Strategic Planning For Dummies®

Chapter 11. Finding New Customers

In This Chapter

• Investigating new customer markets and picking the best ones

• Writing position statements

• Keeping a focus on the market

• Deciding how to reach your new customers

Every business wants to find new customers. It's like asking if you want to make more money. Of course you do! There are two ways to grow your top line: Increase sales from your existing customers (see Chapter 8) or generate sales from new ones (this chapter).

Finding new customers is the role of marketing. When you sift through all the semantics, misused business lingo, and fuzzy concepts, marketing is really pretty simple: Identify who you want to sell to; figure out how to get those people to notice you; and when they do, get them to buy from you. If it is this simple, why does marketing continue to be confusing? Mainly because most people make it too complicated. At the end of the day, nothing matters until there's a sale. And the only person who can make that decision is the customer. As management guru Peter Drucker says, “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” Period.

The primary reason marketing campaigns fail is because customers weren't offered something they wanted, needed, or valued. The components of a campaign — your product, its price, the advertising, sales channels, your salespeople, customer service — can contribute to the failure. But ultimately, the problem comes down to the fact that the customer wasn't satisfied.

This chapter focuses on marketing ...