by Natalie Edwards

Mike encourages businesses to ask 'Who are you best set up to serve?' Using the acronym POD or Point of Difference and how to keep your current customers happy by having a plan.

Hello, everyone. Our last episode talked about the importance of retaining staff, and now we'll discuss the attracting and retaining customers, which is equally as important. Wouldn't you say, Mike?

 

Absolutely. Attracting and retaining customers is what business is about. The only reason we're in business is to be able to do that.

 

Yeah, that's good. Tell us a bit more around the attracting and retaining.

 

Great. So when we look at attracting and retaining customers, let's break it into the two parts. First of all the attracting. When business thinks about attracting people, oftentimes particularly in engineering businesses, I find that they go, well, we're here to serve anybody that needs what we offer. And I encourage them to think about who are they best set up to serve. So yes, while they could do anything, it's actually there's certain jobs that they're better set up to do, there are certain jobs that are more profitable for them. There are certain jobs that fit the staff expertise better. And I often like to use the acronym POD, or your point of difference, and to think about the P being the people that you're best set up to serve.

 

And to really dig into that and quite often, they can be two or three groups of people, we often call them your target clients. And when you know exactly who you're best set up to serve, you can go, well, what do they listen to in terms of marketing media? What do they watch? What do they read? And so we can go and put any marketing that we want in those spaces. And when we have an ideal customer in mind, we also know what their pain points are, and how we can help them with that. And that moves on to the O part around well, what do you offer to those customers? What do you offer that's going to grab their attention? That's going to stimulate some interest and desire, so they take some action in that space?

 

And that offering will then help them to decide because they can see what's different about you as a business. And so when a business can be really clear on their point of difference, it can help them to attract the people that they set up to serve. And to get the right message to the marketplace. For many engineering businesses, they'll often do a good piece of work, and they can use case studies and have white papers around jobs that they've done to then attract similar people who want a similar job done. But probably most importantly is around actually retaining the people you've got it. Is far easier to keep the clients that you've got.

 

Many engineering companies can fall into the trap of the roller coaster. We're just so crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, busy and everybody's under the pump, and then you deliver the piece of work and say, oh where's the next piece of work coming from? And then we're in panic mode, and we're running around trying to find some work. And so what we want to be doing is we want to be keeping that constant. And so if you have a strategy in place which allows you to constantly be reaching out letting people know what you can offer to them and something in place that keeps your current customers happy, what it means is that you're less likely to have the high highs and the low lows of companies that only focus on what's in front of them right here and right now.

 

So a question for the engineering companies watching this now would be if you were to take your clients for the last 12 months that you've finished doing work for, when was the last time you got back in touch with them? When was the last time you asked them how else you might be able to service them? Did you check to see how the job you did for them is actually working? And we talked about that being a key account management plan. Having a plan to keep in touch with your clients. Have a plan to find out what are the pain points have they got, what are the problems that they've, got what are the dreams and aspirations have they got that you can then help them to solve?

 

And you can then start to partner with them. And so retention is seeing yourself as much more than just a supplier, but more as a partner with people. And when you can start to get that kind of mindset, what you'll find is that it accelerates your success. So my real encouragement for people is to think who will we be set up to serve, once we're serving them, what can we keep doing for them, so that we can help them to be successful because the more successful they are, the more successful we will be?

 

Yeah, those great points, Mike. And this ties in nicely to your next topic, how effective communication impacts success.

 

Absolutely correct. Very much looking forward to it.

 

So let's talk about that on the next episode. EP5: The Success Mindset with Mike Clark - Effective Communication