Which Business Style Are You?

Everyone of us wants our business to succeed and everyone of our businesses are multi faceted so giving it its own character, for us to achieve our goals we could really do with defining our character.

The key facet we discuss in this blog is “How do we encourage our customers to buy from us?“ , for me, breaks down into 3 main styles and I will use the “Hunter, Gatherer and Farmer” analogy to explain.

Hunter Style

Are very proactive, always looks for leads and opportunities, very active networking, able to cold call, instigate telephone calls, looks at advertising and social media posts to help uncover opportunities, very good at qualifying if an opportunity is really there and once the client has been gained moves easily on to “Hunt” for the next opportunity, almost forgetting the client just gained. Much of the interaction is face to face or voice to ear.

Gatherer Style

A proactive approach but in a much more indirect way, with this style the business uses advertising a lot, a lot of social media, news papers, e/mail shot and magazines, probably much of the interaction is electronic and encourages the customer to initiate contact, most interactions are initially visual or word of mouth.

Farmer Style

A much more nurturing, retaining approach where the main aim is keep the customer returning to you, this is where they find it easy to buy from you and feel valued by you so “Why would they go anywhere else?”

It is important to understand your business from these 3 simple facets. Workout which is style is natural for your business, understand why that is, there will be reasons behind it and generally it comes down to the owners of the business and their approach, the need from your particular market and the people they need to interact with.

For sure all businesses will be a mix of these 3 as a “farmer” business cannot operate without first being a “Hunter” or “Gatherer” as how else will you have customers to “Farm”?

There are warning signs for each style and we need to be aware of each, for example Hunter style businesses can be too aggressive so switch people off, get a lot of buyers remorse and make it difficult to “Farm” these clients.

Gatherers need to be aware of their message getting in front of the right people, you will never know when the right time is so when you start “Gathering” you need to keep “Gathering” as you will stop being seen, so forgotten about.

And Farmers need to be mindful of the principles of farming which is all about tending to the needs of customers. An aggressive approach can switch people off and stop them coming to you, worse you may not even know you have offended that customer, but I can assure you that customer will not have forgotten.

So no matter what style you are you have to consider what it is you want, what reputation you want and how you are going to manage your style, the important thing is customers like to be treated with respect and in a consistent way, if you have people working for you then you need this to be expressed and felt through out the business and more importantly needs your time and consideration to maintain to satisfy your customers, as it is these customers that make your business.