4 Questions To Identify Your Ideal Clients
For most businesses, they treat every single customer with unquestionable service, regardless of how the customer treats them. Anything they want, they get it. After all, without them you’d be out of business, right?
But what about when customers push our buttons, and stretch us to the limit? What if they waste our time and start to cost us money instead of making us money? Do we have to put up with it?
Absolutely not! A business full of unprofitable customers is an unprofitable business. The key to customer service lies in the ability to identify the gems and the rocks, and deal with each effectively. Your customers don’t have to hold you hostage.
Applying the 80:20 rule there are probably 20% of your customers giving you 80% of your revenue – a business has got to focus on these customers and expand on them.
To identify these go through your database of customers and make a list of the customers that make you answer yes to the following questions:
- Has the customer purchased from you on several occasions?
- Is the customer profitable?
- Is the customer strategically important to your business?
- Has the customer spent a significant amount of money in your business?
While you do this, you may also wish to make a list of customers who made you answer no to one or several of those questions. Those customers could potentially be unprofitable, or undesirable ones that you need to think about avoiding.
Optimizing your customer base allows you to;
a. serve happy, pleasant customers
b. see more repeat business
c. have happier staff
d. make more money
When you are trying to establish how profitable a customer is, think about how much they spend, how often they spend, and what they buy. Do they buy high-margin or low-margin items? Have they referred other customers to you? Do they pay on time? Do they buy products or services at full price? Each business will have a different set of criteria to evaluate this, but use those questions as guidelines.
Your ideal customers are those that are highly profitable, and a dream to deal with. You’re more than happy to accommodate their requests, and go above and beyond their expectations. These are the customers you will want to cultivate more of in your business.
Your ideal customers are the ones that:
- Ask you for the products and services that fall within your expertise or specialty.
- Value your products and services, as well as you and your staff.
- Pay a fair market price.
- Challenge you to be better at what you do.
- Support your continued business and professional growth.
- Help you move in new strategic directions.
To Your Success.