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.
Jan NL – Quinlan & Co
Innovative Thinking
We continuously meet with businesses and business owners who are making a real difference within the SME sector. Through the Lucan South Dublin Chamber we’ve gotten to know Eilis and have been extremely impressed by her and her team’s foresight in bringing a new app (Quinlan & Co) to the marketplace. This app contains an abundance of high quality information that will assist business owners daily, monthly and annually by providing detailed financial information and systems to maintain your records (Mileage Tracker is a personal favourite!)
Congrats to Eilis and the team on a job well done and the innovative thinking!
Click here to find out more about Quinlan & Co. or
Download the App for FREE from Google Play or the App Store.
Changing Mindset = New Results
Most business owners start their own business based on their passion for what it is they do. Unfortunately, it takes much more than passion to build a successful business. You must have a specific vision for what it is you want your business to accomplish and the direction you want to take to produce the results you expect your business to achieve.
Thought is the most powerful force in the universe. Our thoughts are the controlling factor in what we manifest and create in our lives. Use your thoughts to create a specific vision for your business and then apply the right strategies and tactics to grow and develop that business.
What you need to know…
Creating a successful mindset requires action on your part. You must create a mindset that’s focused on performing your highest impact and highest income-producing activities on a daily basis.
If you’re not happy with your business’s current results, then ask yourself a question and be brutally honest as you answer it. WHY are you getting such poor results? WHY are you failing to attract clients? WHY are you attracting the wrong clients? WHY are you failing to generate the revenue and profits you expect from your business?
One of the things that has been widely explored over the years is that people who are broke, struggling or just getting by – don’t think the same way as people who are financially abundant. They don’t believe the same things as financially challenged people do, and therefore they don’t behave the same way. In short, they take different actions.
Why you need to know this…
Small business owners have been mentally conditioned to behave a certain way. They have specific beliefs… such as “in order to make more money, I have to work harder.” “Money is the root of all evil.” “No pain, no gain.” “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” “If I don’t do it myself, it will never get done.”
These beliefs lead to specific actions such as working more hours and putting forth more effort in a vain attempt to increase revenue and profits. That leads to specific results such as feelings of overwhelm, anxiety and frustration… and a deep-seated belief that more and more effort is required, even though results seldom if ever appear.
Do you know what your current beliefs may be costing your business today? For example…
- Do you succumb to mental barriers that may be sabotaging your success?
- Are you laser-focused on your highest income-producing activities?
- Are you hiring, assigning, delegating or bartering all of your non income-producing and less productive tasks?
- Do you know the specific steps you can take to immediately create a “millionaires mindset?”
- Would you like to know how you can learn to develop these critical skills?
It’s our pleasure to partner with business owners who are open to change and constantly challenging the way they think about their business…and do so in such a way that it creates a dramatic increase in effectiveness and profits. Sometimes the changes aren’t all that radical they just need a little mindset shift and BELIEF.
To your success,
SME Owners…What a difference 3 minutes can make!
So, true story, yesterday I’m sitting in a well-known coffee shop that doubles as a restaurant in west Dublin waiting for a client to arrive. It’s 11:57am (please note time, it’s important) and I overhear a conversation between the waitress and two potential clients that went like this:
Potential Client: Hi, we’d like to have lunch
Waitress: Hi, we don’t start our lunch menu until 12 noon
Potential Client: Is your breakfast menu available?
Waitress: Sorry, we stopped serving breakfast at 11:30am
Potential Client: Ok, we’ll try somewhere else [and proceeded to leave]
Business Owners I meet are constantly looking for ways to generate leads and increase sales and it got me wondering how many are fully in touch with the prospects that are at their doorstep already and are the correct processes in place to convert them.
I think its fair to assume that the restaurant owner has no idea that this is happening and the waitress is simply following the rules that they have been trained on, albeit to the extreme, but it does raise the question is their enough flexibility set out for employees to convert prospects and are employees empowered to make the right calls? Three minutes later and there would have been a sale.
As business owners we are the captain of the ship and the visionary for the future of our business, so having a clearly defined plan that includes customer service and having this vision communicated and bought into by all employees is paramount.
If you’re having a hard time deciding on what this plan is and disseminating your vision so it gets implemented efficiently, then consider getting support from a business coach, just like us 😉
To Your Success
Are YOU in the 1%?
The Rule of 1% is simply defined as adding one percent at a time. One of my philosophies is “DON’T LET PERFECTION STAND IN THE WAY OF PROGRESS”. In other words START taking action instead of planning for the perfect situation to arise. Consistency matters and adding just one percent may seem small, but if you approach the vision for your company with baby steps, you will find a huge increase over a solid chunk of time. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.
Avoid doing too much at once or you’ll set yourself up for failure. Think of the confidence you and your employees will have when you improve one percent each week. By the end of a year, you’ll have improved more than 50%!
Take customer service as an example. While, rules and standards are necessary for growth, always be flexible with your best customers. Most retailers only allow a set number of items into a dressing room to reduce the risk of shoplifting, but it generally restricts the large percentage of people who are not stealing from you. Flexibility is the key to what you deliver to your customers and consistency is the key to how you deliver it. So how can you improve your customer service by 1% over the next week?
The bottom line is customers rely on you to deliver what you promise. If you spend too much on bulky advertising that promises more than you can deliver, even your best intentions will unravel quickly and you will fail.
Focus on your vision and baby steps to turn your satisfied customers into Raving Fans. Think 1% improvement consistently.
To Your Success