Why do you need to know your end customer to develop a revenue-generating activity according to the funnel concept?
Return of experience with homestays in Cambodia.
If a company is looking for financing and wishes to develop a new activity, it must draw up a business plan including a business plan and a market study.
The central question is to know if the activity meets a need, if it has a market and if it will be economically profitable. Moreover, it will include its social and environmental impacts if it plans to be green.
One of the fundamental questions of these documents is who is the final customer?
After five years in Cambodia, where I worked for local travel agencies receiving mainly western tourists, I had the opportunity to visit many "homestays." These are often in villages or remote places.
Regularly, after a visit, or a stay, I left touched by the situation. Many NGOs or public organizations have developed homestays in villages to fight against deforestation and poaching by providing revenue-generating activity. The cause of setting up the action was more than legitimate, but they often forgot an important part, the commercial development. From my professional point of view, I was thinking, poor accessibility and very few activities to do around, my tourists will not want to move without reason. Some homestays in Cambodia with a strategic location but more importantly with experiences to live during the day were more attractive.
A business plan is essential to developing an IGA before launching the project. The idea is to create revenues for the communities, and it is necessary to bring a business vision for the project to be successful.
Indeed, a company would not start without an identified final client, so why should NGOs skip this crucial step.
These homestay projects in Cambodia could have worked with a different approach. Considering the issue of accessibility, this is necessary to make the site attractive by proposing a unique experience that does not stop at the homestay. While thinking about who your tourist will be, we can offer tailored experiences based on local life that will trigger the trip, such as a fishing class, a cooking class, or a day of immersion with an artisan... The ideas can be numerous.
The goal is to identify the elements that will trigger the purchase from our final customer.
However, this is only possible if you know your customer and market.
That doesn't only mean a simple segmentation. Still, you must consider your customer as a whole by including his emotions, passions, and convictions by going beyond the basic framework of age, sex, and geography.
A specific persona will save you a lot of time in terms of adapting your product to meet a need and communication. Applying the funnel concept will make it easier for you to sell and communicate directly with the right customer.
I used this metaphor to my sales team to explain the purpose of knowing your customer: At night, in a house, you don't know, it's complicated to move around to find water, for example. You're going to bump into the wrong door and take a long time to get water. But if we know the house well, our way will be simple and direct.
Eventually, his homestay projects attracted some clients, but they have not directly diverted communities from forest clearing and poaching.
According to Sangai, customer experience is the key to successful business development. If you plan to learn more, we can help!
Emeline Beneult, 21/07/2022