealth of knowledge inside of you that you can monetize in several ways. What information do you possess that can be refreshed, repackaged, remodelled, reinvented and rebranded?

Your Promotion Plan
Create a portfolio by putting together samples of your work. If you offer a cleaning service, don’t be afraid to give away free services or products. Prospects like samples to see if they really want what you’re offering. Next, secure your business name, get business cards, and start thinking about your website. You will need an online presence to grow quickly.

Your Platform
Who do you see buying your product or service? Write down a full, detailed description of your ideal client. Consider what they read, where they go, who they spend time with, and what they value. Then go make friends with your ideal customer. Network with people daily and let them know what you’re doing. You can do this easily with online social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram.

Proven Process
Most dreams fall short between what to do and how to do them. That’s why getting help from a coach can provide you with the business wisdom and blueprint you need to succeed. These proven processes not only save you a lot of time, money and frustration, they also help build your confidence to keep going. Above all be prayerful.

You can be talented and still struggle financially and in other areas of life. Talent is not enough to take you from where you are to where you what to be. You need much more than talent.

Talent is in raw form – your innate abilities, gifts you were born with. It is like raw materials. You can have petroleum but fail to refine it and process other derivatives and still remain poor because you have to import the finished product.

You can produce cocoa but fail to process it into chocolate, which puts you in a position of weakness, selling for peanuts.

To add value to your talent, you have to develop skills in the area of your talent. You need focus and commitment to pay the price in being the best that you can be, and contributing in a level that will command high income.

The best in every field make the most money. When you stay at the average level, you get average results.

Being a talented goal keeper does not make you world class. At best you will become a local champion. Talent is not enough to separate you from mediocre. You have to pay the price to gain the skills that will take you to the next level. You need to keep growing and getting better and better.

While holding onto your day job, you need to spend your spare time in developing your talent and becoming more skilful so that you can launch successfully. After discovering your talents, you have to focus on developing your talent through practice and personal development.

You have to add value to what has been given to you.

The world is full of talented people heading nowhere. Many show a flash of brilliance and fizzle out like a candle in the wind. You need to take your gift and run with it. The richest countries in the world today did not acquire their wealth through selling their raw materials.

It is through adding value to what they have. Do not wait until you have a lot of money before you start doing what it is you really want to do. Start with what you have now. As you start moving, you will figure out how to go further.

A lot of folks have a challenge in the area of discovering their passion. It seems they have buried their passion so deep, they are not sure what it is anymore. Some friends ask me to tell them what it is they are good at, based on my observation of them over the years.

Friends and family can assist in this regard, but the onus is on you to discover what it is. If you rely too heavily on external feedback, you may suffer from a case of mistaken identity. Many parents have the weakness of trying to make thier children in their own image. It should come from the inside.

Energy is the fuel of life. The moment your energy level goes down, your performance level drops. Your brain starts to become sluggish. Law of diminishing returns begins to set it. You start going round and round in circles over a simple issue. Your batteries are low. You need to recharge.

However, there are activities that recharge your battery. You enjoy doing it so much that you can’t seem to stop. You feel energized when you do it. You keep going and going. Psychologists calls this state – flow. You are in a state of flow.

You keep going effortlessly in the zone of peak performance. Have you ever noticed a time you felt so tired, and then a long lost friend steps into the room and the tiredness vanished. Have you attended a series of presentations, one puts you to sleep and the next presentation drives the sleep away. It all boils down to your state and how engaged you are with the subject.

If you are doing what you don’t really like, but have to do it, you feel drained. The is a place most employees are familiar with. They dread Mondays and shout hurray! on Fridays. Any work free day is a most welcome get out of jail free card.

They may be above average, but they are putting in a lot of effort because their passion lies elsewhere. They don’t have much enthusiasm, and they become prone to pessimism.

What energizes you. What gives you the adrenaline rush, making you feel unstoppable and alive. What do you have fun doing? What would you be doing to make you so excited you jump out of bed in the morning and reluctantly go to bed because it is getting very late.

Locate it today, its inside of you and live a fulfilled live.

If you desire to attain your utmost potential, you need to locate what you love – your ideal career or occupation. Doing what you love energizes you and brings out the best in you. Money or paying your bills should not be an issue since whatever you choose to do, if you find a way to meet an need in your environment, you will surely make money.

If you can become rich by making people laugh, then there is no excuse not doing what you love.

Job satisfaction numbers show that most of us are unhappy with our jobs. Since we spend most our lifetime working, being unhappy on your job is not a good place to be. If you are already on a job you are not happy with, you need to find what you love and start doing it. If you have no clue what it is you really love to do, you may want to read ‘take a walk on the wild side’.

If you still have no clue (which is unlikely – since you must have been receiving feedback all your life unless you grew up in a deserted Island), the you can take a good guess and start experimenting. Test drive your passion. Keep searching. Refuse to settle. Like true love, when you find it, you will know. Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple captured it beautifully in this excerpts from his famous commencement address to the Stanford University graduating class of 2005:

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

Money confuses issues and gets in the way. The allure of guaranteed pay at the end of the month has derailed many. In looking after money, they lost their way. Money is not meant to be an issue because every field of human endeavor when set up to meet human needs in a massive scale makes money.

If you leverage your day job to attain financial independence (which means you do not depend on your monthly income anymore), that can set you free to focus on what really matters, your ideal career – do what you love and make a difference.

Job Security: Generations ago, going into business for yourself was considered risky and the safest route was to get a good job in a large firm. Now, working for a traditional corporation has become the risky option. Working for yourself has become the new job security. “If I’m working for someone else, I’m trading time for money, but I’m not building any equity,” “As an entrepreneur, I’m the master of my own destiny.

Freedom: People love the benefits of working for themselves and enjoy the freedom they gain from designing their own prosperity. You get to choose when you work, how you work and with whom you work. Best of all, you don’t have to make the agonizing choice between time for family and time for business.

Make More Money. There is far greater opportunity to make money by building your own business than by working for someone else’s. “When you’re in business for yourself, you write your own history, you write your own success story, you write your own legacy and most important, you write your own paycheck. Being in business for yourself gives you the opportunity to work your heart out for something you love.”

A Life of Greater Impact: Through our research most people said they would be more passionate about their work if they owned their own business. The No. 1 reason they gave for wanting to work for themselves: “to be more passionate about my work life.”

A Second Career: People want to own their own futures and redefine their lives. They want work that reflects their values and identity; they want to make a difference.” A landmark study found that 50 percent in their 50s and 60s want to do work “that matters.”

Flexibility: It doesn't matter if you're in a big city or small town. Entrepreneurship is an equal-opportunity employer. E-mail, cheap teleconferencing and a new generation of Web tools make it possible to run a fully competitive business from a home desktop. As a home-based businessperson, you can expand your business to anywhere in the world

My reader, can I ask you a question? If yes, then read on.

Is pain good or bad? Well, whichever way you answer, I want to say that both could be right. There are two types of pain:

"Pain of discipline"
"Pain of regret"

In order for you to succeed, you must choose the pain of discipline. Whichever way you go there must be pain.

If you choose to be educated definitely there must be times it is not pleasant to go to school. Let us consider the fees, the weather, the transportation, etc. However, if you can endure and scale through you can be sure of promotion. On the other hand, if you choose not to be educated you can be sure that when your mates are climbing the ladder of success and you are left behind - the experience will be painful.

Discipline, as we know, is a method of training your mind or body or of controlling your behavior. If you cannot do these then your life could be in danger. For example, if anybody chooses not to discipline himself or herself at the sight of the opposite sex and thereby commits fornication or adultery, and disease(s) arise therefrom, then there will be regrets.

Discipline yourself to start small if you cannot afford to start in ‘a big way’. There is nothing wrong in starting small. God could have created the whole earth once and for all in a day, but He did it gradually. Let us emulate our Creator, and do same. The Bible says, do not despise the day of small beginnings for your latter end shall greatly increase.

I found out that it is only in the English dictionary that Success comes before Work. Surely, and without doubt, you must work before you attain success. Even if you inherit wealth, it does not culminate into success. Be disciplined!