Once you have been in business for six months or more you will start to see patterns develop. You will start to learn about which customers you prefer to sell to. They might not be the ones that you thought they would be when you first opened your doors. It is funny how your business educates you. You will learn things that you never thought of before. Your eyes get opened to new opportunities. You find flaws with your original plans and need to adjust accordingly. I am going to share one really important lesson that took me a long time to learn. You need to focus on growing your most profitable market segment and forget about the rest until you grow that one.
Every new business owner commits the same Cardinal sin. They think money is money and business is business. Therefore you go after every drop of business you can get. You are hungry for work and you are willing to accommodate people to fill that void, especially in a weak economy. Your thinking is misguided though. When you run a tiny little business, you simply cannot afford the baggage that comes along with trying to accommodate every single person who expresses any interest in your business at all. You might not believe me at first because it sounds illogical and counter intuitive to basic business. It is not though. Sooner or later you are going to learn this lesson. The sooner you accept this as truth, the better off you will be. Drop the lousy customers and go get more good ones.
Don’t just take any business you can get. You need to really focus on getting ideal customers instead of just any customers. That is a tough concept to grasp. It will make a huge difference in your business though. Serve your most profitable customers and clients. Serve them exceptionally well. That is where you will find success. If you take on any and every customer, you will find yourself extremely stressed out because you are having a hard time making those customers happy. Only focus on the ones you can serve well. Make every effort to earn the business of more customers like them and less effort to earn any other business.
Funny things happen when you start to spend all your energy serving ideal customers. Your customer satisfaction levels go way up with those ideal people. These ideal people know other ideal customers and they are going to tell those other ideal customers about you. It works whether you sell to business clients or residential clients. Good customers know other people who will be good customers. You want their word of mouth more than anyone else’s.
Your business will not take off and become really profitable until you make this paradigm shift. Don’t underestimate the importance of developing a written marketing plan that specifically targets your best customers. You want to shape everything about your business to appear more and more perfect to those people. Identify exactly what those people look like. Build your marketing engine around getting more of those ideal customers. Your ad copy should speak directly to them. When you are thinking about how to word a piece of advertising copy or a new sign, think about what phrases would attract more of those sweet spot customers.
Once you do this and see how well it works, you will be happy to turn work down from those less than perfect customers. Send them to your competitors instead. Let them have those headaches. You don’t want the business from those over demanding cheapskates. Trust me. Let them go somewhere else. You are doing yourself a huge favor and you are hurting your competition at the same time. You don’t have to be rude about not taking their business. Just explain that your business is better suited for a certain type of client. There are ways to do that tactfully. Follow this advice and watch your profitability and your energy levels skyrocket.
