Get to know your customers: 3 tips from a company with a market value of $285 million

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Technology is changing the way contemporary entrepreneurs keep in touch with their businesses, their teams, and their industries. Among them, the mastery of more cutting-edge technology and ideas will help innovators walk in the forefront of the trend.

For entrepreneurs, few things are important or challenging to be able to keep in touch with the right customers. Contact with target consumers is the key to any business development, but startups face a particular dilemma: they have to confront large and long-established companies in order to win the attention of customers.

Just 10 years ago, constant contact, an internet marketing company, was an obscure start-up that served only 5,000 customers in the highly competitive technology start-up industry and was constantly recruiting new customers.

So what is going to be the constant of a toddler who has turned into a company that has had 600000 customers and 285.4 million dollars in the past year? A recent face-to-face interview with CEO Guerre Goudman revealed the answer to the question, which is made up of three parts, That is, understand the customer, define a clear business philosophy and build a suitable team. The dialogue also provides some expert marketing advice to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Understand the customer. Constant Contact, founded in 1999 in Waltham, Massachusetts, was originally founded with only 7 employees, and Goodman has since been the helm of the company. Goodman believes that understanding customers is the key to success for the company, as well as for her own career. In fact, Goodman was an employee of the former IBM mainframe subsystem design department and later left for her MBA program because she was determined to narrow the gap between technology and clients.

"I wrote in my paper to the business school, ' I want to help build a bridge between technology research and the actual needs of customers '." "Eventually," said Goodman, who attended the Tuck Business School at Dartmouth University. "My current career is following this path. ”

But as many entrepreneurs soon realize, it's much easier to say than to do. For constant contact, which provides e-mail marketing and other digital tools for small businesses, there are three key steps to learn how to effectively promote their services to the right customers, namely: testing, testing and testing.

"There are a lot of things we need to think about and solve." "said Goodman.

When the product was finally launched, it did very well.

"We are beginning to really realize the power of education," Goodman said. "If you give us five minutes to sit down and talk to people around us, then we can let them know what Internet marketing is," he said. ”

This insight is the result of a free seminar organized by regional development directors aimed at explaining marketing knowledge to small businesses. The results quickly became apparent: customers were individually and individually connected in search of online marketing services, and the network eventually extended to constant contact. During the year of 2013, the company had 23 regional development directors who had hosted seminars for 200,000 small businesses.

The lesson from this is that entrepreneurs have to experiment to find out what is the best way to reach a particular customer. Although the experiment will require a lot of money to spend, but the benefit is a reliable, can be customer-different and customer contact with the marketing strategy. Constant contact, for example, has produced 250,000 of billions of dollars to test radio marketing campaigns and proved successful.

Define a clear business philosophy. If a key ingredient---a clear business philosophy is missing, even the best marketing campaign will become worthless. This means that startups must have the ability to pinpoint their business.

"In the beginning you should be clear about what your customer base is and what you can solve for them," Goodman said. "There are many entrepreneurs who have spread their energies into too many things, and I've seen a lot of them," he said. ”

Many entrepreneurs believe that attracting customers can actually help them define the company's business philosophy. In their inference, if the first to attract customers, then they can understand the needs of customers, and thus on the basis of their own business philosophy to sketch, but the fact is the opposite.

"Customers are not going to tell you what kind of functionality your product should have and what they can tell you is what kind of difficulties their business is facing," Goodman said. "You think customers will have the answers you want, and in fact they don't." ”

Constant Contact company's clear business philosophy has contributed to the success of its early marketing activities. As Goodman describes, the idea is to help small businesses develop and nurture customer relationships by choosing the best and simplifying them from the methods available for digital marketing.

This clear business philosophy is important to all companies, especially for start-ups.

"When your company is small, you'd better be able to really focus on something," Goodman said. "If you don't have a product that allows people to try out, buy back, recommend to others, and repeat the process, you're going to get bogged down in the company's business." ”

Build the right team. The third part of the answer seems obvious: build the right business team and stand by. As startups have a rapidly changing nature, business needs and difficulties are constantly changing. But sometimes these changes have to be reflected in management changes to ensure that each department's managers are the most suitable candidates.

"The manager I chose for the marketing department was a business-to-business software marketer," explains Goodman. "Direct reaction marketing will become the core competitiveness of the company began to become apparent, but the marketing department executives do not know about direct reaction marketing." So suddenly the company had a core competency that we knew nothing about. ”

What should I do? Seek professional help.

"When your business is in the development phase, there are things you need to be good at, but these are things you don't know you need to understand," Goodman said.

A successful entrepreneur can realize when the enterprise needs to make changes, and adjust the business team accordingly, if it can't do so, it may blur the business idea of the enterprise, weaken the understanding of the customer and harm the whole marketing strategy of the company.

(Via:entrepreneur, pioneering state compilation; The entrepreneur content authorizes the pioneering state exclusive cooperation, do not reprint without permission