Evan Carmichael explains why selling more to existing customers beats chasing new ones. Ask them directly what they need, understand their pain points, and offer solutions. He built a software feature nobody wanted until he learned to base everything on customer feedback instead.
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One of the fastest ways to grow your business is to sell more to current customers. It's way easier to get customers who you're already working with to buy more from you than to go out and try to find new customers. And if you're trying to figure out what new things you can sell to your current customers, talk to them. Ask them. Let them know, "What else can I do to help you?" Understand their problems, their pains, and offer solutions for them. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. I believe that hungry entrepreneurs deserve help, and today I'm answering a question from one of my readers, Michael, who wrote in saying, "I offer door-to-door delivery services to people from groceries, to dry cleaning, office lunch, pizza, many other things. I would like to know what I can improve on, other things I can have, like selling water to my lunch delivery customers, or any other ideas that you have in mind." In this kind of service business, you're selling to people who value their time more than they value their money. They're hiring you because you're gonna save them time. I like that you're thinking bigger. I like that you're thinking that pizza and lunch and dry cleaning is not enough. You want to grow this bigger. The best way to do it is go talk to your customers. Every time you go and you deliver them something, you want to ask them what else you could do for them. Thank you so much for this order. If there's anything else that I can do to deliver for you, please let me know. Some of my other customers are hiring me for X, for Y, and for Z. I'd be happy to do that for you, or if there's anything else that you have in mind, I'd love to try to take it on. Just let me know. And that way you're building around customers who are paying you money. It's the best way to do it. I made a mistake early on in my career, a pretty big mistake that almost sunk my company. We were in software and we built this feature that took us months to develop that we thought was really helpful And when we finally launched it, it turns out our customers didn't care about it almost at all. And we were heartbroken that we spent so much time and dollars and effort on this feature that if we had invested that time doing something else, the software could be much better. And luckily we still had enough, enough great features in it that we were able to get customers and sell the software. But from then on, all of our new features, everything new we added to the business, came directly from our customers. It came from them telling us what they wanted and also us understanding their pain and their problems. Customers may not always tell you exactly what you need to do because maybe they don't know, but they will tell you their problems. They'll tell you what's causing a frustration for them, and maybe you could think of a way to help solve it for them. So if you want to grow your business, start talking to your customers more. Understand what their pains are and think of solutions that you can offer to help them grow, to help them save more time. That's what you're there for. That's why they're hiring you. And if they like you for your delivery service that you offer now, chances are they give you a good shot at doing other services as well because they know you, like you, trust you, and it's easy to say yes to you. Good luck. I'm excited. Let me know how it goes. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It always makes me want to do more videos for you. And I'd love to hear what you have to think about this video, or if you have a question for your own business, please leave it in the comments below. I always read those. I love seeing them and reading them. They always make my day. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
