This book maps out a unique nine gear framework through which you can run your business idea and test its potential. Here Tom explains the customer acquisition stage - the ‘Delight' gear.

One of the hardest jobs for any business leader is finding enough paying customers to sustain a new product, service, or business. This happens because most companies waste resources trying to sell the wrong products to the wrong customers at the wrong time.

Making sure that you have found the right customers is what our customer gear is all about. You can do that primarily by spending time with potential customers getting to understand their "pain" - for you to try to sell  them anything.  

Making sure that you've got the right product for those customers is what our delight gear is all about.  By involving your potential customers in product development, and adapting your product until it delights them beyond their wildest expectations, you can turn your potential customers into a volunteer sales force.

Timing 

Picking the right time to offer a product to new customers is the most difficult challenge of the three. This is because for most customers and with most new products, most of the time is the wrong time to start the conversation.  Why? Because just like you, most customers lead "time starved" lives.  So the art and science of customer acquisition is to help you address the question: "When is the right time to sell this product to this customer?"

To find the right time, we encourage you to shift your thinking from selling to buying. The flip side of any selling process is the buying process. Customer acquisition is successful when you get those two processes to line up. To visualize this proces,s think of your acquisition pipeline with a lot of leads pouring into one end of a leaky pipe, and only a drop of water coming out on the other side. Every leak in the pipe is an instance where a potential customer's buying process gets out of sync with your selling process. This happens whenever a potential customer interacts with someone in your company who thinks that customer delight and customer acquisition is "not my job." 

The Sales pipeline

To delight, acquire, and retain customers, part of your job is to convince every employee in your company, as well as their friends and families, that customer delight, acquisition, and retention is part of their jobs. 

What happens when a customer calls and your company and gets someone in accounting to tell her that she's got the wrong number? The customer goes away frustrated and angry, and tells a dozen other potential customers that your company is a pain in the neck.  That's a big leak in the sales pipeline.

What happens when a potential customer comes your website and finds it confusing enough that he goes away without downloading the information he needed or buying a product that he was looking for?  It's not just one abandoned shopping cart.  That potential customer tells a dozen other potential customers - another leak in the pipe.

Stopping those leaks 

What happens when one of your employees complains bitterly to their friends about how much they hate something that your company is "doing to them?"  Potential customers tell other potential customers that your company is not a good place to work. Would you buy a product from a company that's a lousy place to work?  More leaks in the pipe.

To prevent these leaks, we recommend that you think of every employee in your company, as well as her friends and families, as potential leaks in the buying/selling pipeline need to be "treated" to make sure that they are strong and secure. Prevent leaks before they happen. Employee delight will create customer delight. And delighted customers will help you convert their friends and families into your customers as well. Employee retention results in customer retention. And it's much easier to get a customer to buy again that it is to find a new customer.

How do you delight your employees?  In much the same way that you delight potential customers. You spend time with them trying to understand the challenges they're facing, and then you go above and beyond what other employers do to absolutely delight your employees.  Once they're delighted, you explain that customer acquisition and retention is everyone's job. You also teach them how to respond if they encounter a customer in a way that will be delightful. You encourage them to look at everything that your company is doing to identify potential leaks and suggest ways to prevent them. You can even enlist the help of your employees' friends and families to get their advice about how to make your company a delightful organization. 

Once you've got delighted employees, friends and families, you look for "friction free stories" that they can share their own personal and professional networks to attract potential customers to a selling process that is in a word "delightful."  Not only will your conversion rate dramatically improve, your retention rate for customers and employees will go way up as well.  And because loyal employees and customers will help you acquire more loyal employees and customers, your company's growth in revenues and profits will go into an upward spiral. 

So remember, to acquire new customers, delight your employees and existing customers. An ounce of retention is worth a pound of cure.

Gear Up: Test Your Business Model Potential and Plan Your Path to Success is available now from Amazon or other good bookshops.