I have always believed that businesses – no matter which industry they operate in, what stage they are in, or how profitable they are – cannot be complacent about one question: “is there a demand for what is being sold?” It may seem like a distracting question to ask, especially when the business is doing well, but, the moment businesses stop asking themselves this question, businesses lose touch with what the market wants – perhaps not immediately, but gradually. Not understanding customers well enough is a chief reason of failure for most new businesses.

For daily deal businesses, it is easy to slide into the assumption that, because some consumers have signed up for the newsletter, they are very likely to be interested in whatever is on offer. But vendors are blinded by their own offering – the florist would always praise his own flowers. Entrepreneurs new to the industry would think it is a simple task to get people to hand over their hard-earned money. Groupon is making a lot of dough, so it could not be that hard, could it? Just slap on a deal on the home page, shoot off a bunch of emails, and they will all buy in droves, right?

Not really. Business is hard, and one of the best ways to make it easier is to communicate often with the people from whom you want money. Very few businesses are willing to get close and personal with their customers, and, while not all customers appreciate businesses being proactive (think pesky-sales assistant proactive), those who do present an opportunity to businesses to study and analyze their customers’ wants and needs. Talking to customers may be largely futile – at worst – but think of the possible market insights that can be obtained from even a few obliging customers. It is the cheapest, most instant, and most reliable way to find out if customers even want what is being sold, along with the “why” or “why not.”

It surprises me that some businesses can go through one working day (let alone several working days) without any of its employees speaking or interacting with a customer. We ourselves do not claim to understand our customers very well, but we are trying our best not to forgo any opportunity to learn from our customers. For us, at Zuupy, we try to make it a lifestyle, a habit, and a culture to grab hold of every possible opportunity to get close with our customers. Customer support email? Great, a good opportunity to interact with customers and hear their grievances. Numbers going down? Shoot them emails and ask them what went wrong. Holiday season coming soon? Send them greeting cards, wish them well, and take the chance to remind them of our progress and maybe give away some freebies.

The moral of the story is, simply, you cannot understand your customers enough. Keep learning. We are trying to. You should too.

Someone once said to me, “There are only three value propositions that you can offer when selling to a business: [help it to] make money, save money, or save time.” It made some sense, because businesses are artificial constructs that, as diverse as they are in terms of industry, size, and culture, ultimately aim to generate profits. That is the raison d’etre of a business underneath their self-proclaimed lofty-high visions and missions. Businesses are as economically rational as real-life entities can be.

Just as we can tell what businesses want by examining their underlying purpose and goal, we can tell what consumers want by examining their underlying purpose and goal. The only problem is that consumers (and indeed people) vary widely in their objectives in life, so any attempt at distilling trends is probably useful only as interesting reading material at best, not a strategic guide. The right question to ask when faced with such information is not “Is this information useful?” but “Is this information applicable to my specific industry and set of customers?”

There is no short cut when it comes to knowing what consumers want – what they want varies so widely and changes so frequently that finding out what consumers want will necessarily be a laborious, continuous, non-scalable process. Fortunately, there exists a universal (and arguably indispensable) method to unfailingly find out that information: cultivating relationships. Consumers are people after all. The more time and effort we spend with them, the more we learn about their wants and needs, even (and some say especially) if we do not ask them directly. No one likes to be dissected with blunt little tools, such as interrogative questions.

Some may say that cultivating relationships with customers goes without saying and that they have been doing it more than enough. Others may say that it works only for B2C businesses or small businesses or specific industries or geographical markets. I say, no. All of business requires trust, and trust can only come from effective relationships. Even large, multi-national businesses are made up of people.

In fact, we have been selling to small businesses for some time now, and the important thing that we have learnt after interacting with literally hundreds of customers is that there is no room for complacency when it comes to understanding the customer. You cannot understand your customers enough; there is always more to learn, and every ounce of knowledge makes a measurable difference to your business, as if there is no saturation point.

Understanding the customer is something even highly-profitable companies should never overlook or belittle. For the rest of us, perhaps it is wise to double or triple our investment into understanding our customers (if our existing methods are working) or change our existing methods if they are not.