Linda Ireland’s book Domino: How Customer Experience Can Tip Everything in Your Business toward Better Financial Performance dives into the step-by-step mechanics of how you can improve your customer experience and subsequently your bottom line.
Domino isn’t the typical business book with lots of stories and a few bullet points of distilled concepts. This book can be used as a manual as you dissect your customer’s path from pre-sale to post-sale and seek to improve your conversion rates.
Each chapter offers thought-provoking questions and exercises that will help you tailor your customer experience and strategy for dealing with customers.
Linda Ireland offers up a very insightful mental mode of how a customer progresses over time as they interact with you:
Triggering Need > Learn > Try > Buy > Solve > Evolve
Trigger
Every customer has some trigger that prompts them to need your product or service. Your company would do well to be there when your customer has this “ah-ha” moment.
Learn
Customers must learn who can meet their needs. Your company needs to earn a place on the customer’s short list. If you aren’t in their consideration set, you’ll never get the sale.
Try
Before customers buy, they want to try your product. Will it meet their needs? Will their boss approve the purchase? You need to demonstrate that your product so effectively that the customer can envision herself a month down the road with the problem solved. What will life be like for them with their problem solved by your product?
Buy
Once a customer commits to buy, you must protect the sale. Reassure customers and match their buying process to ensure you get the sale.
Solve
With your product in hand, the customer now must solve the problem for which it was purchased. You need to prove that yes, your product will work and that it will solve the problem.
Evolve
After time, your customers will evolve to another need. This cycle then starts anew. You need to anticipate the customer’s needs and be ready for the next triggering event.
Recommendation: Read and Use this Book
Domino: How Customer Experience Can Tip Everything in Your Business toward Better Financial Performance will make you think and compel you to action with mind-opening questions and exercises that will help you break free of your current status-quo and more accurately see what your customers are doing and how you can guide them along in the process.
You can buy Domino on Amazon.com.