Segmenting your customers
The secret to Proactive Outreach
When taking care of our existing customers – we often know that we want to have a program of proactive outreach in place. However – how do we fit it all in? How do we give our customers the attention and service they need and deserve, with our limited resources?
The secret is simple. We need to segment our customer base, so that we can allocate more of our time to the customers that need it.
Make a list by Annual Spend
The simplest way to do this, is to look at your customers by how much they spend with you across a year. This gives you an immediate picture of the customers that are the most important to you as a business. It also gives you a picture of which customers expect and deserve a bit more of your time, because they are spending more with you.
Think about it as if you were the customer. As a customer, the more you spend on a service or solution, the higher your expectation of the level of contact and service from that business. So keep this in mind when you put your own business hat back on, when you are supporting your existing customers.
Divide into Groups
Once you have a list of your customers and how much they spend with you in a year, you want to break this down into three or four groups.
The top group, those spending the most with you, should the top 10% of your customers, roughly. So if you have 30 customers, it will be your top 3 customers, by spend.
The next group, should be approx next 40% of your customers by spend. So if you have 20 customers in total, you would have about 8 customers in this group.
You can split this middle group in two, if that makes more sense for your business and resources.
The third and final group are the rest – which will make up the bottom 50% of your customers.
Make a Contact Plan
Then you want to make a simple plan of how often you will reach out to them, and in what way. Your top group, you want to meet more often and with more direct connection – in-person ideally.
The second group, a bit less – but still often enough to ensure you are connecting with them directly across the year.
The final group, who are likely to only be spending a small amount of money with you each year, you may choose to just contact via email, and check in via phone periodically.
Adjust to Suit your Business
Once you have created your base level groups and a plan, look at it with a critical eye to see if it makes sense for you. If you have limited resources for proactive outreach, you can adjust the frequency of your outreach and the style of outreach in your plan, to be realistic for your resources.
The key here is – don’t try and over stretch yourself with too much outreach. You’ll just burn yourself out and not provide a great service. Also – don’t resort to email only contact. Your customers are your best asset and you need to build in some time to connect with them, to ensure they continue to work with you.
Once you have this in place, you can start thinking about how to make the most of the meetings when you do catch up. For this, I recommend implementing a simple system of health checks, to ensure you make the best use of the time.
To learn more about how to implement segementation, health checks and other ways to build business with existing customers, join me on our 4-Week Customer Success Course starting 1st Nov.
