Is It Time To Start Buying From Your Customers?

Those of us who run businesses exactly know how difficult selling can be. At the same time, making that decision to buy and finding the money to complete the transaction may be even more difficult for buyers.

With that backdrop, businesses are so busy trying to sell products and services, produce revenue, cut down costs, and make profit for the shareholders. Some people even go to school to learn to do those things fast and effectively (no knock on business management education, particularly). This is all fine and dandy, but, at the end of the day, every business has been made to believe to just do that, for decades, if not for centuries.

As an analytical thinker turned serial entrepreneur, I always want to try something different and I believe 'buying from our customers' does work well for us. In other words, instead of trying to sell to our customers, we want to buy from them. How does that work, you may ask?

Well, we buy from our customers their genuine stories about their issues, problems, how their current solutions fail them, etc., etc. Only after learning about their problems and buying their stories, will we come up with suitable solutions to their problems. For this approach to work successfully, it is imperative that you truly understand your customers' problems and can put together responsive solutions. For example, I can't say if many weather data providers understand their customers' problems completely today. This topic deserves a post or two of its own, which I hope to write in the future.

In my business endeavors (e.g., weather), we would have nothing to sell until we completely understand our customers' problems. This represents quite a different business development approach than others that have defined and built what they want to sell to their customers first. Some businesses are really successful in doing this sort of thing but, I believe, it is going to be a thing of the past in the near future.

In case you are wondering, we buy from our customers with our time. You ought to try it. It may just work for you, too!

I know it will work for your customers.