When growing your business there are two main areas to focus on: prospecting for new customers and getting more from your existing customers.
If you were to look at the size of your potential market and assume that your company owned 20 per cent of it, it’s likely that your company could not handle double, triple or quadruple that much new business in a short space of time.
You may be surprised to know that the more successful a company becomes, the more selective they are about their customers.
As you would probably be aware, not all business is good profitable business and not all customers are right for you. You should be looking for win-win situations only. What I like to hear is, “Well I need the sales and this thinking only creates a self-perpetuating downward spiral”.
Let me introduce you to a concept called the ICC Rating System (Ideal Customer Criteria).
The ICC Rating System is where we look at the products or services supplied and ask the question, what does the ideal customer look like?
The ICC rating system is a rating we give customers between -25 and +25. The rating is created from 5 strategic points of importance for your company and come from you profiling your customers at length, then reviewing the commonality of answers across your customers will provide your 5 points of importance.
This process is about understanding the profile of your best customer, why they deal with you, how they interact with you, how they pay, what value they see in your offering and how easy it is to deal with them. This is just an example of some of the profiling questions.
So looking at prospecting, where should your efforts be applied? The scatter gun approach doesn’t work. Once you have ICC rated your prospects (yes, you rate them as well as customers), anyone with a 0 or below should be ignored. Basically you need to be focusing on customers who are best suited to your company.
The ICC rating is equally as important when it comes to expanding the volume of business you get from your existing customers. With customers who are more valuable you should go above and beyond to make them feel special. If you don’t rate your customers, how does everyone in the company know which ones are more important? Or does your company use the squeaky wheel principal: customers who make the most noise get the most service?
Whether you need to win more sales, improve profits or prevent profit leakage, eccoConsultants will show you in a very short time our value to you and your business.
© Copyright 2016 EccoConsultants.
