It’s another day in the office. You arrive to an inbox full of emails. Some employees who need your help. A demo your R&D team is doing to show you what they’ve been working on….you get the picture! As leaders, we’re all busy! And if you ask us to name our best customers – we can! But sometimes we forget to take time to really take a step back and look at what our best customers have in common. Not surprising, understanding these characteristics can often help us find more profitable growth in the future. Here are three of the lessons we’ve learned over time.
1. Knowing where your best customers come from can help you invest time and money more wisely
Your sales and marketing team has probably tried several approaches to building the funnel and closing deals. Think about your best customers and investigate the similarities. Did they all come from a specific trade show? Inbound via a specific landing page? From all of the articles you’ve been posting on LinkedIn? Knowing where your best customers came from can help you determine where it might make sense to double down. Bonus: if you’ve got good systems in place for measuring – why not look at what channels are seeing the highest conversions and not just to leads but to close?!
2. Understanding the nuances of the challenges you’re solving for your best customers can help with positioning and discovery
My favorite example of this comes from a book I read by April Dunford (called Obviously Awesome). In this book, the author talks about selling CRM software. What her team discovered when they looked at their best customers was that there was one specific feature of their CRM software – the ability to visually depict relationships between people and organizations – that made them unique and thus the CRM of choice for a particular market. Is there something unique that you’re doing to help a specific market that if you highlighted it more, you’d grow even faster? One of our businesses, Centurisk has been able to do just that.
3. If your best customers come from the same industry, it might be time to focus!
Sure, a large target market means more organizations to sell your solution to which might mean more sales but getting those sales might be more inefficient and less profitable. This concept is somewhat based in Geoffrey Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm where he talks about the benefits of having strong, positive word of mouth in a single market — it’s like adding sales people to your team! Focusing on fewer markets also allows you to tailor your message more and to differentiate yourself from competitors who might be ‘for everyone.’
Over the years, many Volaris-owned businesses have found a lot of success by taking that step back and really looking at who their best customers are, where they come from, and how they’re being helped. Like we said at the start of this article, it’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day operations of a business but finding the time to think strategically about what our best customers are telling us, it can lead to more efficient, profitable growth!