One of the things that I often see business owners fail at, is gaining a good understanding of their customers. Many times, that lack of understanding comes from the lack of conducting a true customer discovery process. This process is especially important in the security guard business. Let’s talk about what it is and why it is so important.
Understanding Your Customer
Having a true understanding of your customers and your potential customers is essential in determining the what and the why in your customers’ decisions to buy your security guard services. I often talk to new company owners who are starting security guard companies because they don’t like what is happening in the security industry as it pertains to wages, quality of service, and morale. Many of them believe that because they’ve worked in the security guard industry for “X” number of years they know exactly what they need to do to be successful as a security guard company owner. So they decide that by making decisions, based on their particular experiences, they will be wildly successful and the contract dollars will rain from the sky.
That’s rarely how it happens because although they may understand the operational aspect of security, they lack a true understanding of their potential customers. So to prevent you from making that same mistake, let’s talk about the process of Customer Discovery.
Process Of Customer Discovery
One of the fatal flaws of any company is basing your decisions on unvetted assumptions. Customer Discovery is a process that allows you to challenge all of the assumptions that you’ve made about your security guard business. For example, someone may think “If I train my security officers in “X” way my company will be successful.” Again relying on unvetted assumptions is and will always be the downfall of many companies.
The first step in the Customer Discovery process is to clearly define the hypothesis behind your assumptions. An example of this would be: “If I have my officers wear white uniforms customers will trust our officers more.” In this hypothesis, the problem that you think you’ve identified is customer trust and your solution is white uniforms.
The second step in the customer discovery process is to clearly outline your assumptions. The assumptions in our example are:
- There is a problem with customer trust.
- That white uniforms will solve that problem.
- Customers will be willing to allow officers to wear white uniforms, and so on.
Step three in the process is getting out of the building and going to talk to your prospective customers. Again, you should be talking to people that would be potential buyers of your service not friends and family. In terms of the number of people that you should talk to, I would recommend that you identify at least 10 – 15 prospective customers. Remember that you are not talking with them to try to sell them anything, or to get them to agree with you. What you are doing is asking a lot of open-ended questions to get their perspectives on business. You should be asking questions like:
Tell me how you go about selecting a security guard company?
Why do you use a security guard company?
Why is security something that you are concerned with?
Why do you or don’t you trust your security guard vendor?
What does your vendor do correctly?
The idea is to get the customer to tell you their exact opinions about security guard services so you aren’t depending on unvetted assumptions. By asking good questions, the prospective customers will be telling you EXACTLY how and what you should be selling to them.
The fourth step in this process is to take all of the information that you’ve received and reevaluate your theories to make sure that what you are offering is what your customers will buy. This simple process will put you 3 steps ahead of many of the security guard companies that are already in the market and struggling. To recap:
Do you regularly engage in customer discovery? If not why not? Or If you have questions, about the customer discovery process, please feel free to leave your questions below and I’ll try my best to answer them.
By Courtney Sparkman
OfficerReports.com is a software company that provides security guard companies with an easy way to monitor their officers, better manage their operations, and win new business. Take a tour of our software to see how we combine Electronic Reporting, Real-Time GPS based Tour Tracking, and GPS based Clock In and Out into one easy-to-use platform.
