Breakthrough: Become besties with your customer
Business owners learn what value means to their customer
How well do you actually know your customer, like, really know them? What do they crave, what would they pass by, and importantly, what makes them value you enough to buy from you rather than from a competitor?
These were some of the questions put to Sarah and Steve when they logged on and showed up at a recent online Breakthrough workshop.
It seems crazy now! recalls Sarah, We just hadn’t spent much time thinking about what value we bring to our customers and what problems we were solving for them.
Sarah and Steve own Little Gwendreath – a collection of holiday cottages located on Cornwall’s dreamy Lizard Peninsula. Changeovers, cleaning, property maintenance, bookings – this stuff becomes the non-stop to-do list of running an accommodation business to a high standard.
Sarah says,
We’ve been so busy working on the day-to-day operations of Little Gwendreath since we bought it in 2015. When Covid forced our closure, we were able to think about stepping back from those daily tasks and think about our business from another angle.
Responding to changing customer needs
Steve and Sarah contacted Breakthrough to seek advice and get support in the areas they needed it most, focussing on their response to their customer’s changing needs in the midst of a pandemic.
Breakthrough’s Business Model Canvas presented the couple with the chance to think about how all the components of their business knit together to form their overall business strategy and what value that brings to their customers.
During the workshop we built customer personas to visualise who our ideal customer was. This really helped us and we decided to implement a customer questionnaire to find out even more about why our customers stay with us – this helped us shape our overall value proposition going forward.
With Covid restricting foreign travel in 2021, UK holiday accommodation businesses are reaping the effects of a boom in the staycation market. Good news for Little Gwendreath who’ve now been able to reopen their doors to customers.
Steve says,
We have made marketing our priority as it was something we hadn’t focused on previously. We now have a marketing plan in place. Thanks to Breakthrough we will continue to monitor the feedback from campaigns and from our customer questionnaires so that we are continuously developing our business.
If understanding what motivates your customer is something you’d like to make time for, contact us by telling us a little about your business. Find out more about our upcoming Breakthrough workshop.