How to Find Customers
By leadership author and keynote speaker Ross Shafer
You want to start a small business but you don’t know how to get your products or services to market. This week is Part Two of my “How to Start a Small Business” series …how to find customers who will buy what you’re selling. The most common mistake for people who start a business is to think they will automatically be successful.
Well, you may think the world can’t wait for you to go into business but the cold reality is that other people have gotten to your “category” before you. You have to prove you deserve to be in business. You have to give customers a better reason to buy from YOU instead of your competition. Take Mike Lindell for example. You’ve seen him on TV. He’s the My Pillow Guy. Mike was a bar and restaurant owner in Minnesota who always woke up with neck pain so he got the idea to create a better pillow. Mike believed in the old saying “If you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door.”
Of course, thousands of great pillow manufacturers were already on the market. But Mike was so excited to create the perfect pillow that you could throw in the washing machine, that he mortgaged his house. He tried 90 different designs and configurations…assuming that when he came up with the world’s best pillow, all of the big stores like Costco, Kmart, and WalMart would say, “OMG Mike! Please let us sell your pillow.” But they all turned him down. He tried selling them from a Kiosk in Shopping Malls…but that didn’t work either.
He finally sold a pillow to a guy who owned a lawn and garden store…and the guy liked the pillow so much he wanted to sell them in his store. Selling pillows in a store that sold grass seed and lawn mowers didn’t even make sense. But it worked…so well that Mike rented a booth at a garden show convention…and because Mike was so passionate about his pillow, he sold out every one. He had no idea his target market was lawn and garden people. But the success of that garden show caught the attention of a Minneapolis newspaper…who did a story about Mike and his pillow.
The orders flooded in and Mike realized he didn’t need Costco or WalMart. He could sell pillows on his own. All he had to do was tell the story about WHY he wanted to make the World’s Best Pillow. If you don’t know who your target market is…or you’re getting rejected by the venues you think should sell your product or service, then go back to WHY you did all of this is in the first place. What made you want to create something better? What made you want to provide a service that didn’t exist before? Your authentic passion and drive WILL open doors for you.
AH… but there is one caveat: If you want to go into your own business ONLY to make money, then you need to go back to your day job and forget about being an entrepreneur. No customer will buy from you just because YOU want to make money. Today, Customers happily give money to business people that give them a better reason to buy.
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Ross Shafer is the author of (9) popular business books and (14) human resource training films. In a former career Ross won (6) Television Emmy awards for his work as a TV host, writer, and producer. Today, Ross is a sought after keynote speaker and consultant for Fortune 500 companies worldwide.