Are You Working With The Right Clients?

Are you working with the right clients? Too often, when we get started in business for ourselves, we take anybody who will throw a dollar at us and we don’t discriminate very effectively. The better you are able to discriminate and choose carefully whom you desire your customer to be, the more profitable, the more enjoyable your work will be, the more you will be able to focus on the things that you are truly good at and create incredible unique customer service experiences.

To understand who your ideal clients are, know how they elicit the best of your ability, understand what their criteria are for success, what they’re afraid of, and what you can help them do and design your ability to do business around those particular details.

In my money service business, we have done this for last four years and have done well. One of the things we talked about previously was the subject of commoditization. It shows up in this business in the form of payroll checks, tax checks, and social security benefit checks. Those are the lowest margin checks with probably the most ungrateful customers that come into our system. We made a corporate decision about four years ago that we were not going to actively develop that market. Instead, if customers came in and began to haggle with us about price, we did something very simple: We just referred them to Wal-Mart. One of the things that ended up happening was that we sent so many customers to Wal-Mart that we clogged Wal-Mart’s lines, and they ended up sending all the customers that had large and strange checks for us to cash.

It worked out wonderfully. We would much rather do much larger transactions for which the customer would be much nicer and much more appreciative. Wal-Mart cashes three types of checks, we cash 37 types of checks, and as a result, we can live on a very, very narrow percentage of getting just the right type of customer to come into our stores, and sending all the rest away so that they don’t clog our resources or waste our time.

In every business that I have ever been a part of, when we did not do a good job of matching and aligning ourselves with our ideal customers and the right type of deal, we suffered. We wasted time, we wasted effort, we did lots and lots of work, and we were not appreciated for it. In fact, customers would curse and say that we didn’t do enough or there was something that was missing, and it was simply that we were not right for them and they were not right for us.

My warning is if you really want to invest in your business success, focus carefully on exactly who you are doing business with, and determine whether or not they are the right people for you to be doing business with, and if not, make that decision quickly.

I challenge you to spend time and write down who your ideal client is. Be as specific as possible.