DOWN TO BASICS

GET DOWN TO BASICS

Your task as a Delivery Agent is to identify the various needs of your customers or the households that form part of your Customer Base.

Remember that this business is not restricted to delivery of goods and services within your immediate communities.

We also live and communicate in a virtual world that exists now on social media platforms. We have w******p, f*******:, i********: and Twitter. Most of us have more than three thousand friends and/or followers. I have a friend that has a platform with over one million followers.

We are also into various groups that sometimes have membership running into tens and hundreds of thousands.

These are all opportunities if one is lucky enough to pitch a good product or service.

If you can turn 500 of your friends, followers or group members into your Customer Base for a certain product or service, out of which you make one hundred naira only from each delivery of that product or service, and you deliver it weekly, then you are on your way to financial independence.

So, understand that money can be made from both the real and virtual worlds.

Take a look around the community within which you live. What do you see? People moving about their daily routine and businesses.

What you are looking at is haphazard data that needs to be collated in order to make some sense.

The easiest way to collect this information is to go door-to-door getting details of each and every customer, household or group.

Information such as house number, name of head of household, population, phone number etc are very vital to your data collection.

I want us to understand how to get the much needed customer base. As I stated earlier, no business will survive without the patronage of customers. The customer is the soul of any business.

As an individual or a business enterprise, you have to understand that getting your customers and keeping them is the most important and difficult part of your project.

Here are some questions to reflect on:

1) How many households do you have in your immediate community? What's the population?

2) How many contacts do you have on your phone and your w******p?

3) How many friends or followers do you have on your f*******: page?

4) How many do you have on i********: and Twitter?

The next part of the questions are: -

5) What percentage of these contacts combined do you have some form of influence over?

6) How many can you reach out to, one-on-one?

In the virtual world, take your time to market your products or services personally and privately to your potential customers online. A potential customer needs to feel your personal touch.

Assuming you have a total of five thousand contacts all together, would you say your percentage influence on them is between 5-10%?

Well, here is the good news. 10% of 5,000 are 500 customers. This is a fantastic start.

Remember that MTN that has over a hundred million customers started with a single customer.

Think big… Start small.