Angela Kamanzi My Journey in Entrepreneurship
A few weeks ago I got a call from Rose (not real name). She had retired from employment and used her retirement package to set up a small manufacturing plant for a product she was convinced would be useful for a particular section of the market.
She had done research and found out that her potential clients needed such a product to save money on energy consumption. Her problem was that, once her product was ready, none of her prospective clients was willing to abandon what they were used to and embrace her new item.
Rose’s is a case of the typical entrepreneur who assumes that their fantastic product will be automatically and enthusiastically embraced by their potential customer. This rarely happens no matter how innovative your product is. Should Rose have approached some of those potential clients and talked to them, she would have realised that maybe the problem she had identified wasn’t a major concern to them, or that they weren’t ready to effect major changes in their systems to accommodate a new and untested product.
Your first step in building your business should be to fall in love with your prospective client. Get inside their head and heart; understand their problems an fears; feel their desires and hopes. Learn how to express this love through your sales and marketing communications with them. Turn such exchanges into opportunities to interact with the client heart to heart.
Then and only then, your prospective client will believe and trust that you have their best interest at heart. That’s when they will literally beat a path to your incredible product.
Angela Kamanzi
Your Friend in Biashara
