There IS A Perfect Customer Out There

Many a business owner has uttered the phrase ‘the customer is always right’ with a sarcastic tone. That’s because, in business, far from finding the perfect customer, the person we’d love to deal with, and are happy to serve, we often find ourselves dealing with people who make our lives miserable.

The mindset, however, is that any customer is better than no customers, and since we’re all told that the customer is the most important person in our business, we make allowances, give in to demands, and find that we’re fuelling the problem. We become stuck in a cycle of trying to retain customers who demand all of our energy, instead of focusing on finding the customers we’d like to work with.

The truth is, however, that it all starts with your marketing campaign. If you find yourself always dealing with customers who are far from perfect, who sap your energy, and who make you feel that you’ve gone above and beyond what should be expected to earn their money, then the problem probably isn’t with them. It’s with the marketing you used to attract them in the first place.

In days gone by, finding this perfect customer would have been called demographics, and that plays a big role in the process. These days, however, it’s referred to as synchronistic marketing, and there’s quite a lot more to it.

The first step in finding the perfect customer is figuring out who they are. Your perfect customer is likely to have specific traits, they will have a particular attitude towards you, and your business, and they will evoke a particular feeling in you when you deal with them.

The next step in finding your perfect customer is realising that once you’ve found those perfect customers, you need to retain them. Instead of focusing more efforts on marketing to the people you don’t want to work with, you should be focusing on retaining the people you do want to deal with, and leaving your nightmare customers free to choose an alternative supplier.

While it may sound counter intuitive to let customers walk away, if you really look at your sales figures, you’ll probably find that your perfect customers are the bulk of your business, even though you’re spending more time and money on the people you’d rather not be doing business with anyway!

Once you understand your perfect customer, and that you can’t be all things to all people – and that you shouldn’t want to be, there are several things you can do to benefit your business.

You can choose to create a business that your perfect customer will want to do business with. You can offer them the products and service that you know they want, in order to attract them.

You can target your marketing to your perfect customer, to the places that you know you will find them, and to a message that you know will resonate with them.

By making slight changes to your business, and your marketing efforts, you can start to attract the perfect customer to your business over and over again. You will also find that because you’re more focused in your efforts to gain new customers, the people you don’t want to deal with are less likely to turn up at your door, or your website, so you won’t have to make the decision whether or not to serve them.

Spending all of your time serving anyone other than your perfect customer causes several problems in your business. It can stifle productivity, because all your energy is devoted to ‘putting out fires’ rather than growing and developing your business. It can make you lose faith in your business, and yourself, because everything you do is a struggle. It can even cause your business to fail, because you’re devoting so much time to pleasing difficult customers that you don’t have any left for building and improving your business.

Yes. Your customers are the most important people in your business. Nevertheless, wouldn’t you rather the most important people in your business were people you actually liked? You wouldn’t choose employees you did not enjoy working with, so why work with anyone other than your perfect customer?