The new year has started, your hunters are hunting and your existing customers are ordering. How do you know the orders being placed are profitable and a good-fit for your company?
Let’s take a quick self-evaluation:
- How well do you know your company’s value-added competencies?
- How well can you identify prospects that have the greatest potential to become good-fit customers?
- How good are your management techniques in this new age marketing information world?
How did you rate yourself?
Let’s take a look at what is most important in ensuring a customer is a good fit:
- How well suited are your products/services geared towards your customer’s needs? Are you forcing a round peg into a square hole? Is the fit mediocre at best or is it more like a hand-in-glove?
- Does your client require you to deviate from your tried and true value-added competencies? Years ago, I ran a plastics compounding business that only made our company’s proprietary formulas. We had excess capacity and I went and secured custom compounding orders from existing accounts that also compounded. It was a good chemical fit and put extra cash to the bottom line. This does not always happen.
- Do the value-added solutions you provide to a single customer also provide a solution to additional prospects or existing customers? Or, is every product/service customized to each and every customer, and there is no commonality among your products/services? If you had a product or set of products that you could sell to a unique market segment, would your company be more profitable?
- How unique is your product offering? Are the barriers to market entry high? Or, can anyone get into your customers with little effort or capital or technology? What unique skills or knowledge do you have over the competition?
- For your existing customers, are there opportunities to cross sell and up sell? Or, is your company a one-string banjo with no other offerings to your customers? Are there patterns to your existing sales that can be optimized through better sourcing or manufacturing?
These are some thoughts to ponder as you try to maximize your customers, your products and your profits. There are sure to be other mechanisms to optimize your revenue and margins, but here is a start for the coming year.
Dave Harman is an associate with Sandler Training. He has over 30 years’ experience in sales and sales management with Fortune 500 companies as well as small, family-owned organizations. He has held positions from sales to senior management with companies such as Conoco/Vista, Amresco and Ohio Awning, and owns his own business. He earned his MBA with a concentration in Marketing from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. You can reach him at [email protected] or (888) 448-2030.
