I’ll start with a paradoxical statement. The problem of finding clients doesn’t actually exist. The real issue is the low quality of handling potential clients. If the quality of processing leads is low, then to achieve good sales figures—meaning those that are acceptable for the survival of the business—you need to have a large number of potential clients, manage a database of such clients, and acquire more leads. CRM. systems and so on. At the same time, no seller is physically able to serve more than one customer at a specific moment, which means that having more than one customer at any given second is unnecessary for the seller. The presence of a second waiting customer does not increase sales; it only will add to the hustle and bustle Текст для перевода: ..
The pursuit of a large number of potential clients is akin to a woman who sleeps with a different man every day in hopes of getting pregnant by just one of them. Such behavior is condemned by society, and from this perspective, it becomes clear why being a salesperson is not considered a prestigious profession, but rather one of the “oldest” ones.
Additionally, the flow of new clients is hindered by the dissatisfaction of existing ones, who feel they were “sold” a product and later realized it. The quality of a salesperson’s work should be reflected not only in the sale itself but also in selling what the client truly needs.
Conclusion #1. The issue of finding new clients should primarily be approached by reducing the need for new clients, or in other words, by improving the quality of the salesperson’s work. No magical knowledge or skills in finding water will be beneficial if you are scooping the discovered water with a sieve instead of a ladle.
But still, new clients need to be sought after. And they are being sought. They treat it as a problem, but end up facing it. escalation We envision the world as a fortress, with clients defending it from within and sellers attacking from the outside. In reality, if we rise above the problem, looking down from above the battlefield and the fortress, we can see that if the fortress is not attacked, those inside will be eager to leave it. Every person is searching for something; everyone wants to buy or acquire something. For instance, I am looking for a service station for my car. However, the service station sees this as a problem of finding clients. So why don’t I choose the first service station I come across?
It’s important to understand that we operate in a market with asymmetric information. The buyer and the seller know different things. In reality, we are all buying a pig in a poke. This is the foundation for understanding the issue of finding and attracting customers. Without this foundation, any other attempts to theorize or even develop heuristics for customer acquisition are just astrology. Unfalsifiable a study that is only capable of providing explanations for events that have already occurred. It is impossible to build any effective theory of client acquisition that predicts specific outcomes without understanding the client’s fundamental question, “What’s in the bag?”
What should be done to find clients? Reduce asymmetry if you are a conscientious supplier, and conversely, increase it if you are not. Considering that everyone believes in the good (or acceptable for the price) quality of their goods and services, it makes sense to focus on reducing asymmetry.
And then it becomes clear why.
- activity on the internet and social media is so important;
- Why it’s worth working on a brand and why a recognizable brand with a good reputation is valuable.
- The color and material of the bag, as well as the inscription “fat black cat” or “only the best cats from the manufacturer,” also influence the buyer’s assessment of the invisible cat.
- What are service standards and standards in general for, and why is it important to maintain them?
- Why is the best source of new clients an active chain? controlled recommendations;
- Why aren’t the billboards working?
- Why is a major client, bombarded by various commercial proposals, unable to choose a supplier despite having a clearly expressed need?
- Why good marketing with a bad product leads to disaster;
- and so on.
Conclusion #2 To attract clients, one should work on reducing asymmetry. From this perspective, it is important to approach issues related to activity in Web 2.0. Otherwise, the statement “you need to create a Twitter account” will be a) trivial, b) unpredictable in terms of effectiveness, and c) no different from shamanism. When engaging in any form of marketing, consider whether this activity primarily reduces information asymmetry.
Well, okay, we have clients and we start sorting them out. People generally love to sort and analyze, especially when they have a lot of free time (from meetings and closing deals). And it turns out to be just like that joke about the man who went to the patent office with his invention of a shaving machine. “But, excuse me, how did you manage that? After all, every person’s face is unique!” the patent examiners asked.
“Well, the first time — yes,” replied the inventor.
We start to think about our client, for example, a 35-year-old man with a higher education and a category “B” driver’s license. From the perspective of this specific man, it resembles the coffee grounds reading I mentioned earlier—a sort of “average temperature in the ward.” For sellers, it’s simply about increasing the likelihood of a sale when interacting with this particular segment. However, probabilities are not the same as knowledge. In our attempt to eliminate information asymmetry on our side, we have actually increased it. Moreover, the conclusions we draw often do not align with the real facts. For instance, based on statistics, we concluded that our buyers are those very men and began targeting this segment, engaging with fathers picking up their children from kindergarten, while overlooking aspects like their sexual orientation. In reality, our product or service was purchased by members of a gay club who simply shared information about it with each other. Often, sellers create a portrait of a potential client based on their own ideas about the benefits, advantages, and methods of using the product, forgetting the old saying: “I love strawberries and cream, but fish has a different taste, so I take worms when I go fishing.”
Conclusion #3. To truly understand who your customer is, it’s enough to simply ask the customers themselves. How they found out about the product, what they liked, how they plan to use it, what their impressions are, what disappointments and discoveries they’ve had, and so on. It’s straightforward. You can even buy if you don’t feel you have enough skills to approach it on your own.
Now, let’s imagine a situation where there are 200 sellers in the market, all shouting, “The best cats in bags are only with us!” in an attempt to reduce asymmetry. However, it only takes a couple of sellers in the market who have bricks instead of cats in their bags for all these claims to become useless. How can you attract customers to yourself? It’s simple. You just need to start shouting, “Bald cat in a bag!” I’ve already mentioned this. wrote. By the way, the idea of asymmetry and game theory works here as well. Company A doesn’t know how much money Company B will allocate for advertising, and anticipating this, it tries to spend slightly more on advertising than Company B. Company B behaves exactly the same way. As a result, in the FMCG sector, people are not paying for the product itself, but for the advertising of that product on TV and billboards. The same thing happened during the Cold War—mutual destruction driven solely by information asymmetry. Once this was understood, tools like the “Open Skies” treaty were invented, allowing, for example, a Ukrainian reconnaissance plane to fly over Germany after coordinating its flight path a day in advance, along with international inspections, agreements on missile launch notifications, and so on. This, in fact, led to the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the USSR had nothing to do with it. The U.S. also has China, against which it could ramp up its military capabilities.
Conclusion #4. The worst way to attract customers is to do what everyone else is doing. For example, don’t sell books in a bookstore just like everyone else. If you don’t stand out from the crowd, you’ll end up in an “arms race,” which will be perceived by frustrated customers as an attack on them. If everyone is trying to identify the territory of potential clients and “catch” them there, you should consider creating an exclusive and comfortable space just for them. The cow began living with humans because, by choosing one predator, it gained protection from all the others. Yes, for humans, livestock farming is more labor-intensive than hunting. However, the days of foraging and a nomadic lifestyle are long gone, and it’s now harder to hunt a deer than to raise a cow. Hunters, especially elephant hunters, are starving today.
When searching for clients, it’s important to distinguish between sales and distribution. Additionally, it’s essential to differentiate between B2C and retail. Even when it comes to a vodka manufacturer, their… client — not a drunkard who has wandered into a grocery store, but the very owner of that grocery shop. Accordingly, even in retail, the sales process operates at the supplier-distributor level and is a B2B sale. The end customer is nothing more than a statistic in this process. It turns out that the grocer will stock the products thathe thinkswill be implemented better. And he will think… while looking at the billboards. It turns out that billboards are primarily aimed at distributors, not the end customer. The customer will choose from what is available on the shelf, based on their own experience and recommendations. And yes, partly from what the advertising has drilled into them. But only partly. If we are not talking about retail, then we should also not discuss the differences between B2B and B2C sales. In both cases, the sales process, if properly structured, is aimed at getting the customer to articulate the benefits of the product being sold. Moreover, these benefits should relate to the personal advantages of the specific individual, even in B2B, answering the question: “why,” and not from the perspective of kickbacks that… destroys relationships, specifically from the perspective of the company’s representative (if it’s B2B), as someone who understands dependence the success of the company and personal success.
Conclusion #5. It’s not worth distinguishing sales by B2B, B2C, or retail categories. Instead, they should be divided into large and small sales. Long and short, considering how many people are involved in the decision-making process, how much the outcome of a deal can be concealed, and how a specific customer’s dissatisfaction can affect future sales, and so on. From this perspective, it becomes clear that finding new clients is simply about looking for people to talk to about business or people who can connect you with others to discuss business. And such people are everywhere. You don’t even have to look too hard for them.
In general, there are two approaches to finding clients. One is marketing-based, and the other is sales-based. Our world is becoming increasingly… flat The asymmetry of information is decreasing. As a result, traditional customer attraction tools—such as advertising, propaganda, trade shows, and creating “catchy” texts—are becoming less effective, while classic sales techniques are gaining traction: recommendations, personalized communication, understanding the individual customer rather than just their “segment” in marketing analysis, and recognizing the problems and needs of each person who walks into the store. This is precisely why sellers and managers trained in “old” methods are noticing their ineffectiveness in the “new world,” leading to the notorious problem of finding clients. In reality, we just need to understand what kind of world we are in and which methods are worth using.