Once you have gotten a few customers, you should make it a habit to think strategically. Not all customers are created equal. In fact you will find that 80% of your sales and or profits come from 20% of your customers. A good exercise is to segment or grade your customers.
Write down a list of all your customers. Hopefully you have a list of them in your accounting or customer management system that you could print out quickly. From this list review the clients and grade them on the following.
Sales – How much total sales have they generated this year?
Profit – How much revenue minus expenses have they generated this year? You might not have this information if you have not tracked expenses to specific jobs or customers.
EODB – How easy are they to do business with? Do they generate problems, questions, last minute changes?
A/R – How quickly do they pay their bills? It’s important that they generate revenue, but if you are floating them a loan for the amount due, it is a hidden cost of doing business with them?
Referral – Have they referred additional business to you? Are they willing to give a referral to your new customers if asked?
Ethics – Do they ask you to bend the rules? Do you trust what they say to you or others? It is hard enough staying out of trouble without having a customer push you in the wrong direction.
From these questions you would make a chart like this
| Customer | Sales | Profit | EODB | A/R | Referral | Ethics |
| Fred | ||||||
| Betty | ||||||
| Wilma | ||||||
| Barney | ||||||
| Greg | ||||||
| Peter | ||||||
| Bobby | ||||||
| Marsha | ||||||
| Jan | ||||||
| Cindy | ||||||
| Alice |
You would put in dollar amounts in the Sales and Profit categories. On the other categories you could indicate a grade of A, B, C, or D or rank them 1 to 99.
Finally you would give each customer a final ranking.
From there you would craft your marketing and service strategies to