Experience Archives - Susan James Coach

“We really don’t sell smoothies. We sell an experience; and we give you a smoothie while you’re there.”

-Keon Davis, Owner, Smooth-N-Groove

Keon Davis is an entrepreneur who has grown his smoothie business from nothing to a million dollar business. His story of building his business is certainly worth reading. Click below to read more about Keon’s rise to success.

http://www.blackenterprise.com/small-business/on-campus-smoothie-truck-business-on-track-for-1-million/

What struck me most about the story of Keon’s philosophy of his entrepreneurial mission is the idea that his company sells an experience not a product.

It is worth considering. Are you focusing on providing your potential clients an experience or a product? Your answer may belie what your next step will be to increase your sales and garner customer loyalty. If you pair your intelligence about your target market with consciously giving those specific people a positive experience of you and your business, you will have leaped forward toward business success.

Many times, business owners are stuck at a certain plateau. They become frustrated and feel hopeless about the future of their business. When we look at what happened in the business to cause this malaise it is usually that the future of the business has expired and the initial customer experience has gone stale. Once a business owner clearly sees what happened then he can build a new fresher experience for his customers. The business begins to flourish again at a new level.

If you are stumbling about not knowing what your customer’s experience is, I suggest you ask them. A high touch way to make the inquiry is to call some of your customers to get their impression of the experience that your business gives them. You will find out more about what your clients want and expect. They will be impressed that you called them and listened to their opinion.

Another way to test your clients experience is to ask them to answer a brief questionnaire about the experience of working with your business. You may want to pair the questionnaire with giving each person a special discount on one of your products or services.

One way is not better than the other. The point is to check in with your loyal clients, they are your target market. Use their responses to further enhance the experience that your clients have in working with you.

If we are to accomplish anything really worthwhile we are going to have to push up against, and to break through, our limits to what’s possible.

That’s not so easy. Oh sure, in that first flush of excitement that comes with a new idea, great things seem possible; in fact we seem to be a new kind of human being, until all too soon we find ourselves out on the firing line. Faced with putting those ideas into action, how quickly we become our same old selves again.

What exactly has happened? How did we forget our new selves so quickly, and so entirely?

To arrive at a useful answer, perhaps we must be willing to consider that reality is not the way we think it is. What is reality anyway? Or more importantly, what gives you and me our realities?

First, we do not experience the world—what you and I experience is our own personal interpretation of the world. If you don’t believe this, ask any senior physicist about that chair you are sitting on. He will tell you it is nothing but empty space, and some unimaginably tiny particles that take up no space at all.

We learn quickly from birth to experience the world in a particular way—the way the people around us experience it. If we don’t, we are not allowed to play in the game of everyday life—(they will put you away). We form a persona—a me—and by the time we begin school that me is almost rock solid. It determines what we think, what we feel, what we do—and more important—it determines what is possible, and what is impossible. How we experience the world is absolutely consistent with that persona. And we will defend it with our lives. Just watch your reaction the next time some idiot cuts in front of you in traffic. What actually happened is a brightly colored steel box on four wheels moved into the path of the brightly colored steel box you were sitting in. But your reaction? You’d think you had been threatened with assassination.

Given that a great many human beings have gone beyond their limits and have accomplished extraordinary things, things that were, until then, considered impossible, the question arises: what allows these people to transcend the limits of the box they live their lives in? (And be it a large box or a small box; it’s still a box.) What allows them to push up against their limits—and their limits are just as real as are yours—and to reach their goals?

Next week we will inquire into this.

Photo courtesy of ”Blank Cardboard Box” by aopsan

Susan James Coach

Tag Archives: Experience

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