I had lunch this afternoon with a colleague in the world of sports business that is just a little younger than me and we were talking about some of the areas where sports business executives make mistakes. One of them is not really focusing enough attention on actually building fans.
They love to sell to people, but putting in the work to build fans and customers is often lost.
Which reminds me of a conversation that I had with a client later on, we were talking about the constant price objection that inhibits their ability to sell to their target market.
I told this client: “You can keep selling your product where price is the only point of interest and you will always be a commodity.”
That’s a race to the bottom.
You know what, you might win.
I had a third conversation, this one centered on selling to the consumer market.
Again, the gist of the conversation moved back to the way that people don’t buy like they always did before.
And, my reply was that if people buy differently, you need to sell differently.
What was missing in all of these conversations and observations was a lead-in that started with value and customer acquisition.
When I was a kid, Ford had a slogan: “Quality is Job 1.”
But after going to my first marketing and business administration classes in college, I realized that the real job 1 of any business is creating and keeping customers.
Unless your business is organized around that, you aren’t going to succeed over the long term.
That’s as simple as I can say it.
Build customers and figure out ways to keep them delighted.