Aveline Clarke: Hi. So in this lesson, I'm going to give you a small exercise, a very easy one, where you can identify your gaps. To start this, I want you to get a piece of paper or a whiteboard and some space, no distractions. I'd also like you to do it with all the people in your team or your business who deal with your customers, leads, and prospects, especially that front end of the journey where before they have actually become a customer. So what I want you to do is ask yourself the question, how many times does someone come to us and ask for something as they are looking for answers to their problem? So often they're reaching to you asking for something, whether that's they're reaching to you by asking for your e-book free report, maybe a video. How many times are they doing that, and also, are you delivering on that?

Ask yourself, are you effectively following up with them to ensure that they got what you gave them and that it helped them? Are you asking them or finding out if it's solved their problem? So your goal is not to actually count the numbers of people that come to you and download something and the number of books you deliver. That's a metric, yes, but that's not really the end goal. The end goal here is ensuring that you have answered their problem and their question, and that's a gap if you have not done that. So as best you can, you need to be asking yourself how you can ensure that you're solving that initial question for them.

Okay, next, you want to look at what the followup process is after that initial contact. Are you following up in a consistent, appropriate, and engaging way? Have you given your prospect enough time to absorb the information you've given them? Have you educated them? Are you building a relationship? Yes or no. And just by asking these questions at each stage, and then certainly at the point of sale, like the customer conversion sale stage, you're asking yourself these questions. You'll be able to say, "Well, actually, no, we're not doing that." So at the point of sale, are you giving the customer a sense that everything they need is going to be provided to them when they buy? When you have a service based business, this becomes even more important because people are not just buying a thing or an outcome, they're buying you.

So have you conveyed enough of you, who you are, and your business and the brand and the personality of you to ensure that your customer feels understood and aligned with you? After they become a customer, you want to ask yourself, how are we delivering on that? So many people focus on just getting a sale and then the customer service drops off dramatically. Once you get the sale, your job is to keep building that relationship. Ask yourself, how are we doing this? How do we build a relationship with this customer? And are we doing it effectively? If you ask that conversation of your team as a group, and then write down, how could we build this relationship more effectively? List all the ways. And over what period of time? Ask, what else do we need to deliver and what can be delivered in a more efficient way?

There's always a trade off of using technology versus a human. However, you've got to find the way to ensure that the technology supports you to make it more efficient whilst not taking away from building the relationship with them. Look at your average customer life cycle. So if the customer stays with you for, say, one year or two years, how do you ensure that they stay for that period of time, and how could you potentially extend that beyond there? Is that possible? Can we go beyond two years? Can we go to three years? And if so, what do we need to do to fix that? So hopefully those questions and that exercise will gain you a lot of clarity and some answers around what you need to do to map your gaps. Have fun with this one. Like I said, have the team play a part, do this together, and see what comes out. It will be very enlightening. Enjoy.