Ep. 3 - Not all customers are created equal
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode three of the Lovable Business Podcast. My name’s Mercy Barake, and I am your host. Today, I am here with another solo episode. The topic that I brought to you today is this idea that not all customers are created equal.
Unless you are purely driven by profit maximization, then you should really be mindful of who you take on as a customer and be very picky about your customers, because working with the wrong ones can have. Seriously damaging impacts on both you personally and your business. So if that sounds something that you’re interested in, I advise you to take a seat back, relax and enjoy this episode.
So, might be wondering like why I obsess over this topic. If you follow me on other types of social media. This has been the theme of the past two weeks. Working with your ICP, your ideal client or customer profile and trying to figure out who your dream customers are. Well, one of the reasons why I think it’s really important to almost ruminate over this topic is because you.
We’ll always try to fit yourself into so many different molds when you’re trying to work with customers. Even though your offer, whether it’s a, it’s a product or a service, the way you position your offer, we’re always going to be slightly different depending on the person. And that is a challenge that, is a perfect recipe for madness and failure because you really cannot just push yourself into hundreds of different molds.
And I think that the more customers I work with, the more I realize that in some cases this sort of inner sense of not being enough is coming up and then I’m trying to position myself to be someone or offering something, that I know the person will like and appreciate, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the right choice for me.
So, yeah, it’s a really tough situation and the reason why I say it is a recipe, for disaster is because you will end up being confused on what you are even doing and what you’re selling and what your positioning is. I work with a lot of wonderfully talented ladies who run, luxury press on businesses.
So they basically make, press on nails at home. They are artists and they are also trying to figure out who their ideal customers are, and I think because. I see how some of them are still, like they are probably in the business for the past three-ish years and they’re still struggling because they know that one customer wants, I don’t know, nail there are durable, so they have to focus on durability and.
Then another customer wants, nails that are like in their very eccentric or specific style. So they have to focus on the style and they keep getting lost in the, okay, if I am. An artist and I’m gonna focus on sort of marketing my art more and, and focus less on the durability of the sets or whatever additional benefits this can have.
They find theirselves, getting lost in sort of the noise and not being able to boil it down. And there, this is something that I’ve been through many times as well. In my life. And what I learned is that it works best if you pick something and just stick with it for long enough to decide whether that’s the right thing for you.
You should never think like a huge corporation where basically they’re just playing a.
Numbers came on a very, very high level. At the beginning of my career, I worked at this, FMCG company, fast moving, consumer goods, called Procter and Gamble.
So I worked at Proctor and Gamble. And Proctor and Gamble owns and manages some of the most well-known household brands like Ariel and Lenoir or Fairy, Pampers. You get the drill when you work in a corporation like that. You have sales. For each category, for each product at like in, I don’t know, in the range of millions of pieces, right.
Per month, then it’s a completely different game than when you work with customers that you actually No, and almost like. Probably even remember them by name.
You know so many of your customers, like in an in person or person to person way, that it’s, it’s just a completely different game you’re playing than those huge companies that are
purely. Focusing on maximizing profit and shareholder shareholder value what will set you apart essentially is that your business is more human. And if your business is more human. And it also means that it will take a lot more energy from you to run the business and to please your customers and to listen to your customers.
Because a customer’s role in your business is not purely to give you money to take your product or take your service and give you money. They also are. Your marketing channel, if you think about it, they might be the ones who are promoting your business to other people, sharing your posts, making your content viral.
You name it. They’re the ones that are giving you feedback. So if something went wrong with your product or service, they are the ones that are giving you the input on how to improve. What to improve, because it’s also in their best interest that you sell them a better product
some of your most trusted advisors, I. Always had clients when, whichever business I was running or part of with who I felt a sense of comradery almost, that we could sit down and have a very personal conversation. So they could give me a lot more insight into their world. And by extension of this, I could understand my market more.
I could understand what they need, what else they need. And that also may helped me create additional services or products that I could go back to them and sell. So they are helping you grow your business in more ways than you imagine so I really think that if you are a small business, your number one ask would be to be obsessed with your customers.
That being said, if you have the wrong customers, if you’re working with the type of, of people or companies that are not necessarily a great fit to your service, that could be detrimental to your business. And I brought three aspects here. Money and energy, and I wanna talk about all three. So when it comes to time, I’m gonna give you something like super groundbreaking.
We have limited amount of time on this earth, in this life, and if you work with the wrong customers, you will end up putting your time into the wrong place basically. And that means that you cannot use that time to work with the customers who would be able to improve your business and improve you as a person and get, give you more insights and more whatever.
If we think of, again, the press on businesses that I, I talked about, let’s say a set of press on nails costs $75. Of course, if you sell it to the right customer and to the wrong customer, it’s $75. $75, but then what you do with that money at the end of the day is you reinvest part of it into your business.
And if you get feedback or you build on feedback from the wrong customer, it means you are putting money towards the wrong things because you are trying to please someone who is not even, you know, a good fit to your business to begin with. So they’re diverting your.
They’re changing your direction into a place or into, a new version of your business that you might end up hating because that’s not the type of people you wanna serve. That’s not the type of business you wanna make. You listen to advice just simply, simply from the wrong people. And then the third aspect is energy.
And this is something that I started really working with on a more serious level, if I can say that. I loved discrediting or undermining the importance of energy when it comes to work. I always thought of energy as something that I can rely on in my private life, but when it comes to business, business is business.
No emotions almost, you know, like this very toxic way of, of thinking about business, but I realized that.
If you simply work with the wrong people, they would put your energy into like a mode of deficiency. And let me take a sip of coffee because this is a very chill conversation we’re having here.
So basically, some of the customers who by definition are not a great fit for your company, can end up draining you so much. That you will not have the energy to work with the customers that you love and that you would wanna spend your time with, and they give you, good vibes. And so it might even sound crazy that you make decisions based on the vibes you get from that customer.
But I think we should really stop, discrediting this kind of gut feeling or resonance when it comes to business decisions, because at the end of the day, what we are trying to do here is build businesses that we love and that we can continue loving in a sustainable way. If you work with people who constantly drain your energy.
Then you are shooting yourself in the foot. This is not something you can do long term. This is something you can, stick it out, in the short slash midterm, but it’s definitely not gonna be something that will motivate you to continue doing on a longer term. And I think this is where most businesses actually get it wrong.
And I can speak from my own experience. I also started working with clients that were absolutely not interesting for me. So when I was, working on this startup that I mentioned in the past episodes as well.
So I was building a partnership management platform. I know it sounds super, um, weird and robotic, but basically we were building a software with my co-founder and, when we started building the software, we were thinking, we were imagining that our customers would be.
Know very, innovative FinTech companies, like financial companies or insurance companies or some digital, marketing companies, like stuff that we were at least, a little bit interested in, or we knew the area or we saw, how, buzzing this environment is like when we worked in Copenhagen and left and right there were meetups, FinTech meetups, InsureTech meetups, people getting together, hosting conferences, having some beers together.
It was a very vibrant environment and I really hope that, our. X customer is not listening to this, but if they are, I’m sorry. The first customer we ended up landing was working in audiology. They were basically creating, hearing aid, devices and equipment to measure, someone’s hearing abilities.
So they were working with or at the end of the day, they were servicing hospitals and healthcare, organizations. And the thing is that their needs were so specific to their market. Although the people we worked with were super cool the industry they were in was so boring to us as we felt like, oh my God, if we have to build this company.
As a specialist in medical technology or even focusing on companies that are doing hearing aids, that would be one of the most boring businesses we could have ever imagined for ourselves. Unfortunately we didn’t have the luxury to really send anyone away or disqualify anyone who was having the problem we were working with.
We just never imagined that this type of company would fall into the category of customers that were interested in what we were doing, let alone put a huge bet on a new company basically when we met them, we only had a presentation and some designs of what our, software will look like.
But the point I’m trying to make is that just the idea of having to then take their feedback and improve our platform based on their, desires or their needs. Made both me, and if I can talk on behalf of my ex co-founder, I think him as well, so uncomfortable because we realized this is a business we would be doing because we accidentally stumbled upon a very, interesting or very specific niche who have the money to solve this problem and who are willing to work with us.
But at the same time, like we had zero interest in learning more about their domain. So this was just a very long wing, way of saying that, yeah, sometimes the customers you work with, you have to be ruthless and you have to disqualify them sometimes. And one of, really good ways to do this is basically refer them to someone else.
If you feel like there’s a mismatch between you and the customer, like, you should never take this personal, because it is just simply what it is. And I, I wanna believe that people, you know. To begin with, have good intentions so they, they’re not out there to get you yet, still buy your products. But I know in many businesses it’s, it’s, it’s quite possible to have some of your competitors as allies.
If you feel like some customer is not for you necessarily, but could be benefiting from someone else, then you send them over there and refer them to this other provider. All right. And now I just wanna talk briefly about, what happens when you do land? The right customers and you start working with really your dream clients.
And again, I wanna talk about three aspects, which is gonna be time, money, and energy. And just, you know, give you an idea of how different it is to work with the right people. So when it comes to time, and working with the right customer, your dream customer, time as a linear thing seems to stop existing and I can only, compare this to being in a state of flow when you work with these people because.
Even if it’s, let’s say a, a customer service case. So like they have a problem and they’re reporting it to you and you’re having a conversation, but if they are the right customer for you, that’s going to feel like something worth putting your time in and getting, you know, and getting a very high return on your investment. So if you are solving a such customer’s problem and it takes you 10 minutes, you might think about this as, oh, wow, I’m so happy I managed to solve this in 10 minutes, and it feels like I saved myself hours of work in the future. So when really, when it comes to time, you just, you just feel like it was.
So when it comes to time, it’s just going to feel like it was time well spent on them. When it comes to the money aspect. I feel that getting paid by your dream clients can have such an ecstatic feeling because you feel this sense of really hitting the nail on the head, and if you are working with your dream client and you’re solving their problem, it can give you really such a.
A beautiful feeling that you’ve, you are fulfilling a purpose and you, your contribution to society is something meaningful. And I believe that this is something that you should always, consider when you run a business that not every dollar will feel the same to you. When you get a dollar from the customer that you feel you wanna service, that’s going to feel so differently than getting money from someone that you feel like, oh, just get out.
Or, let’s just get it over with. Let’s have this transaction and forget each other. I actually noticed that when I work with someone who I feel is really my dream client, like I have to constantly silence my inner enthusiast who wants to offer them things for free. And, you know, sometimes I manage, sometimes I don’t.
So if I ever offered you something for free and we work together, then know that you are someone who really resonates and, hits a chord with me and you’re probably one of my dream customers.
Okay. And then let’s, talk about the third and last perspective or aspect, which is energy. I know that when I work with the right clients, even if I have a low or crappy day, they make me feel so much better because I work as a coach, I usually get energized, as soon as they enter the meeting.
And I feel that when we are finished, my day just got exponentially better. And so for me, having the right clients and trying to aim for working with your dream clients is. A hundred percent a way to also psychologically trick yourself into feeling that doing the business you’re doing is actually a positive thing.
And I know this sounds so silly, but I think we tend to say, you know, enough is enough. Because we just have way too many negative, connotations to what we are doing. And that can be your job. That can be your business, that can be a relationship. So when you basically engineer your business in a way that it gives you good vibes and good energy and like.
Net if you consider everything you put in and everything you take out or everything it takes away from you. If that equation is still positive, the business energizes you and you are just gonna keep doing it no matter what, because that energy will also fuel your creativity. It’s going to fuel your.
Interest in finding new ways to make it work, or you might not completely give up on this business. You might just scale down because it’s still something that will keep adding to your life. So this is sort of the wisdom, the daily wisdom that I wanted to leave you with if you’re interested in exploring this topic more.
First of all, you can always book me for a. Sort of like discovery or getting to know each other. Call for free. And also check out my YouTube video on this topic where I also attached a worksheet that you can walk through with me in the video, where you fill it out to try to understand who your dream client is and who’s that person or persona.
Whose, um, whose problems you are really interested in solving and I think that would make your business infinitely better. Thank you for listening to me today and I will see you in the next one. Hi, and take care.
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