Customer-first is fine but how about the first customer?
Have you ever experienced earning money via selling a product/service? If yes, do you remember your first customer?
I discovered at an early age that I love making money more than “money”. So, I have jumped many times with courage of ignorance since my childhood. Selling jeans, books, helping other people’s homework, giving private lessons, selling candy at the supermarket and sometimes even organizing some activities, for example, hello kitty for kids in semester holiday… In time, I always made an effort to give more professional service based on my previous experiences. Especially, for customer satisfaction, managing customer relationships, after-sale services were always my main focus area. Normally, I don’t prefer to use this kind of term, it just makes a person happy for me. In this case, that person becomes your customer…
Now when I look back on the experiences, the mistakes, the gains, I recognized it became a guide for me to behave automatically in my current businesses. I love researching and learning about the sale, customers and marketing. However, the observations and the experiences from young ages have helped me to be more close to customers. Of course, it doesn’t mean the books or the courses are less important. In my case, learned things from books, courses are really needed to be practiced well and for a long time.
Imagine that you learn the courses with hundreds of people every time. Input is the same for all of you and output will be similar. To have a competitive advantage, it is important to be unique. I believe, having a business-related experience and mistakes will help more than the books and research at the first point. However, of course, then it is very important to contribute more values with research, books, and courses to your skills. To summarize, I believe first having a business experience and then developing your business skills with education would contribute more benefits to you…
In this article, I will try to explain the steps I took to reach my first customers and how I improved my customer relationships, together with the experiences I have gained.
I would like to start with below 3 points:
- Sincerity
- Satisfaction
- Feedback
The first customers can bring you motivation to focus your business. This step should not be considered the first step to make money. If you are alone, the first customers are also a great reference source. In fact, it will help you make your next sale more confidently. You can think that there is someone agreeing with you about the value of your product. For example, for the technology adoption life cycle, those people are called as innovators or early adapters.
When you obtain the first customer, it will help you keep your motivation up as you will soon meet more supporters. Especially if you have generally received positive feedback from your first customers… This does not mean that every business will be very successful and our first customer will always be satisfied. It would also be the opposite.
Maybe, if we are not fortunate enough, the feedback from customers who do not like the product may hurt our excitement. At this point, our goal should be to reach more customers. In fact, this must be a source of hope for us. Of course, another point is whether our product catches the product-market fit …
The solution that we offer may be immature yet. Therefore, we may not satisfy the first customers, but the important point here is to enter the market with MVP and to improve the product development process with the experience and knowledge gained.
Energy …
One of the biggest needs for work. There will always be needs. We will always face new problems. Yes, life is not perfect for any of us, but when we keep our energy balanced and positive, then we can overcome the difficulties. So far my experience, it was very difficult to learn this lesson from the books and courses. However, the previous experiences and mistakes helped me a lot at this point…
Let’s continue with energy more…
If your energy is high, the customers will realize this very quickly. They will understand your difference rather than the others … The key point to be advantageous in the competitiveness in the initial steps is how fast you are recognized by the first customer…
The first customer can be your family, sometimes your teammates, or your investor. It is not important to move forward in our world. You have to win your customer’s hearts… The product or service does not mean too much on its own, because the competition is high… Most probably, your customer can find a very similar product to yours in the market…
Nowadays, brands that have human feelings such as sincerity, energy, trust in a professional manner have more chance to reach their first customers earlier…
