Building the Perfect Client!

Back when I taught karate for a living, Darren Willard was the most perfect client I ever had. He was a great looking, little nine-year-old kid kid, with a photographic memory for anything you taught him. He was enthusiastic, took private lessons, came to all the tournaments, and his parents ALWAYS paid on time. They supported all the different promotional events, they referred their friends and they made positive comments when they were in the lobby instead of bitchin’ about something. Ah, if only there were more Darren Willards in this world, the world would be a better place. The good news is there are, but you have to find them.

Who is your perfect client?
Can you describe the qualities of a perfect client to yourself? You probably thought immediately of somebody in your business who’s the perfect client. Which is good because the first step in finding more perfect customers is to truly understand what a perfect customer should look like. What age is he or she? Is it a boy? Is it a girl? Is it a man? Is it a woman? What kind of income do they have? What type of job do they have? Where do they live? What do they read? Where do they work? What exactly are the qualities of a perfect customer for your products or services?

Now I would do this exercise with your staff and would try to come up with four or five different people who would seem to be the perfect clients. Take a look at the profiles of what the perfect client is because from now that’s the only clients you want to attract!

Can you do that? The answer is, you really can. You can target-market good customers. But in order to do that, you have to come up with a profile of what a good customer looks like. What kind of money do they make? Where do they go to school, or church, or whatever. Once you have that type of information, pinpoint it. Then you can go back out with a direct mail campaign, with a promotional campaign, with an ad


campaign, in a school newspaper, or a church newsletter, or something else,
and you can pinpoint and target-market these people much, much more effectively.

So, take the time to establish profiles of your key customers. Build the model customer, the type of customer you want to attract. Where do they hang out? What do they do? Where do their children go to school? Where do they go to eat? And from that, get your mind thinking about how you can target-market to attract specifically that model customer.

Recently I had a client call me up and say, “Hey Andrew, things are not doing so well. My marketing doesn’t seem to be working. There’s lots of other competition moving into town and the yellow pages just don’t make the phone ring like they used to.
_______________________________Always look for answers from within first!
__________________________

As always I advised this client that the first place to look for new business is from within your existing customer base. I had him go back and write out a list of every single customer in his business, then write out a list of what their occupation was. Well, he didn’t know the answer to a lot of these questions. Some of it he got off a questionnaire and some of it he just asked in casual conversations over the next three or four weeks. “Hey John. Where is it you work?” “Hey Sally. What is it that you do? Once he’d
gone through this whole process, which took about a month, an amazing thing happened. He found out that 40 people out of the 200 people in his customer base all worked for the same company, and he never even knew it!

It turned out that 40% of his customers worked for Tyson Foods. So guess what the next thing he did was? He went down to contact the personnel manager at Tyson Foods, pointing out that a lot of their



employees were using his service.
All of a sudden, the guy became interested in putting together a corporate program at Tyson Foods.
Which reminds me of the old adage, “A bucket full of minnows will feed you for a day but a single whale will feed you for a year!”

Segmenting Your Market
Segmenting your market is of vital importance to maximizing your marketing results. Not all clients are created equal, in fact the vast majority of them are hardly worth the effort. You must segment your customers into different profiles and analyze what’s important to each group. From this information you can decide which markets you should pursue and which to just let take their own course. With this in mind, you can target your message and your media to hit the most profitable groups.

Until next time, this is Andrew Wood advising you to segment your market into groups and then focus the bulk of your marketing message on hitting the two or three groups that can bring you the most money for the least possible expense. The perfect client group!

Andrew Wood is a sales & marketing expert & author of; Selling With Confidence, Building A Legendary Reputation, Conquering Your Market With a One Man Army, Making it Big, Legendary Leadership, and The Traits of Champions. He can be reached at
http://PersonalQuest.com or Mail to: andrewwood@PersonalQuest.com or 352-527-3553