The only thing worse than having no customer is having the wrong customer. The wrong customer takes more of your time and resources because they don’t have a clear view of what successful delivery looks like. They demand unrealistic requirements because they don’t know what they’re asking for. The wrong customers anger quickly because they know they aren’t getting value but can’t put their finger on why.
How do we identify the right customer or what I call a Dream Customer?
Need – Can your customer describe how your offering addresses their need? Seems simple but I’ve seen many situations where the customer wants what you’re selling because it’s a hot product or because everyone else is doing it. The problem is they can’t describe why they need it. When this happens the customer often lacks the will necessary to help you help them. We’re much better off when they know their needs.
Experience – Is the customer able to assess your performance? The customer must have experiences that enable them to assess our delivery. If they don’t have previous experiences it’s a very powerful sales tool for us to help educate them and we need to. By doing so we become the trusted advisor who helped them truly grade us. Unless the customer can assess us and offer feedback that helps us be at our best, they belong higher in the funnel until we can educate them. Blog: Three paths to earning customer credibility
Success – Are competitors aggressively pursuing this customer’s business? Successful customers have many suitors and they make good advocates. When we have no competition, it’s too good to be true. In this occasion we need to be honest with ourselves about whether it warrants our company’s resources and personal time, to sell to a customer that nobody else wants. This happens more than we think. These are usually companies in decline or those who are so short-sighted that they don’t care about the success of their suppliers.
Time – Is there time to succeed? One of the most common reasons for project failure is when the customer and supplier don’t have time to succeed. Results are demanded before the project can realistically be done and ROI requirements are based on that short timeline. Time really is money and if the customer is giving us two weeks to deliver something that takes five, we’re asking for failure. It’s up to the salesperson to help the customer develop realistic time expectations but if we exhaust our ability to do so, we must evaluate the viability of this business.
We don’t always get to sell to ideal customers but it’s helpful to know what a dream customer looks like so this can be part of our qualification and selling process. The only thing worse than no customer is the wrong customer. By using these four questions we can quickly understand if we’re pursuing the wrong customer.
©2015 Rick Wong – The Five Abilities® LLC
