Building customer relationships is a two-way process, but to build trust and understanding, you need to know what the market challenges are. These challenges will better help you to get to know your customer. Like all challenges, market challenges need to be solved to help your customers and your business.
So, what are market challenges and how can they help you understand your customers?
Market challenges
The building blocks for effective customer relationships are market challenges. Market challenges are the issue that your clients face. These are problems that impact your customers in the running of their business, so it’s critical that you understand them so you can begin to comprehend the solution.
Solving these challenges can differ from one business to another but what is a constant is the way that you deal with potential customers. It is by understanding the way that your target is talking, showing your knowledgeable expertise, and solving their problems that you can reach out and build trust with customers.
You can demonstrate trust and expertise to deepen those relationships through blogs, podcasts, social posts, and building community. Thought leadership adds value by demonstrating authority and expertise in different formats and in different locations where your customer is likely to be hanging out.
On a wider scope, market challenges are also those found in the external market. It can be competitive forces that impact the industry as a whole shaping the ways that businesses race to solve customers’ problems.
It takes time, effort, and methods such as market research to come up with what your customers need. The solutions that most resonate with your audience are the most relevant ones that will keep any business ahead in the market.
Importance of understanding the customer
Don’t just go straight into selling when you want to provide your solutions to your potential customers. A customer is a human being after all. So, it’s better to build trust, rapport, and understanding before you can get customers.
Understanding your customers is the key providing the best solution. It will:
- Build relationships with them
Build relationships. Don’t just sell. This is so true when communicating with your customers to understand them. Relationships are built based on trust and familiarity in the business world as well as outside business. So, you’ve got to build trust by having conversations that build rapport when communicating with them; you hear them out, empathise with their issues, and show them how you can help them out.
Building trust needs to come naturally without you pushing them to buy your product. It is by showing value and through the art of reciprocity that your potential customers become interested.
Reciprocity is all about being generous with potential customers by giving ‘gifts’ without the intention of anything in return. When we say gifts, however, we mean whitepapers, thought leadership, and advice without the expectation of anything in return.
2. Establish loyalty and credibility
Customers that know that you understand their challenges and provide relevant solutions are more willing to stay loyal to your business and tell others about your business.
It’s like a cycle that keeps growing; someone who bought your product and found that it solved a problem in their lives can recommend it to a someone else who faces the same problem.
Using market challenges to understand your customer
Going through the process of understanding market challenges should be part of your positioning process.
By getting into the nitty gritty of working out what keeps your customers up at night, you’ll be able to get under their skin and solve their problems.
Understanding the market challenges allows you to provide the best possible solution, or even find that you don’t have the solution – yet. So it’s critical that you spend time working out what problems your customers are having.
This means talking to your sales teams about the conversations they’ve been having with customers – both acquired and lost. Those conversations are a goldmine of information, and that’s before you even get into talking to the actual customers themselves.