Why Your Best Customers Are Not Always Obvious

Do you really know who your best customers are?

Sure, in a sense, you do. After all, their names are on the checks, right? But I’m going for a deeper sense of your customers…do you know exactly why they are your customers? Or what makes your best customers, well, better than others?

It’s easy to think you know why—until you try to get more of them.

Here’s a great example. When I was helping my wife start her own company (print brokering and consulting), we did an exercise to identify who her best-fit clients would be. We both noticed that many of her best clients were non-profits in the local area.

So, of course, we targeted medium-to-large non-profits in the area when we did our sales and marketing.

The results were less than stellar. Most non-profits just didn’t have the kind of need we were hoping for. And even if they did, the budget wasn’t there. When the budget was there, it was because they cut corners in other ways—like with design. And that just created more issues when it came time to print.

How did we get it so wrong? After months of failure, we went back and looked at our list. And we noticed something… yes, many (though not all) of her best customers were non-profits. But there was something more significant that they all had in common: They were all event-heavy non-profits. As in, they all organized large events on the regular. Those events drove most of the print projects: Mailers and invitations. Signage for the event. Program booklets. And so on.

Then something exciting happened. We looked at those good customers who happened not to be non-profits. And we noticed the same thing: Many of those businesses were event-heavy as well. For example, one company did operations and marketing for assisted living facilities, and they were regularly having open houses and other events for the properties they managed.

Here’s the point: The pattern we *thought* we saw in our best clients was not really there at all. It was illusory. It just so happened that many of my wife’s good customers were non-profits, but that was not what was driving their needs.

They were good print customers despite being non-profits, not because they were non-profits.

To discover this, we had to look for patterns among all clients—both non-profit and for-profit And we had to stub our sales toe on all the non-profits who were not a good fit.

Now think about your situation. How many times have you been asked to look at the demographics of your customers? Are you looking beyond age and gender? If you are B2B, are you looking beyond industry, role, and company size? What factors are really driving purchases? What patterns are you missing?