How many customers do you have?

How many potential customers do you have?

Who should you speak to first?

One of the things that most of my customers talk to me about it how do they know who to approach to try to sell their product or service.

We can waste a lot of time chasing the wrong customers. This is frustrating for us as we continually get rejected and earn no commission. However, it possibly also means that our best customers are being poached by the competition losing us even more revenue.

Our best customers earn us the most money but they are valuable in many other ways. They are invested in our success so will help us by providing feedback and recommendations to other customers.

Our worst customers cost us time and money. It takes longer to lose a deal than it does to win it because we keep chasing it even when it is lost.

So, it is really important that we only focus on the best customers.

One of the best examples of this comes from Dr Paddi Lund, the self-confessed "Crazy Dentist" from Queensland, Australia. "Crazy" because he's doing so many outrageous things in his practice and because his success defies all conventional business paradigms.

It is a remarkable story and his books are full of really useful and interesting ideas. Relevant to this is how he went about choosing who was his patient and who was not.

https://www.paddilund.com/content/view.asp?name=TrainingCustomers

He created a series of criteria such as did they regularly brush their teeth, did they always turn up for appointments, did they pay their bills on time etc and ranked all of his customers against them. He then “fired” those that did not match his ideal customer.

For most of us, we cannot afford to fire our customers but we can choose who we spend our time talking to. Find a set of criteria that work for you and focus on those customers only. It will be important to revisit the ranking every so often and you may find that different customers rank differently for different products.

However you do it, focus on those customers where you have the greatest chance of success. Do not chase customers just because they are the biggest or are just down the road from you. Have an objective set of criteria and rank them accordingly.