Age doesn’t have a lot to do with how much customers love you

I was speaking the other day with a young guy who left school and would love to start his own business, but he said that clients wouldn’t give him a go because of his age. It made me think about the reasons people use our services — and it’s got nothing to do with my age!

Customers want to know that the business they hire will do a good job, in a timely fashion, and for the best price.

Age doesn’t really have a lot to do with it, though it can go against you if it appears you’re inexperienced. (Conversely, long established businesses also risk being considered stale and irrelevant compared to new, innovative startups — businesses often run by younger people.)

Knowledge is power

Since age ain’t nothing but a number, the first step in winning customers based on merit is to understand your industry. You do this by researching the market, which helps you determine whether there’s a need for your products or services, what the market is willing to pay for those products or services, and what problems aren’t currently being addressed by other businesses.

Researching the market will also help you to create products and services that are actually needed. As an example, after running physical training centres for many years and some thorough research, we realised that students preferred to learn online at their own pace.

So we put our training courses online, making sure to provide our workbooks and learning guides in formats that students could access from any computer at any time, which was something other online training providers weren’t doing at that time. (They still posted out workbooks and learning guides.)

Ask lots of questions

There’s an expression: there are no dumb questions. And that’s true (to an extent anyway!). When you meet with a prospect, make sure you ask them lots of questions about the products or services they’re looking for. This will ensure you come up with something that suits their needs.

If you’re selling to another business, you should prepare beforehand by researching their business as well. This will help to know which questions to ask them and to make better recommendations for suitable products and services.

Researching prospects is a key part of the sales process and it’s something all successful sales people and business owners do — in addition to asking lots of questions!