Customers Are Like Birds – Part 2

Customers Are Like Birds - Part 2

Remember the post before when I said customers are like birds and all serious birders have field guides to help them find and identify new birds? Part 2 of our series deals with how to create a Field Guide for Customers to help you find, attract and close more new prospects!

To create your Field Guide for Customers, start by ranking your customers by revenue to determine who the top sales generators are. They may change from year to year, so feel free to average them over 2 years to get an accurate revenue number. Once done, do a quick calculation on which ones are the most profitable (or do it the easy way by consulting your business software). What you may find is that your biggest customers may not be your most profitable ones. Ultimately, your goal is to find out the best customers according to what truly benefits your company. Usually, they number around 10% of your total customer base. They also tend to be your most loyal fans with whom you've had a long, prosperous relationship.

Once you've identified your best customers, begin to build separate profiles of each one so that you would recognize one if you saw it on the street, online, at a grocery store or in an airplane. Try to determine the following information (and feel fre to add more if it helps):

• Industry (SIC or NAICS)
• Geographic location
• Size of revenue, # of employees, # of locations, # 0f computers, etc.
• Pain points you've helped them address over time
• Find out what they read (industry publications, business journals, etc.)
• Learn their professional association memberships
• What hobbies and activities they pursue

Why collect all of this information? Each customer occupies something akin to a business ecosystem, to coin a popular term these days. You wouldn't go to a salt water marsh to find a bird that thrives in arid deserts, right? The same thing applied to searching for business prospects. You should fully visualize and map out your best customers' business ecosystems so that you know where to find more like them, how to tell the A customer apart from the C customer, and how to articulate pain points that resonate with them.

Once you finish your Field Guide for Customers, you will be ready to devise new marketing strategies that will help you zero in on prospects with less effort and money than ever before.

Incidentally, David Meerman Scott, in his book The New Rules of Marketing & PR, refers to customer profiles as "Buyer Personas." He recommends knowing each "persona" inside and out before you create content and spend money on marketing activities. After all, each "persona" responds better to content that's designed for their needs and is reached in ways unique to their demographic. For instance, you wouldn't try to reach a teenage audience to sell your revolutionary skin-cleansing product by posting an ad in the Economist, right? Better to look for magazines teens subscribe to and consider tying it to a viral marketing campaign that involves Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. 

That's all for now. Look for our next installment of Customers Are Like Birds - Part 3 -  New Customer Acquisition Strategies