by Donald
Mitchell
http://www.2000percentsolution.com
©
2007
You want to grow. So you direct the salespeople to
make calls twice as frequently on their accounts. Not much happens.
Next,
you increase your advertising budget by 10 percent.
Not much happens.
Then
you increase your promotional budget and customers increase their immediate purchases,
but sales droop as they work off the increased inventory they are carrying.
There
has to be a better way to grow. What is it?
Attract new
types of customers to purchase your offerings.
Most organizations
answer the question of who else needs their offerings by describing more of the
same kinds of customers or beneficiary recipients in some other location. That
answer is helpful as far as it goes, but it doesn't exhaust the potential.
Keep
going. Who else?
Rather than just scratching your head,
invite customers, suppliers, distributors, partners, employees, and those in the
communities you serve to help you.
Procter & Gamble
(P&G) got a tip from an employee's family member about a great product available
in Asia for removing scum from bathroom tiles. On further investigation, the product
was discovered to be made of automobile insulation produced by BASF, which was
already a P&G supplier.
It's highly likely that BASF
didn't think of P&G as a potentially large user for its automobile insulation
material. The story ends happily for BASF thanks to that P&G family tip.
I
once met a marketing specialist for a large company whose job was to find new
uses for the company's products that would attract more customers. When asked
how many new customers this activity had attracted, the specialist stroked his
chin and softly said, "One." When asked how much product this one customer
had bought, the quantity turned out to be tiny.
Based on
its track record, this company would have done better to have abandoned its inside-out
search.
Here are some questions that may help you find new
users as you reach out to your stakeholders for ideas:
- What other
attributes does your offering have that no one is yet using?
-
What new, valuable attributes could be added to your offering?
-
How could your offering be adjusted to substitute for something else?
-
How could your offering be combined with something else to add benefits for new
users?
- What can you eliminate from your offering to make it
less expensive to use than a currently preferred alternative?
Good
luck with your hunting for new types of customers!
Copyright
2007 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved
