Drawing on the success of 2022, Curtis Accounting Solutions followed five essential steps to make 2023 a year of tremendous growth. By applying these strategies, we have seen exponential revenue increases and anticipate even more in the coming year. With the right plan in place, anyone can make 2023 their best business year yet by growing their business.
Separate Your Customers
The first step in growing your quilt shop (or any business) is to separate your customers. You must narrowly define your customer base and who your customer avatar is.
Only some people who come into your shop or order online are ideal customers. They are just your customer.
Your business cannot be all things to all people. You need to separate your ideal customers from your other customers. If you can answer yes to these questions, you’ve successfully separated your ideal customer into a specific group.
Is there one dominant club or group specifically for this group?
Would your message make you an obvious keynote speaker for this group?
If you listed the top 100 influencers in this group, would all of them know each other, and would they want to know you?
If you can answer yes to all these questions, you have sufficiently separated your ideal customers and niched down.
By closely studying your ideal customer, you're going to determine how they are moving, in what direction they're heading, and where you need to stay and be immediately in front of their needs, right?
Unify Your Products & Services
You are ready to unify your products and services when you have identified your ideal customer. You’ll do this by closely studying your ideal customer. How are they moving? What direction are they headed? How can you stay in front of their needs?
Discovering the answers to these questions will help you hone your offerings to suit your ideal customers and ensure you have that in stock. You’ll understand their needs, so they are ready to come to you.
In the next stage, you’ll capture their attention.
Create a Rally Cry
By this point, you’ve gained momentum by combining your offerings with the needs of your ideal customers to create a unique solution. That unique solution isn’t enough to capture your ideal customer's attention; you need a rallying cry.
A rally cry is a repeatable, viral message that speaks to your mission and inspires the next prospect to become your customer. It’s a qualifier and filter. If a customer “gets it,” then they can join you.
You must dig deep and know your purpose to create a rallying cry. You must understand your why. A great resource is the book “Start With Why” by Simon Sinek. His book will help you solidify your purpose and mission for your business.
Your rally cry should be one short sentence that is five words long. It will help you attract your ideal customer, not just any customer.
Gather your Customers & Offerings
Gather is one of the longest stages you’ll be in. During this phase, you’ll seek out your ideal customer and what they need from you.
You’ll improve or overhaul your offerings to meet the need of your ideal customer. It’s constant and continuous improvement. Getting referrals is the key to knowing if you are gathering correctly.
The greatest way to give customers an extraordinary experience is to anticipate their needs. And you can only do that when you understand who they are. In Raving Fans, Ken Blanchard says referrals happen when existing customers have such a great experience they feel compelled to tell everyone about you.
To get started, you’ve got to ask your ideal customers questions, then track their answers. Then repeat this process over and over again. Ask, track, ask, track, etc. After you’ve asked all the questions, you’ve got to review what you learned by talking to your ideal customers.
Expand
The last step to growing your business is the expansion phase. You’ve got to document all the previous stages and formulas that work with your ideal customers. You keep doing what is working and stop doing what isn’t working.
During the expansion phase, you’ll seek similar markets that could also benefit from the products you’re selling and match your mission. Then you’ll start at Step #1 by separating your customers, creating a rallying cry, gathering, and expanding again.
The Expand phase takes a lot of time to achieve. When you are the authority and a household name with your ideal customers, you can enter into the expansion phase, but don’t do so until then.
For most businesses, getting to the Expand phase takes years and years. They remain in the gathering phase because this is where they are honing and refining their offer and products to fit their ideal customers. Because of this, the first four steps take a lot of time and energy to master.
In each phase, you’ll find that your business will grow leaps and bounds as you get more clear on who your ideal customer is, their needs, and your messaging. When you have completed all five of these steps, then you have your personal formula to repeat in a similar niche or new group.
Comments