Many businesses are based on the 80:20 principle. It means that about 20 percent of our consumers contribute to eighty percent of our revenue. If this is the case, we should plan and think with this key fact in mind. If we don’t, it is possible that we don’t have the clue on people who are likely buy from us. We should know consumers who are actually our real best friends. We should develop a mental picture of them.
When we do, we could focus our effort on them, so it is possible to keep our business sustainable. Obviously, it is not possible to reach everyone at the same time, but at least we could focus on our best customers and aim to satisfy them.
But how do we find out who are our best customers? We should start at the place our business is located. We should also have a good idea why we open a business in specific places, because this would determine the types of consumers. Best customers could encourage us to take those important steps. We should have plans on doing something that could attract people in the first place.
We could ask these consumers why they regularly use our services and products. We could also go to local areas, such as market and gathering places to find new customers who can be loyal to us. For example, we may perform online surveys to make sure that we could get enough information.
There are many good ways to gather information related to best customers, one of them is by giving them something cool. We could encourage people to fill out an entry each time they complete a transaction. They could win a discount or other things that could encourage them to buy more products from us. We could perform this kind of survey a few times each year. We could look for demographics in our survey and there are numbers in demographics that we can measure.
As an example, we may start to identify best customers based on age groups, marital status and gender. They could also have specific race, education and occupation characteristics.
We could also go to the local chamber of commerce to find publication related to our industry. These journals may contain additional information on likely consumers for our industry. There could also be multiple demographic information mentioned based on our prospect groups. The government should provide a huge help too, as they could publish a template of questionnaire that can be used for consumers in our industry.
In a survey, we should have an indication on how many times people need our services, whether it is each day, week, month or year. This should give us a good illustration about our market and we could be able to focus on specific parts of our market.
Without proper surveys, we won’t be able to distinguish best customers and we may take the inefficient, shotgun approach. It would be better to take an aimed rifle shot to target our best customers.