Marketing efficiency or why to segment your customers?

Efficient marketing or why segment your customers “Develop your business” when I mention the subject with my fellow business leaders, I frequently get the same answer “not at the moment, I am totally overwhelmed”.

Yet the figures show that often, and despite long days of work, the profitability of these companies is far from satisfactory.

So how to improve the results while having more fun?

Work quality rather than quantity, by bringing the concept of ideal customer into your marketing strategy.

I propose a five-step action plan:

Define your ideal customer: We all know “dream” customers and those who would prefer to do without: late payments, endless negotiations on prices, purchases by small quantities, frequent changes of orders, slow and complex decision-making processes … The analysis shows that a certain number of clients do not correspond to the business or organization of our company. We are going through them and are the first to be responsible for this situation, how do we fix it?

Divide customers into four classes ABCD: Free to you to set your criteria around two key points: Profitability and easy to do business with them. A customer will for example be a loyal customer buying your standard offer and complying with the payment terms. In contrast a customer D will be little if not profitable and very time-consuming.

Differentiate your business approach according to the four classes: strengthen your loyalty actions on customers A and B. Harden negotiations with C and D by staying very commercial but knowing how to say no. Why not direct a small, unprofitable customer to a better equipped colleague or distributor to serve it?

Invest the time gained to develop marketing actions with customers and prospects corresponding to the criteria of class “A”

Implement the system: Analyze your customer portfolio with your sales team every year to make choices and set goals consistent with this approach.

This strategy is simple and “profitable” in the short term. We know it well and feel it intuitively. As often the main difficulty is to challenge habits, to know how to say no to our clients, to our employees or to ourselves.

For all these reasons the help of a coach(us) can be “paid”, I am convinced, how about you?