Nothing destroys a business faster than resistance to change. Your business mindset and perspective play a crucial role in business growth and sustainability. If you want to become a successful entrepreneur, you must be open to change and ready to embrace business mindset shifts.

In this post, you will learn 3 key business mindset shifts that will help you lay a strong foundation for long term business success.

1. Sell Results, Not Services

Many businesses focus chiefly on the specific services or products they offer while neglecting or paying any attention to the “why” people would go looking for what they are offering in the first place. Maybe that approach worked a decade ago, it’s certainly not working today. As an entrepreneur who’s determined to achieve sustainable business success, you must understand that people are not looking for your product or service; they are looking for specific results.

Your prospects and customers have doubts, worries, goals and desires, and all looking for solutions that help them solve their problems. But how do you make them see you as the solution they’re seeking? One of the ways to achieve this is by building a business model that is focused on results!

Rather than headlining your product or service, you should instead think of the results or value it delivers to your customers. Does your service help business leaders feel confident about the key business decisions they make? Or maybe your program is focused on creating a smooth ecosystem that encourages business growth? Whatever it is, ensure that your message accurately highlights the results you help your customers achieve.

Some of the ways you can reposition your offering to highlight results, include:

Make use of “before” and “afters”: You don’t have to be a makeover artist before you can adopt this idea. While your service is important to you, your customers only care about end-results. To use this approach, you can list some situations that imply the “before” and another list of results that highlight the “after” of a former happy client.  Look at this as sort of a mini-case study, which paints a clear picture of what you did for a client, and the results you helped them achieve.

Use customer testimonials: Recent studies show that 92{3bb3efdcb65cc203b4a9ed6114715ca7beaa93644e272fe2e7930ae7f51d0390} of customers read online reviews before buying, while 72{3bb3efdcb65cc203b4a9ed6114715ca7beaa93644e272fe2e7930ae7f51d0390} say positive testimonials and reviews increase their trust in a business. Customer testimonials, especially those in video format reinforce people’s trust as they clearly show your prospective clients the kind of results to expect.

Use visuals to demonstrate results: A simple explainer video or animation that allows customers to see themselves getting the results they want can distinguish your product or services from competitors’. These projected results can help you prepare the mind of your customers and hasten their decision-making process.

2. Focus on Leads, Not Sales

Every business, small or large, needs sales to continue to operate profitably. However, you may miss out on a more vital business development process if your attention is entirely focused on sales. Before sales, you should focus on driving leads and prospects into the sales funnel.  Without leads, there will be no sales.

A lead is someone who has shown interest in a product or service that you provide. Lead generation is crucial to achieving sustainable business growth. It marks the first step in the sales process. Therefore, you should concentrate on strategic marketing campaigns that enable you to attract leads and convert them into prospects.

Lead generation provides you with deep insights and the opportunity to collect specific data to improve on future marketing campaigns or communication. Thus, much time should be dedicated to not only attracting, but nurturing your leads. While many businesses don’t have challenges with recognizing lead opportunities, they struggle with nurturing the leads they capture into actual customers.

How do you nurture your leads?

Online content: Once someone has shown interest in your product or service, you want to ensure that you sustain their interest in your business. Online content such as blog articles, educational or how-to videos, and even social content,which relates to your unique selling propositions (USPs), are great resources to keep them informed about your products or services.

Email marketing: You can build a series of emails with specific messages designed to address specific needs of your leads at the initial stages in the buyer’s journey.  Also consider, drip email campaigns to automate this workflow.

White papers: You can share success stories of former customers or provide details about how different you’re from other related products or services.

3. Don’t Sell Products, Provide Solutions

It’s important to have great products with amazing features. But it’s more important to know how to transform these features into solutions that help your target audience solve their problems. When providing solutions, verses selling products, you’re creating a deeper connection with customers, which helps in building long-term relationships.

In your sales efforts, you should understand that each customer’s needs are different and that your product may not be able to provide a one-size-fits-all solution. Product solutions involve a combination of products and services that are specifically targeted at helping each customer solve a particular problem.

In addition to selling a product, customers want to experience excellent customer service. Some of them are unsure of what they need, they need you to guide them to make sound decisions. Clients are more likely going to stick around and remain loyal to you when they see that you’re genuinely interested in helping them to overcome the challenges they’re facing, by offering increased value or a fresh perspective.

Do you have a client who’s stuck in the old ways of doing things? You can assume a “teaching role” by enlightening them about the imminent death of papers and how leveraging digital technology can help them transform their business and streamline operations.

At every stage of your customer’s buyer journey, ensure that you provide a solution that makes a significant difference in your customer’s lives, careers or businesses. That way, you will be viewed as being valuable, helpful and thoughtful, rather than just a company who they purchase products from.

Ready To Take Your Business To The Next Level?

Every change, small or big starts from within, before manifesting on the outside. Business success is anchored on your ability to reposition your business by changing your mindset and perspective. Sticking to the status quo, when there are obvious needs for change, is a recipe for disaster and perhaps failure. You can start laying the foundation for long term business success by adapting these three business mindset shifts.