Step Two - Analyize Your Best Customers

You know what you sell now you need to spend a little time analyzing what your best customers look like. Your goal with this exercise is to create a profile that helps you target who your best prospects are. You want to know where to put your energy both with existing and new customers.

List your top 50. or more, current clients and identify these attributes for each one.
An Exel spreadsheet would be a great way to do this.

• Annual sales volume
• Business type
• Primary promotional product use(s)
• Seasonal purchasing patterns
• Value rating 1-10
• (Assign a numeric rating for how valuable this client is to you. Consider ease of doing business, profitability, partnership and other criteria that you think is important.)

Review the results and look for patterns.
What industries are the companies you’ve had the most success with, in?
Are there product uses that you commonly deal with, for example service awards or safety programs?
What size are the businesses you’ve had the most success with?
What buyer type do you have the most success with, HR, marketing, sales, purchasing?
Are there seasonal programs you have success with, golf, contractor gifts, company picnics, etc?

When you identify the patterns, within your best customer group, you’ll create a profile of your current ideal customer. This profile is extremely valuable for several reasons but two stand out.

1. These are your current clients you should be spending the most effort on.
2. If you find new prospects that fit this profile, it’s much more likely you’ll be successful getting new business from them.

Now that you know which of your current customers you should be spending the most time with, you have to ask yourself this question, are you? If instead you’re spending most of your time with smaller, less profitable ones, you’re not making the best use of your time.

Also take a look at the numeric rating you assigned to each customer. How does that rating system line up with your most successful accounts? Are they rated the highest or the lowest. It’s possible that some of your most successful accounts are the ones that you deem the least valuable to your business. What about time spent on accounts? Do you spend most of your time on your 10’s or your 1’s?

After you take all this into account you should have a pretty tightly defined profile for your ideal account, good job! This profile is what you’ll use to target new prospects and dramatically increase your success rate.