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We've all worked with them...

The customers who suck you dry. You give and give and give and they take and take and take. But they're never happy. In fact, they are likely saying nasty things about you and your company to everyone who will listen. You wonder why - you spend so much time with them, you help them so much - in fact you do more for them than your really great customers...

Why?

The problem with this thinking is that it's really more about us than the customer. It's a blow to our egos for a customer to not appreciate our work. If you think about it, it's almost the same pattern as staying in an unhealthy personal relationship. The more someone doesn't love us - the more we need to "help" them or convince them we're loveable. As a business owner or solo-preneur, I think we all like to think that if we just do a really, really good job then we can make every customer happy. And the more a customer complains, the more we rise to the challenge - we just need to do that one more thing to convince them that we're doing a good job.

What If I Were to Tell You To Fire These Customers?

Admit it. You dream about firing these customers. You just don't think you can or should - because the customer is always right. In fact, I bet that if I guaranteed you that there would be no fall out, you would go ahead and fire them right now.

Imagine getting rid of all the customers who talk bad about you and suck the life out of you, and spend more of your time with the customers who are profitable, refer you and appreciate and value the work that you do.

What would that mean to you personally? Would you enjoy your work more - rediscover that passion you used to have for what you do? Would you have more energy and would this energy spill over into your time with your family and your friends?

What would that mean to you professionally? Would your business be more profitable because you're spending less time trying to solve problems and deal with "non-issues"? Would you be able to spend more time developing your expertise and finding more of your ideal customers? Would you actually be able to expand your business by having more customers out there referring you - and fewer customers taking away from your business by complaining about you?

Loving Your Business Equals More Business

Identifying your ideal target client and putting processes in place to...

1. Ensure you can recognize them when you see them,
2. Weed out your non-ideal clients early on, and
3. Let go of customers who slip through the cracks.....

...is one of the most powerful things you can do for your business - both to ensure you remain energetic, happy and passionate about what you do - and create a healthy, sustainable and profitable small business. It's also a step nearly every small business skips (you know - that strategy piece) - and is one of the main reasons their marketing doesn't work.

So How Do You Start Working with More of Your Ideal Clients?

So, working with more of your ideal clients sounds great on paper, but how do you actually go about making that happen. Well, I've done this myself (yes, I also learned the hard way), and it's the first step I take with all of my clients. Here's what we do:

Step 1: Identify Your Ideal Target Client

To identify your ideal target client, gather together a list of all of your clients, past and present, and plot them out on a spreadsheet. Include columns for:

• Profitable
• Refer
• Detract
• Support Hours
• Annual Revenue
• Number of Transactions/year

For the first three columns, you can rank them on a scale of 1 to 10. You can also add additional columns that will be helpful in determining if there are any trends in the customers who are ideal and not ideal - for example, depending on your industry and type of business you could include columns for:

• Industry
• Company size
• Position of your Main Contact
• Location

There could be many others, but hopefully you get my drift.

Next, plot out your customers on a simple grid like the one below - including columns for:

• Profitable/Don't Refer - these are ok customers - and it would be a good idea to find out why they don't refer
• Not Profitable/Refer - these customers aren't detractors, and you should find out why they are not profitable - is it a pricing issue, the type of market they're in?
• Not Profitable/Don't Refer - these are your detractors and customers you should likely not be working with
• Profitable/Refer - these are your ideal clients who you should be primarily targeting

Now, take a closer look at the group of customers in your two extreme quadrants - Your Ideal Client (profitable and refer) and your Detractor (not profitable/don't refer). Are there some common characteristics you can identify right away? Are they all from a certain industry, location, posiiton in the company?

Now that you know who these companies are, you can dive in deeper and collect even more data to identify the commonalities.

Step 2: Find Out Why Your Ideal Clients Like Working With You

Now that you have identified who your current ideal clients are, you need to find out why they chose to work with you, why they continue to work with you, what they think is unique, or different about you, and why they refer you to others.

How? By talking to them. This is the stage where many business owners hesitate. They don't want to bug their clients, and they are pretty sure their clients don't want to talk about this stuff. Wrong! I thought this way too at first, but have been surprised over and over at how much the clients appreciate you talking to them, and that you actually care about their opinion. They actually see it as a form of good customer service. So if you have any hesitations at this stage, do not worry and carry forward!

I do recommend that you get someone other than yourself to interview your clients. If you have a marketing consultant you work with, or someone you trust that you can use to survey your clients, that would be a good idea. Your clients will open up more to a third party and won't be as worried about saying things just to please you.

So what do I ask on the surveys? Here are a few of the questions:

• How did you become a client?
• Why were you looking for their solution at that time?
• What problems were you hoping to solve?
• What stood out that made you want to contact this company?
• Did you seek out other providers?
• Do you remember why you chose this company over a competitor?
• In your mind, what does this company really do?
• What do you feel is this company's core difference and/or specialty area?
• If you went to their website, did you find the right information - and do you feel that the website truly reflected who the company is and what they do?
• If you were to search for a provider like this company now, where would you search?
• If you were to Google the company, what search terms would you use?
• Who do you think is this company's ideal customer? Why?
• What frustrates you about this market in general?
• Is there something you feel no one in the industry is offering that you would really like to see?
• Do you refer this company to others? If yes, what do you tell others when you refer them?

Note that it is important that you conduct this survey either over the phone or in person. People tend to at first give very vanilla answers, and it is the surveyors job to really dig down and get to the real meat of the response.

After you've interviewed 6 to 10 clients, take a look at all of the surveys and again identify any common elements. You will likely start to see a theme emerge at this point. This theme often reveals what your ideal clients view as your core difference.

Note that this is often a shock to companies. Why? Because what they thought was their core difference, and what they had likely been communicating via their marketing this whole time - was not the same core difference that resonated with their ideal clients. In fact, their marketing message could have been attracting all of those bad customers. Something to think about.

But now you have the information. You know what your ideal client values about you, and now you can adjust our messaging and branding to attract, educate and converst - you guessed it - more of these same clients.

Step 3: Get Rid of Your Detractors

For some companies, depending on the nature of your business and your customer cycle, you may be able to simply begin phasing out your non-ideal clients. Simply don't offer them a renewed contract or renew thir term. But for many companies, you will have to be a bit more pro-active. And this is hard. After all, it's scary to give up revenue, but keep in mind from your earlier analysis - that if these clients are truly detractors - then you're actually gaining profitability and protecting the long-term health of your company.

And no, you don't have to outright fire them. You can think of creative ways to "move them on to other providers". These clients may not be ideal for you, but may fit in better with another provider you know. While some detractors may be evil clients, most are not. Most are simply a bad fit - and would be a better fit elsewhere. Having a conversation with them about how you feel that because your business focus is on X and their needs are more in lines with Y, you feel they would get better results from vendor Z and you would be happy to refer them.

If you do need to end the business and don't feel you can recommend the customer to someone else, your option are either to let your term run out, or have that conversation. If you have to have that conversation, be professional and diplomatic and stay away from any accusations or blame. I usually focus on my need to provide the best possible value for my clients, and I feel that they would get better value from a consultant who is a better fit.

Step 4: Outline What Makes Your Ideal Customer Tick

You already have some great information about your ideal clients from your customer surveys. Now you can do a little bit more research as to what makes them tick. Here are some question to investigate and answer:

• Where do you find these clients? Where do they hang out online? What do they read? What events do they attend? Who do they partner with?
• What are the main triggers that would cause them to need a company or service like yours? These are their problems.
• What type of common behaviors do they exhibit? Are they movers - do they care about their industry and feel a strong need to participate in industry associations?
• Are they educators - do they care about really helping their clients get the most? Are they skeptics - do they believe everyone is really saying the same thing and no one is delivering results?

Once you have these answers, it's time to create a biographical sketch of your ideal client - sometimes called developing a persona. Below is a handy sheet you can download to help you with this step:

Get Started On Identifying Your Ideal Client and Creating Your Complete Small Business Marketing System

Identifying an ideal target client that is both profitable an will refer you is the first step we talk about in the Duct Tape Marketing System. More on this step, and the other 7 steps can be found in our free small business guide, The 7 Steps to Marketing Success. This guide was written by Duct Tape Marketing founder and best-selling author John Jantsch.

Download this free guide to small business marketing written by best-selling author, John Jantsch by clicking on the button below: