Starting A Business Abroad: Listening For Your Clients’ Needs

Posted on 22. Jan, 2010 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Entrepreneurs
1 comment

As we’ve discussed in recent posts, your first duty as a business owner is to listen to your clients.

But what should you listen for when you’re just starting out and don’t know very much about your target market yet?

Listen for what your clients need

Listening for your clients’ needs – it seems obvious, doesn’t it?
Yet you’d be amazed at how many entrepreneurs start businesses based on what they feel is a great service, or a product that they’d buy in heartbeat… only to be met with polite indifference from the buying public.

You absolutely must make sure that there is enough interest out there to make your business viable – and when I say interest, I don’t mean whether people think it’s a good idea. I mean whether they’d be willing to buy or not.

Conversely, you don’t want to miss out on lucrative opportunities just because you’ve overlooked a need that is right there, waiting to be met. There are way too many factors for you to try to predict what your clients really need: cultural differences, needs that are or are not being filled by the government, local trends and fads, etc.

All you can do is listen closely, and take your cues from your clients.

How do you spot a need?

You’re looking for both relevance and urgency.

The problem you’re solving has to be important and personally significant to your clients, otherwise they’ll just carry on without doing anything about it. The problem also needs to be solved ASAP, preferably yesterday – after all, you want your clients to buy now, not in 5 years’ time.

When eavesdropping on your clients’ conversations (either literally or via social media), listen for things like:

- “What we really need is ____. I’d be all over that!”
- “I wish someone would offer ____. I’d pay good money for that.”
- “I’ve tried the solution you suggested, but that didn’t solve my problem with ____.”
- “What I was trying to do with this product I bought was ____, but that didn’t work, so I’m back to square one.”

In other words, you want to hear that people are keenly aware of the problem, that it’s relevant to them on a personal level, and that they are willing to take action in order to solve it.

If any of these criteria is missing, what you have is a “want” disguised as a “need” – and as such, a much lower priority. Sure, it’d be nice if someone offered a solution, but your prospective clients aren’t truly ready to open their wallets or sign on the dotted line.

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Emmanuelle

Images via guitarrocker2712 (top) and [phil h] (bottom), via Flickr Creative Commons