No matter what you call them—customers, clients, guests, patrons, or members—the people who choose your business are at its core. Truly understanding who they are, what they need, and how they interact with your offering is essential to long-term success.
We met David Wemyss-Smith of Manyung Gallery Group, a man of many talents. His long and varied career has always had a customer-centric approach. He is passionate about people and knows that, regardless of your business type, you cannot deliver quality customer service or exceed customer expectations if you don’t know your customers. Without happy customers, there is no business.
We asked him to reveal his top insights on how to really get to know your customer. David shared with us:
Some businesses operate without accumulating knowledge of their customers….are you one? Just taking an order, wrapping a purchase and receiving an EFT is never enough. Every sales occasion is another opportunity to build, even the simplest, ‘database’ on a customer. Their name, email address, postcode and hopefully mobile number is the start of a basic customer record.
Building a profile on what each customer likes/buys, spends, provides essential data for your future dealings with them.
There is great benefit in identifying different customer types……time to start segmenting. This simply means breaking customers into defined groupings. Whether it be a list of higher spending VIP’s, those who tend to regularly buy a certain style of product or service, or those that refer others to your business. Without intruding on their privacy, consider starting to record basic information on your customers and determine which market segment/profile they belong in. Adding in sales data means you can start to build a picture of who they are and what they like.
Use the segments to progressively tune your service or product to each segment’s specific needs. This is very important for targeted relationship building.
Now you have a database and know a little more about your customers, it’s time to talk to them – in ways they want to hear from you. You may get to know that some will respond to text message communications whereas others will keep in touch through Instagram or email invitations.
As you get to know your customers, their preferences and purchasing history, you can develop targeted communications designed to appeal to a segment. For example, some customers may be attracted to ‘On Sale’ items whereas another group will be more interested in new products and seasonal launches.
Use ‘different strokes for different folks’ – adopt tailored social media and marketing communications for different customer profiles.
There are large downsides of not knowing your customers well enough. Start addressing them today!
If there are issues, you can use your database to efficiently communicate updates. Very important if you want to tell people you are able to reopen if you have been shut down!
Having built a great local brand, with a settled team, a formal business plan, and a history of past performance and projected activity, is really important when you are promoting your business for sale. But what underpins everything is a supportive, customer base that is well informed and loyal. You [and the new owner will], communicate well with them because you know exactly who they are, how to ‘talk’ to them, which of your service or product groups they prefer, how they like to be treated and when they are likely to respond to a particular marketing initiative or event.
Selling your business?
A segmented customer list, with historical data is essential and adds great value.
David Wemyss-Smith, director of Manyung Gallery Group
Content first published December 2023, reviewed February 2026
The Mornington Peninsula has an abundance of talented, local people in business. As part of the Support Local campaign, we are connecting our local business community to these local experts. Through sharing their expertise and insider knowledge, these experts hope to play a part in re-energising the economy with new ideas to Support Local.
