How do you find the right customers for your business?
Finding the right customers is three steps: write down your ideal client so precisely you could hand the description to someone else, understand the market that client plays in, then build a list of every company in that market that matches, with a real person to speak to at each one. Most businesses skip the first two steps and live with whatever list accumulates.
Where most customer lists come from
Ask an owner who their customers are and they can name them. Ask how those customers were chosen and the honest answer is usually that they were not. Whoever called first, whoever a friend introduced, whoever said yes in the early years when any work was good work.
That is normal, and it is how most businesses get started. The cost shows up later. The list shapes the whole business: which jobs come in, what margin they carry, how much of the owner's week goes on the accounts that pay least and ask most. A customer list that arrived by accident is hard to grow on purpose, because nobody ever wrote down what a good customer looks like.
Step one: quantify the ideal client
The first step is a description, not a feeling. Write the ideal client down in terms someone else could use without you in the room.
Size. Turnover, headcount, number of sites, whatever measure fits your market. Too small and they cannot afford you. Too large and you are one of many suppliers.
Sector and situation. Which industries, and what is going on inside them. A business that is growing, changing hands or under new regulation buys differently from one that is standing still.
The problem you solve. The specific thing they struggle with that you fix, in their words rather than yours.
What a good fit looks like. The customers you already have who are easy to work with, pay on time and come back. They are the pattern.
If you cannot write that down in a paragraph, you do not yet have an ideal client. You have a customer list.
Step two: understand the market they play in
Once the client is described, look at the market around them. Who else is in it. How the work flows between the players, from the people who specify to the people who deliver. Where the pressure is coming from: regulation, costs, a shift in who the end customer is.
This is the part most businesses skip, and it is the part that turns a description into a direction. Brian Valentine has just run it across one sector in Scotland, end to end, and the ideal client fell out of the market map almost on its own. Once you can see the whole sector laid out, you can see who you should have been aiming at all along. Yesterday's piece on knowing who your ideal client is came out of that work.
Step three: go and find them
The last step is the list. Every company in that market that matches the description, ranked, with a real person to speak to at each one. Not a bought list of names, and not a list someone else handed over, but one built from your own description of who you want.
Sales gets a lot easier when you know exactly who you are looking for. The calls are to the right people, the conversation starts from a real understanding of their market, and the customers who come in fit the business rather than reshaping it.
This is work PeakRatio now does for owner-led businesses: the ideal client written down, the market mapped, and the list built from it. If you want that for your business, send me a message on LinkedIn. If you want a quick first read on where your business stands, the free Ratio Check takes five minutes.
How PeakRatio helps
The ideal client written down, the market mapped, and the list built from it. If you want that for your business, send me a message on LinkedIn. If you want a quick first read on where your business stands, the free Ratio Check takes five minutes.
The Ratio Check is a free, five-minute read … best place to start.