In my last blog post, I wrote about how my advertising agency wound up spending a lot of time going after a customer we hadn’t initially identified as needing our services — and how we then analyzed our list of current customers and realized that most of those highly treasured companies on our roster sought us out, not vice versa.
Which got me thinking. How do you determine who is the best customer for your business? And then, how do you attract that customer? We’ve all had customers who weren’t a good fit.
This always takes a toll and not just in terms of customer churn and your bottom line. It can also have an impact on staff morale. And then there is the question you inevitably get from prospective customers: Why aren’t you working with company X any more?
When any relationship is terminated, people want to know who was at fault. If you throw your ex under the bus (rightly or wrongly) on the first couple of dates, your prospective partners are likely to lace up their running shoes.
One of the things I love about writing for this blog is that I always learn from the people I get to interview. Blaine Gary, an accountant I talked to and wrote about in December, told me about a book he had read, “Attracting Perfect Customers: The Power of Strategic Synchronicity.” Written by Stacey Hall and Jan Brogniez (now Jan Stringer), the book suggests that we get perfect customers when we are in synch strategically.
I called Ms. Stringer. She told me she had spent 17 years in sales, her last position as vice president of sales for a company in Houston. She said she always approached business development a little differently, and she told a story of attending a big hospitality sales meeting in the grand ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hilton.
There were lots of suits in the room, and she knew none of them. “I decided I would attract people to me,” she said, “so I stood on the side of the room and put out this conscious light.
A few minutes later, the president of a hotel management company came and stood by me. He knew my company, but didn’t know me. Everybody knew him and as people came by to talk to him, he would say, ‘Hey, do you know Jan?’ ‘Meet Jan, you need to know her — she can help you.’” Soon after, Ms. Stringer said, she left that job to start a company that helps others learn to attract perfect customers. She suggests four steps:
First, be clear about what is the perfect client for you and your business. She suggests writing several pages about the qualities you are looking for: “We all want certain qualities in relationships and being clear about what those qualities are first sends a note to the universe.”
Second, identify what makes you and your perfect customer tick: “Look at the relationships in your business up to now, the ones you’ve stuck with and really, really resonate with — there is a good vibe. Ask yourself, ‘What is that about, what makes me tick?’ Your perfect customers will tick to the same thing.”
Third, specify what you want your perfect customer or client to expect of you: “A lot of times, we think we have to shape ourselves to fit the expectations of others: ‘They expect that so I must do that.’ Early in my business, people would call late at night or over the weekend. I realized I hadn’t specified that I did not want my perfect client to do that.”
The fourth and final step is to declare who you are going to be to attract what you want: “You have to be someone who believes, I can have what I what.” Pondering her advice several things come to mind. I do believe in the power of positive thinking.
In fact, I have my dad’s copy of “The Power of Positive Thinking,” dog-eared and yellowed, on my bookshelf. Of course, thinking positively and focusing on attracting the kind of business you want are no substitute for carrying out the basics of business development.
But I think Ms. Stringer is right that it is important to have clarity about what kinds of relationships are going to be best for your business. I now know the warning signs that a prospective client will not be a good fit.
The trick is to heed these signs and not get too excited about the opportunity. For us, these signs include companies that operate on a culture of fear (of higher ups or of risks of any kind) and companies with executives that are dysfunctional and just don’t work well together.
Our best clients are the ones who understand that the more information they share about their business, the better job we can do. They are the ones who believe in the power of good advertising strategies and the creative that delivers on those strategies.
They are the ones that value our time as much as we value theirs. My conversation with Ms. Stringer led me to focus on further clarifying who our best customers are and to start incorporating in our marketing materials what we value, as a company, in our business relationships.
We always highlight the benefit we offer prospective clients, but there is also power in telling the universe, “This is the type of client we want to work with.” (New York Times)
MP Mueller is the founder of Door Number 3, a boutique advertising agency in Austin, Tex. Follow Door Number 3 on Facebook.
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