It's Time For A Mid-Year Check-Up, How Are Your Customers Doing?

By Perry Rearick, Chief Editor, Follow Your Buyer

Thought for the Week – It’s time for a mid-year check-up, how are your customers doing?

Six months ago, many of us were filled with hope as we committed to dropping that extra weight, strengthening our cores, and cleaning-up our nutritional habits. How is it going?

But that’s not the check-up I am referring to. I’m talking about business, and how your marketing and sales are going.

We’re mid-way through the year and our monthly sales meeting may go a bit longer than usual. We’ll spend more time combing through the financials and validating forecasts. If we have not done it yet, we’ll be trying to connect closed sales to marketing activity and determining what’s working and what is not. Hovering over the meeting a like a big rain cloud at a baseball game will be the pressure of economic uncertainty.

And your customers are having the same meeting!

Here's an idea! Dedicate two full days to speak with as many customers as possible. Make it an all-hands on deck event that involves every employee.

The call might go like this.

1. Let the customer know what you’re doing.
2. Explore how their business is doing and how confident they are in reaching their goals for the year.
3. What is going well for them and their business?
4. What else is going well for them and their business?
5. What else is going well for them and their business?
   *You get the point, keep asking until all the good is out on the table.
6. Then ask what isn’t going so well. What are their biggest challenges and concerns?
7. How is this impacting them personally?  
8. Offer help! Help that goes beyond your product or service offering.
9. Give them space to talk about you and your business.
10. Don’t try to sell them anything!

Businesses that have done this once, find it so valuable for themselves and their customers, that they do it each year. And they do it mid-year when we’re all assessing our plans and still have time to make course corrections.     

I hope you have a great week!