Growing your business
15 September 2010
It’s easy when you’re keen to grow your company to think that ANY new business is good business, but it’s often not the case; not all customers are equal. Some absorb far more than their fair share of your management time delivering worse margins and potentially distracting and diverting you from more profitable activities.
A good starting point is to categorise your customer base into A, B and C grade customers. The criteria you use to do this will be specific to your business but can include things like;
· Profitability
· Cost to service
· Repeat work
· Referral generation
· Hassle
· Relationship
· Strategic fit
This will give you a good idea of what a good customer looks like and enable you to assess your current customers against those criteria. This simple analysis forms the basis for two key things; your client account management strategy and your client acquisition strategy. Or, to put it another way, how are you going to work with your clients going forward (and which ones are you going to develop, hold or ditch) and how are you going to attract new clients now that you have a profile of what a good customer looks like.
Posted: 15/09/2010 10:51:16
by
Growth Accelerators
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