Tag Archives for " Customers "

The Right Clients

Someone recently asked me why I chose to capitalize the words ‘Client’ and ‘Customer’ in my texts. Well, the simple explanation is that I appreciate their business. As a sign of respect and acknowledgement of their importance to my company, I want to show my appreciation in every article that I write containing these words.

It’s wonderful to have successful, paying Clients but even better to do business with the right Clients. To start with, we are either big fans of our Clients or we become big fans as we get to know them better. I hear our employees and freelancers raving every week about some of the great things our Clients are doing to grow their businesses. I want to maintain this positive culture and have therefore decided that our sales teams will only target companies that we really want to do business with. I want to be selective with the people that we do business with so that the result is and continues to be a positive experience for all involved.

Today we have four business relationship guidelines that steer our Client acquisition decisions:
1. Essential elements of our Client’s business culture MUST match ours or at the very least, are similar to those that we value and respect on both an ethical and moral basis. We take pride in our reputation and credibility and wish to work with those with similar ideals.

2. The potential for success is reasonable to fantastic. We want to ensure that we have the necessary competencies and availability to deliver the project successfully and exceed our Client’s expectations. Should a prospect have what we determine to be unrealistic goals, we will gladly recommend a competitor. We will never try to convince a Client that an apple is an orange or that we can deliver something that we know we are not capable of delivering because we want to help each of our Clients solve their problem(s) and, as a consequence, recommend our services to others.

3. Profit = Fun. It is a simple equation and there is a ton of truth behind it. A project must be profitable and have the potential to be carried through to successful completion with high levels of motivation and contributions to our bottom line. In essence, we ask for a win-win deal. If our Client wins, we win as well and if our Client is not able to achieve their objectives, we reconsider our role and our efforts to provide the necessary ingredients for success. Competing on price has little merit in this equation since the team requires rewards for a job well done.

4. Bandwidth is an annoying topic for us because our product is based on people with specific skills and limited availability. We want to give our Client’s the best possible service and that means that we need to have a well rested, physically and mentally fit team ready to jump into action. Success brings with it some level of frustration as you learn that you simply can not please everyone all the time. Our people tend to be booked solid for 60 to 90 days out and that means that there is little available bandwidth to acquire new business unless we add additional people to the team. On some occasions this is exactly what we did because we were interviewing superb people at the same time as we acquired a new Client that required the type of services that these new people were capable of delivering. That was a lucky situation and in 10 years has only occurred twice. Most of the time, we are approached by prospects that were referred to us by Clients or read about a Client success story that we created. These prospects usually have some urgent needs and therein lies our challenge. We want to help such companies but only if we can put the right team together to increase the probability of success.

Naturally, there are exceptions to the above guidelines but truth be told, we learned our lessons in the past and such exceptions are rarely worth the time and effort when a win-win is simply not possible.

We count on people like you to understand our thought process and although it may seem in some ways to be rather exclusive given the way that we filter our opportunities, please know that we really appreciate new business opportunities, they are the lifeblood of our business model. BoxONline is currently undergoing some growing pains and thus further expansion is necessary to achieve our objectives so, if you know of people who may fit into and support this Client oriented model of exceeding expectations, please do get in touch with me directly using this form.

Radical Approach – Know thy Customer

One of my mentors told a Client (a manufacturer of drills) that

“People don‘t want your product.”

The president of this large manufacturing firm looked shocked but my mentor continued,

“Your Customers are not interested in drills with more bells and whistles.
They are in the business of making holes – and they want help with 2 things:

1) Making more holes in less time and
2) Making good quality holes

end of story.”

With these words of advice the manufacturer changed his entire marketing approach and for the following 5 years achieved sales records never seen in that industry before.

Think about it for a moment…
What do your Customers really want?
What specific benefit can you provide them with both today and in the future?
What are you waiting for?