Create a Customer Plan, Not a Business Plan

Each year, business owners spend hours upon hours writing business plans, only to have them accumulate dust. This pile of paper doesn’t help your company, and it certainly doesn’t help your customers.

Instead of creating yet another business plan this year, think about a different approach: A customer plan. After all, your business is all about your customers. Creating a plan that is built around them is the surest way to achieve transformative success this year.

Start with your customers
Unlike a business plan, which is built around what your competition is doing, a customer plan is built around customer habits and needs. Study your customers – what they like and dislike, how they live and work – and learn what it will take to really delight them.

Find your 10x goal
Your 10x goal is a big-picture plan to make your company 10 times better than your competition. It includes reinventing a business category and creating a brand new customer experience – think Uber or Apple.

In short, it requires innovative thinking and a big-picture vision to catapult your company to the very top of your industry. What can your company do to create an innovative and fresh experience that will blow your customers away?

Plan your launch
Your 10x goal should be launched four years out and strategized from there. Begin with the launch and move backward quarter by quarter, outlining everything you’ll need to do in order to reach your goal. Unlike a future-focused business plan, a customer plan shapes strategy by starting with a future goal and moving in reverse.

Focus on the possible, not the probable
Too often, businesses focus on what they think they can do instead of dreaming about what might be possible. But no business succeeds by playing it safe – and customers don’t win, either. After all, if your business isn’t seeking to grow in new directions from new sources, the end result will be business as usual, not transformative growth.

 

Connecting Your Customer to Your Brand
Now that you have a better understanding of your customers, how are you increasing brand awareness? Proforma Business Impact can help you engage customers with promotional products, print materials, digital marketing and more. Give us a call at 888-230-1448.

 

 

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