Three Things Customers Actually Want

It can be tempting to bombard customers with advertisements, cold calls and emails about promotional deals. After all, you want them to know about you. And the more you tell them about all the amazing stuff you offer, the more likely they are to do b

usiness with you, right? The only problem is that most customers hate when you try to aggressively sell them something.

Selling products or services is kind of like dating. You wouldn’t want to be the guy who calls a girl 50 times after a date to try to convince her to go on another one. Similarly, you don’t want to be the company that pesters its customers with a barrage of emails, fliers and phone calls. It’s all about playing it cool and providing something people want. Oftentimes, the tricky part is figuring out what exactly your customers actually want. To help you out, here are three things most of your customers are looking for:

1. The same good experiences as their friends

Thinkstock

If someone has a good experience, they’ll tell their friends and family members about it. Their friends and family members will then, most likely, try to seek out that same good experience. So, let’s say you own an Italian restaurant and a young college student tries out your lasagna, and she thinks it’s the best lasagna she’s ever had. She’ll tell her friends about it. A couple of her friends will probably come to your restaurant and try out the lasagna. If they have the same good experience their friend did, they’ll tell their friends about your lasagna. They may even share their experience with all of their college buddies on Facebook. Eventually your lasagna will be the talk of their college and maybe even the talk of the town, if you’re able to provide the same good experience to all of your customers.

If your lasagna’s pretty good on Tuesdays and Thursdays, divine on Mondays and Fridays and mediocre on all the other days of the week, you can count on having some pretty disappointed customers on all of the other days of the week. If their friend has a good experience with you, customers expect to have that same good experience when they try out whatever you’re selling. If you’re not able to consistently create that favorable experience, you’ll have a difficult time attracting repeat customers and building your company’s word-of-mouth reputation.

2. An affordable solution

This may seem pretty obvious, but many businesses fail to provide customers with solutions to their problems or fail to provide solutions at reasonable prices. Think about what your customers truly need. If you run a copy and print shop, your customers need you to provide reliable computers, printers, scanners and copy machines. They probably don’t need you to provide them with state-of-the-art copiers that can turn posters into billboard-sized prints. So, it would be smart for you to invest in more good-quality, basic copiers before you invested in a super-fancy, expensive copier that would ultimately bring your prices up. If you can provide your customers with a simple solution that doesn’t cost them an arm and a leg, they’ll be a lot more likely to do business with you.

3. A company that’s visible but not aggressive

In this day and age, customers, especially Millennials and Gen Xers, decide who they’re going to do business with by conducting online research. This often means that they type what they’re looking for into Google, and they end up doing business with a company that comes up on the first page of the search results. Customers aren’t necessarily shelling out their hard-earned cash to businesses that call them up on the phone or send out fliers in the mail. If you want to get the most ROI from your marketing efforts, invest in internet marketing and search-engine marketing. If you don’t know much about how to market your company online, educate yourself. Take some relevant online marketing courses, and pay for your employees to take some courses too. If customers can find you online, you’ll have it made in the shade.

As you make decisions that affect your business, it’s essential that you think about what your customers truly want. So, offer them the highest-quality version of what they need at a reasonable price, and make sure they can find out about you online.