Are you sitting on a wealth of untapped information?
If your business is already established rather than just starting up, and you have a broad customer base, you could be sitting on a potential gold mine of information that you won’t need to dig too deep to access!
Look to your best customers first
Start profiling your existing customers – If you’ve already done this go through the steps outlined below anyway and just check that you haven’t missed anything important to factor into your equations. You can do this whether your company is in business-to-business or business-to-consumer.
- List your best customers – typically they will be 20% of your total customer base
- Write down what it is about them that makes them “best customers”
- Next you can look for the more obviously identifiable similarities amongst these customers
- Then look at where they came from
But don’t forget the rest
Now that you’ve analysed your best customers, how are you going to use the information you’ve uncovered?
- Look at the remaining 80% of your current customers plus your lapsed customers and see whether any of the companies match the identifiable similarities of your best customers. It could be that those with a close match have need of more of your product or service, but either you or they haven’t identified that need yet, or it’s being fulfilled elsewhere – Now is your chance to find out and do something about it!
- Take the criteria of “identifiable similarities” and see if there is a specialist list available that matches the majority of them and that you could rent/buy for prospecting purposes
- Finally, if you come across any really awful customers during this whole exercise, you might like to take a view on your future dealings with them!
Remember: It is a fact that pursuing unqualified business is one of the most common reasons companies fail to reach their revenue targets.
Happy hunting!
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