How To Find The Right Customer?
The Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) states:
80% of your profit comes from 20% of your customers.
Here at Interesting Content, I like to keep a close eye of whom these 20% are. We use a CRM tool to identify and track all sorts of data that is important such as source of sale, length of sale cycle, reason for win or loss. This data has been helping me and my team really understand with whom we are doing business with but also helped create a robust customer persona.
We as a team sit down every quarter to not only update the customer persona but also critique it to ensure we are on the right tracks.
This has resulted in us forensically scouring our existing CRM to; one identify the hottest prospect whom who would hopefully be part of the 20% and be a successful customer for us in the future. We also like to look at the data to determine whom we should disqualify from our sales pipelines.
Un-Customer Persona! This is essentially a list like the customer persona that helps us identify whom we should not work with and helps us screen such customers so we don’t attract them to our funnel in the first place.
Having said that here are my top 5 tips on finding the right customer:
Create a customer persona based on your own data (whom has been a good customer to you, who has been profligate.)
Break the above down to ideas, tactics as well as strategies so you can find 100’s of your sweet spot personas and get their attention.
Make sure your sales & marketing activities are in line with attracting the right persona of customers into your funnel. Critique the activity too. If all your customers are in LinkedIn, should you spend time or bother with Instagram or Tiktok at all?
Be ruthlessly focused with customers whom are not in your persona. It may tempting to take on a project or turn away a paying customer but in the long run your ideal customers will be the ones that will be the best customers.
Focus! Get to really know your customers and their biggest headaches and position your product or service to help alleviate this from their lives. Not only are you creating something that a lot of people will find useful but you will likely win the customer for life!
More research here:
Determining Your Ideal Customer
8 Rules for Finding the Right Customer (and Saying No to the Wrong One!)
More about the 80/ 20 rule: