You’ve probably heard this saying,  “If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business; you have a hobby.” (It came from author-customer experience expert Don Peppers and his co-author Martha Rogers.)

Though pretty obvious, the reverse is also true: If you’ve got customers, you’ve got a business. But let’s face it, as a business owner, you’ve got customers and then, you’ve got Customers—the latter being your ideal type, the loyal ones who buy often or a lot (or both) and with whom you share a mutually beneficial relationship.

Isolate Customer Factors

So, to be in business and stay in business—profitably and for as long as you choose—you must create a steady flow of the kinds of prospects who become ideal customers.

You do it by a sort of “reverse engineering” of your existing ideal customers.

That may sound a bit scientific but it’s easy to do—just three steps:

• Analyze
• Isolate
• Target

We’re going to look at each one of these individually.

Analyze

You’ve heard of “the 80-20 Rule?” It’s something you can observe in life. Example: You wear 20% of your shoes 80% of the time. Or, 80% of the pollution comes from only 20% of the cars. (It’s not always a hard and fast 80-to-20, but you get the idea.)

It’s likely that 20% of your customers give you 80% of your income. So, have a close look at that 20%, in terms of:

• Age
• Gender
• Education
• Marital status
• Geography
• Annual income

If you don’t have this demographic and geographic information, survey those customers to get it.

Ideally, you want to also know your ideal customers’ psychographic data—what they value, and what motivates or interests them. Interests and values are expressed across a person’s life, from their hobbies to their attitudes to their spending habits—their lifestyle in general. If the information you have about your customers provides you some psychographic insights, you’re ahead of the game. If not, survey to get it.

Isolate

In analyzing a dozen or a hundred of your best customers, you will begin to isolate the common factors…and you may be surprised at what you find.

We recall one very successful small business owner who had assumed that his customers were pretty much just like him: Millennial, entrepreneurial college drop-outs. When he finally analyzed the 20%, he isolated a game-changing factor: they were all baby boomers and retirees.

Target

Once you’ve isolated the factors that your best customers all have in common, you can use these factors to target more prospects who share these demographic, geographic and/or psychographic traits. It’s a bit like extracting the “best customer DNA” and using it to clone more ideal customers.

If you’ve analyzed and isolated and you’re ready to target with postcard marketing, go to www.prospectsplus.com, where you can design your postcard and use Nielsen PRIZM to reach more customers with those “best customer” traits.

If want to learn more about your best customers, their spending/buying habits and more, call Opportunity Knocks at 1 (866) 319-7109 and we’ll help you with the analyzing, isolating, and targeting.