In New York City in the first half of the 1900s, many an enterprising businessperson had an ice truck and went around selling ice to people.
And then one fine day when the refrigerator became much more common, people
knew this was a great convenient time saver–and started buying them.
From one day to the next, no fault of the quality of his service or his product, Mr. Ice-seller suddenly is out of business. This was a major disruption in his business model.
Now, I don’t know for a fact what these ice sellers did next in that situation, but just for example, here are some ideas of what they could have done:
1) Start selling refrigerators.
They already knew all the people that they
had serviced, and therefore, they knew who needed a refrigerator because the
people that were buying ice until yesterday, obviously, do not have a
refrigerator yet.
2) Sold their customer list or partnered with a guy selling refrigerators. This way, they would get a commission on each refrigerator that’s sold. Or they could have sold the names to two or three different refrigerator sellers and therefore get more money for each lead.
The point is that when you have a list of your customers’ contact information, you can use it. It’s an asset ready and available for your use, even if the business changes. Or maybe you end up doing something different than you originally thought which happens in many businesses after the business initial start.
For a much more recent example, when PayPal started, their business was not going to be as a safe and secure connection, a company that transferred money from one person to another.
Initially, they had a little bit of a different business, and after some time, PayPal’s eventual current model developed or evolved.
I can’t stress this enough: It is essential that you capture your customer’s information because:
1) Anyone that you’ve done business with in the past
2) Or anyone you’ve considered doing business with in the past,
3) Anyone that wasn’t interested in the past
All these people are valuable contacts that you can use in order to make your business grow.
Rabbi Issamar,
Thank you.
Also, you never know when that connection will be useful to connect with a third person.
Hillel
Fantastic article!
Keep it up!
BS”D Enjoying your blog; good to see more frum business professionals. I really got a lot out of this post and the one about not having enough info not being a reason not to start.
Hatzlocho, Yitzchok