Deliver What Your Customer Needs
To survive, every business needs to change and adapt to the current environment, meet the changing needs of their customers and take a more future-focused view of innovation. If you want to sell, it's even more vital your business is relevant.
Business relevance is about looking ahead to try and forecast what will happen, rather than remaining focused on what is happening today (or worse, what happened yesterday). In order to stay in tune with the changes in how we live, what we interact with and how we purchase - you must create an agile business. You need an innovative model that allow you to act more like an entrepreneurial start-up and less like an industrial dinosaur.
There is simply no room for complacency if you want to keep your business relevant to your customers.
10 Ways to Keep Your Business Relevant Today:
1. Make your business essential
Find products for your customers, not customers for your products. Your customers will always be there, but their needs and wants will change - ensure you change with them. A cafe that only ever sold dine-in coffee, for example, would have missed most of its market the moment click-and-collect became the norm.
2. Get closer
Find out where your customers hang out and hang with them! Your business must be easy to find - both online and off - to both your existing and prospective customers. Is your online presence relevant? What social media do you need to engage with? Is your website mobile optimised? If you haven't checked how your site actually looks on a phone in the last year, that's worth doing today.
3. Have affinity
Once you know who your customer is today, you'll probably find they have similar interests and hang out in a group or tribe. Find these places - online communities or networks - then join them, be helpful, and build strong, mutually beneficial relationships. A trades business, for instance, might get more genuine traction in a local Facebook community group than in a national ad campaign.
4. Be a dynamo
Your business needs to be energetic and dynamic. To keep customers, you have to prove you have a strong and serious business. Make your business innovative, complete, long-term, and always ready to serve customers. That might be as simple as actually answering enquiries the same day, rather than the same week.
5. Give light
Educate your customers. Share inspiration, stories and information that adds value and teaches them something. Always shed light on problems, and be honest and clear so your business doesn't suffer from misunderstandings. Trust and confidence attract customers - just like a light that attracts people. A short how-to guide, a clear FAQ, or even an honest "here's what went wrong and how we fixed it" post all do this well.
6. Shine
Stand out from the masses. Ensure your customers feel special. Go the extra mile and your customers will follow you anywhere. Small, consistent gestures - remembering a regular's usual order, following up after a big job - do more for this than the odd grand gesture.
7. Serve
Customers choose a business that makes them feel comfortable and secure - not humiliated or talked down to. Be a down-to-earth business owner who exists to serve your customers. That means genuinely listening to a complaint before responding to it, not just responding quickly.
8. Save your customers
A customer has a problem - be the one to fix it. Not just with the exact product or service they need, but with helpful advice and assistance. Pointing a customer toward the right answer, even when it isn't a sale for you, is what earns the next one.
9. Be consistent
Persistence is one of the most important keys to success. Consistent doesn't mean your business has to stay the same - but the value you add to your customer needs to stay consistent, even as the model, method or delivery move with the times. The channel can change; the reason customers trust you shouldn't.
10. Love your own business
You cannot expect your customers to love your business if you don't. That enthusiasm is one of the hardest things for a new owner to fake - and one of the first things a buyer will notice is missing if it isn't genuinely there.
Why This Matters When You're Selling
A business that's stopped adapting doesn't just get harder to run - it gets harder to sell. Buyers aren't just paying for what your business does today; they're paying for their confidence that it will still be relevant in five years' time. A business that's visibly kept pace with its customers, its market and its channels signals a future, not just a history - and that's exactly what a buyer is trying to judge.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does business relevance matter when selling?
Buyers are paying for future earning potential, not just past performance. A business that has visibly kept pace with its customers and market signals a future worth buying into, rather than a business in decline.What's the difference between staying relevant and just staying busy?
Staying busy can mean doing the same things for longer; staying relevant means actively changing what and how you deliver value as customer needs and channels shift.
Learn more about business adaption for survival and why innovation is important for business.
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