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Ten Greatest Ideas for Planning Your Business • 19

doing it perfunctorily. Things change and you should be aware of the main direction
in which you want changes to occur. You are going to do the figures on the first year
of trading, but it is not a bad idea to think two or even three years ahead in terms of
the markets that you may have a go at.

Idea 9 - Usethe 'ideal' technique to understand
your customers

Customers have always traded product or service features against the price they are
prepared to pay. They also look for how well your business processes provide cus-
tomer satisfaction and the relationships they build with the people that they meet
from your organisation. To build long-term customer loyalty you need to under-
stand their buying criteria - what questions will they use to compare you with your
competitors? To understand this thoroughly you have to talk to as many customers
or potential customers as you can. What are they looking for? How do they make
their decisions to buy?

Now you need to assess what your customers would say was their view of the
ideal offering in each of the following four areas - product, process, people and
price. Again you can ask them for their opinion of what would be best for them,
either in a meeting or a telephone call, or by inviting them to join part of a planning
session. The points they make are their buying criteria and will fit into one of the
four factors mentioned above. Customers will tell you what ideally they want from
you if you ask the right questions. You may not be able to achieve the ideal the
customer is searching for, but if you know what it is you should come close.

Not all the criteria will have the same importance to a customer, so the final
step in this technique is to put a priority against each criterion. When you have
finished defining the buying criteria and the customer's ideal, think about their rela-
tive importance on a scale of 1-10. You do not want, when it comes to making
decisions about what your offering is going to be, to work hard on issues which the