Your best prospects may need to evolve over time. Expanding the reach of your business often means you must take steps to develop a relationship rather than pushing quickly into the sales efforts. A good CRM allows you to enhance your efforts to expand and grow your business.
Identify the Persona of Your Best Prospects
Prioritize your time and resources by being extremely clear about who you like as a customer. Here are a few questions you may want to ask:
- What size company gets the most benefit of your service or product?
- What other products/services does your ideal client use?
- Where are your best clients located?
- What type of product/service do they deliver to their customers?
Use the short list above to get started thinking about what matters in your company’s relationship with your best customers. Use CRM tools to sort out a specific description of that type of customer. Ask your customer-facing staff what qualifies a best client to them. Review those characteristics once per quarter to get more clarity.
Court the Clients You Want
Build your pipeline with the type of customer that appreciates your company. As you fill your pipeline with those that fit your “Best Customer Persona”, it will become easier to let the others move on.
Think about it. When you have a mixture of great clients and hard-to-please or hard-to-profit customers, the best clients will suffer. These less than ideal clients sap away more time than the good ones. They cause your best employees to battle a bad mood. They drain your resources and personal energy. You simply have less to offer those who make your company shine.
Define Extraordinary Customer Experience
From the very first moment you make contact with them, the best clients will respond to an experience noticeably higher than what they expect. Delineate what extraordinary entails. Is extraordinary a sales rep keeping on-time appointments? Is it about a customer service staff using common courtesy words like “please and thank you?” Does it mean remembering their name and personal information about their family or hobbies?
Put your CRM to work establishing the criteria and then share your pledge to meet those standards consistently. One example is 1-800-Got-Junk. They set expectations with these words from their founder, Christopher Bennett. “We pledge to arrive on time, in a clean shiny truck, with two friendly uniformed drivers – but so can anyone. What makes us unique is, our truck crew will call the customer 15 minutes ahead of time and let them know we’re on time.” This extra step sets the company apart from others – even the ones who also keep their appointments.
Saying that you want a better clientele and actually making it happen are two very different things. One of the biggest challenges is making distinctions based on real data collected in your CRM about best current clients. When you know who deserves your best, it becomes much easier to attract better clientele.