As we continue looking at how to strengthen a business and improve sales through better communication with customers…
We come across something that often slips away without us noticing.
We’re talking about the concept of interest, which is an essential component of communication.
If you could just get more interested prospects, your life would be a whole lot easier.
But how do you get prospects to become more interested?
Being interested in prospects and customers matters
If you’ve ever tried having a conversation with someone who wasn’t really interested in anything you had to say, you’ll understand how frustrating and disappointing that can be.
Well, the same thing applies to businesses when communicating with their customers to establish good relationships and customer loyalty.
Think about the last time you interacted with a store cashier that barely noticed your presence. Maybe they rang you up without looking at you. And then mindlessly passed the receipt to you while chatting with another employee.
Did that make you feel welcome and valued as a customer?
Or what about that time you called a business for information and it felt like you were bothering them? Perhaps they came across as having more important things to do than to waste time answering your questions.
How excited did that make you about doing business with them?
Pay attention to your customers
As a business owner, it’s easy to fall into the trap of becoming too focused on running the business.
This is especially true if times are tough and you’re struggling.
You’re working hard on selling more to improve your income. On top of that, you’re trying to manage staff and handling emergencies all day long.
Somewhere in the process, you start forgetting about your customers.
It’s quite silly when you think about it, but it happens all the time.
You can get so intent on operating the business and pushing sales of products and services that you lose sight of the fact that those products and services are purchased by customers.
To sell more — and more easily — it’s important to pay attention to your customers. By doing so, you develop a keen understanding of what they really need and want. And this leads to discovering how you can keep them happy and wanting more.
This understanding starts with you being genuinely interested in them — not just as faceless masses that give you money, but as individual human beings who have problems and fears and dreams and everything else that makes us alive.
You’ll win with your business if you are sincere in your efforts to learn more about your customers and to communicate with them in ways that make them feel heard and understood.
But, what if you’re not interested in your prospects?
What do you do if you’re simply just not really all that interested in your customers?
Well, you can usually get around this by finding something about them that you can get interested in. See if there’s something — anything — about them that does in some way interest you.
And then start a conversation with them about that one thing and expand out into more and more things that you now find yourself becoming more interested in. Before you know it, you’re in good communication.
Sometimes, however, we find ourselves in a conversation with someone that no matter how hard we try we just can’t seem to get very interested in who they are and what they have to say.
Many times, this is accompanied by a feeling of not liking them.
If this is the case, take a look at what exactly it is about them that you don’t like.
Do you have some prejudice against them? Do they remind you of someone in your past that you didn’t like? Is there a personality clash?
Or perhaps you have some disagreement with them? Do you not see eye-to-eye with them on some important issue? Do you not respect them for some reason?
Keep ’em or find better ones
Once you’ve spotted why you’re lacking affinity for your current customers, you next need to decide how important it is for you to hold on to this reason.
And also take a look at whether you can find some little thing about them that does appeal to you. This can be used as a starting point for developing a positive relationship over time.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that they’re just not a good match for your business and it doesn’t seem worth the effort to try to build a relationship with them.
In this case, you need to find the people that ARE a good match and start communicating with them instead.
This goes back to the earlier step we discussed a few weeks ago about researching and determining who the most ideal target customers are for your business.
They should be people you actually care about and whose lives you want to improve with your products and services.
Then start establishing genuine win-win relationships with them and build up a loyal customer base from what you now find to be a growing pool of interested prospects.
