Doorstep Diaries - On the Doorstep

I believe passionately that success in business will only come from knowing your customers intimately. From really understanding what it is about your business that connects with them, that really inspires them to buy from you. And so, it was a really amazing opportunity with the 900 orders that we delivered across London, to research and understand people's hopes, desires, thoughts, and dreams about plants.

I quickly gained a reputation within the team of drivers, of being the slowest. And that was because everyone that I delivered to on the doorstep, I was fascinated to understand why they bought from us, a company with at that point, no reputation, no background.

And I started to understand that most people, most homeowners who are not gardeners particularly, are completely overwhelmed by plants and renovating and transforming their gardens.

The service that we were offering was starting to tackle that. But the other thing I noticed was that, people are reticent to jump in and make a decision to spend a lot of money on plants. So, I can remember one customer who had ordered a Shade collection, and I turned up at her house and she really needed 10 of these collections.

But the thought of the risk of making the wrong decision or of looking after all of those plants, it stopped her from doing it. And I saw that again, and again, and again. So, I guess that started to germinate an idea of how could you offer the advice and guidance or set up a framework for that would build confidence for someone to make a decision about how they could transform that garden. And that now has developed into our pivot.

The key point is from a sales perspective, having done sales before in many jobs, I cannot sell something to someone if they don't really, really want it. And so the fact that we were delivering these plants and people were so happy, it was just natural for me to build closer relationships.

So many of our top customers, I would pop in and visit post the original restrictions of COVID. We had a barbecue with another of our other customers. She wrote much of the copy that's on our website. Her background was in Communications and she'd really nailed what we're all about.

So it was wonderful to build such close relationships with customers and take that forward to where we're at now. Each of our customers that we work with, it's really from our perspective, a collaborative relationship where I want to offer as much value as I can to them. But really, they're offering a tremendous amount of value to the future of our business.

I guess if there's a lesson in this article, it is, take the opportunity to build close, trusted relationships with your customers. Because they're your biggest drivers for future success.