Thoughtful Thursdays - Why Do Your Customers Buy From You?

Over the years I have been fortunate to have enjoyed reasonable success achieving sales expectations. I thought it was a matter of just doing my job.

At an industry gathering one of our competitors was overheard wondering aloud how in the world we were able to secure the majority share of a significant piece of business we had never enjoyed before. It was this comment that encouraged me to find out why our customers in fact were our customers.

Our business was number 2 or 3 in the market. We were not the lowest cost producer and therefore not in a position to be the lowest priced supplier. We were competitive with a product as good any out there, so why did our customers buy from us?

It seems such a simple thing to find out, but if you are at all like the majority, when things are going well, we do not always take the time to ask the simple questions. I took the question to our customers.

Was it our service, delivery times, price, product quality? Not surprisingly what I found out was that these criteria were given. You would not be in the game if not competitive in these areas. So what was the reason?

To paraphrase, it was because when they called us, they knew that they would get a response from the same day. It never occurred to me that a customer call would not be returned same day - would it to you?

Now that is something to think about.

Richard