To win more customers you need to attract them. It’s simple: you can’t get them to give you money if you have not yet attracted their attention.
Most business owners don’t separate these two things when thinking about marketing, getting more customers and growing their business, but it’s critical.
To understand this at it’s simple core, its more of a mental state or train of thought that you need to get the ‘attracting’ part right. If you’re thinking about customers liking your product and paying for your product at this stage, you have overshot the goal.
I have called my customer winning process ‘Customer Mountain’ for several reasons, but one of the main reasons is because it’s a simple thing to understand.
Whatever your business sells is your “mountain”. Your customers are the people who would match the description of someone who would like to climb that mountain. These are your “mountain climbers”.
If your mountain is a musical instrument shop, the mountain climbers you want to attract are people who either:
- Are musicians / or who can play an instrument. Or they are:
- People who want to learn how to play an instrument.
- Who are responsible for purchasing instruments (schools, charities, etc).
Your mountain climbers ARE NOT:
- People who hate music.
- Those who don’t like trying new things.
- Folk who might of played an instrument in the past but are no longer interested.
Attracting
Using this same example of the music shop, you only need to attract people who fit into the three categories numbered above.
As the owner of the music shop, you don’t need to sell them a guitar right now, you only need to find out who are the people within a reasonable travel distance from your retail shop who sometimes think to themselves:
Gee, it would be cool to know how to play a song on guitar.
How you attract these people is part of the Customer Mountain map that I have crafted over years of trial and error. It’s not really going to fit into a blog post like this one and it also will not be a good way for you to learn it.
I wanted to help you here understand the key difference here between:
- Attracting customers. And;
- Winning customers.
Because they are two very different things.
How to Attract Customers
An example that is often used in marketing and sales (maybe you’ve heard this before) is to imagine you are in the centre of a sports stadium with 40,000 people.
You have the microphone and you have 60 seconds to speak to all these people. Maybe you realise that 60 seconds is probably not long enough to “sell” them on buying your product or service.
What may be a better idea for you is to think about ways you can find out who are your mountain climbers amongst that 40,000 people.
This way, you can follow up with them later.
The key here is that you were able to identify all of the 40,000 people who were most likely to be interested in what you’re selling (your “mountain”). If you try to convince people within that 40,000 to buy within 60 seconds, you may get a couple of sales but you will miss the 3,000 – 4,000 other people who will be looking to buy what you’re selling sometime between your 60 seconds pitch and 6 months from now.
