I attended a lunch presentation last week covering the first steps of building the content and path for your business plan. I loved it, I think it had great material but there was one thing that a lot of the audience members kept bringing up and I didn’t see the presenter react to it at all or correct those asking about attaining customers as a business and consultants asking for clients. What’s the difference?
Well there used to be a marginal difference a many years ago when a front store would simply consider a buyer a customer and that was the relationship you could always expect.. You buy something and as soon as you exchange valuables the transaction is over, whether you knew the customer personally or not they were your customers. Clients where reserved to more professional on-going services where transactions were not as simple as a simple one time exchange.
That changed since the creation of the world wide web.
Ever since the creation of instant messaging, global online data consumption successful businesses have adopted the concept of building client relationships for their stores and services.
A client is someone who has done their research on you and your products and services, someone who has asked for referrals, scoped the place, checked out the quality of what you do, and has somehow been exposed to your brand, someone who deserves your honesty and engagement. A client is someone who has ongoing buying relationship from you. Does this describe a customer? Yes it does. The difference is social media. A customer who uses social media for referrals, validation and build their confidence that they made the right choice in buying from you rather than someone else, they are your ongoing clients and without them you have no business.
When you start seeing your customers as clients your business will definitely benefit in form of increased sales and overall satisfaction.
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