Pet Information > Others > Pet Articles > 4 Stages of Building Your Customer Herd: Lessons Learned From a Baby Horse

4 Stages of Building Your Customer Herd: Lessons Learned From a Baby Horse

29 11:46:11

4 Stages of Building Your Customer Herd: Lessons Learned From a Baby Horse






     In business it's more important than ever to build your tribe, or your herd. One of our mares here at the Hacienda just had a baby horse. The Hacienda is our working Spanish horse ranch. Getting the trust of a beautiful foal reminds me a lot like earning the trust of a new customer. A little foal can be really skittish at first, just like a prospective or new customer who's never done business with you. You must earn this trust.

Gaining Trust - There's so much marketing and advertising noise out there, it's difficult for people to know who to do business with anymore. When you own a small business, it's important to cultivate trust so you gain a new customer and more importantly, you can keep them for years to come.

With a little foal, you've got to give and take. You can't just show up and expect them to trust you. Sometimes they're even afraid. Just like potential prospects who've been burned in the past or had bad customer service from other similar businesses. You've got to slowly prove you won't do anything but benefit them.

Open Communication - Once you've gained the trust of a new customer, you must now cultivate open and clear communication. With a foal, this may take time but is worth it in the long run. Just with new prospects or customers to your business. It's worth it to create marketing messages that clearly communicate what you can help them with and what makes you different (and hopefully it communicates why you're a better choice than your competition!)

Joining Up to Move Forward Together - After you get trust and communication, you and the little foal can now join up, just like in a herd for mutual benefit. When a little foal has decided to join up with a human, they'll follow and take cues from you.

This is a great place for a business owner to be. Once you've gained your prospects or customers trust, it's easier to make a recommendation for something they might need and easier to sell them what they want and need. Once you've gotten to this point, you can even recommend other resources and since you are now a trusted guide, many of those recommendations will be followed.

Build Your Herd - Some business owners know this, but most do not. When you build up a database of satisfied customers and clients, you now have a business asset you can go to over and over again. You've proven to them you are a good bet for doing business with. The likelihood they'll do business with you again is much higher than before. The only catch is that you must communicate with your herd regularly and you can do this with a combination of email and snail mail. This is where a lot of business owners fail. They want to use the cheapest way to communicate and think that mail is a waste of time. But with the amount of email most customer are deluged with, sending direct mail can be a huge differentiator.

Turning as many potential prospects into paying customer and subsequently into members of your tribe isn't that difficult. It takes time, patience, respect and care. Just like earning the trust of a precious foal.