What do your customers not want to do that you could help them with?

(Time to read this blog article about  45 seconds)

Many of your customers don’t have the time, the skill or the inclination to install, maintain, keep track of, prepare or otherwise ‘deal with’ what they buy from you.  There’s a huge value-add and revenue-add opportunity here, if you get it right.

‘That’s nice, but isn’t it supposed to be a grill?’

Lowes, Home Depot and many other sharp building materials retailers have partnered with ‘trusted contractors’ to create install programs for customers who don’t want to, or don’t know how to do ‘fix-it’ or renovation projects themselves.  IKEA has crews that will assemble and install for you. .

Grocery stores’ sales of ‘prepared foods’ continue to climb as consumers don’t have time to cook. There are over 600 million cooked rotisery chickens sold in America annually.

Many manufacturers and importers contract out the warehousing and shipping of their products to outside logisitcs companies who do it better.

So, the question here is how could you add value and increase revenue by doing for your customers what they don’t have the time, skill or desire to do for themselves?  How could you help them to choose, process, control, service, store, resell or recycle what you sell?  Here are a few more examples to get your creative juices flowing.

1. A large distributor of industrial safety supplies puts one of their own staff into their largest customers’ facilities to issue safety products, do safety coaching and control  inventory.
2. Our tire ‘hero’ stores our off-season tires for us…and charges a fee for doing so.  A ‘win-win’.
3. Businesses that sell seed and fertilizer to farmers have agronomists on staff to do soil testing for their customers to determine which seed and which fertilizer will work best for them.
4. Smart financial advisors help clients partner with top lawyers and accountants to keep their estate planning tidy and tax-efficient…and top travel agents to help them plan extraordinary adventures.
5. Mattress retailer, Sleep Country Canada, takes away your old mattress when they deliver your new one.  They donate the good ones to homeless shelters and recycle the rest.  They realize that folks have no easy way of disposing of an old mattress, and they deal with that in a way that makes us feel good.  

So, what do your customers not have the skill, time, facilities or desire to do to be successful with what you sell?  How can you help them with that?  And how can you do that in a way that adds value, strengthens the relationship and grows your bottom line?