Who knows your clients best today?
Sales and Marketing
Your marketing team has likely defined the ideal client or target market. If they are good they’ve also built out avatars of what those clients look like. Online or offline they are generating leads for sales.
If you have a social media presence you might know who your followers are. If you are good at it you might be engaging well online and gaining further market insights; maybe even some customer feedback.
Your sales team is likely in front of or talking to prospects a good portion of the day. If they are doing their jobs and some of the prospects convert then they were there when your new clients first bought from you.
Client Managers and Customer Service
If customers or clients buy from you more than once your sales team might be building relationships with those clients. Or you may assign client relationship managers to handle that piece.
If you have to deal with irate customers, returns or other support you have some sort of customer service or technical support function.
All of these groups put together give you some insight into your prospects and customers.
When you are looking at getting more clients, delivering more value to those clients or creating new products and services; these groups might be a good place to start for gathering insight.
The Often Overlooked Groups
Some of the groups that are often overlooked are the frontline and support teams… the people who provide the product or service to the client. Sometimes they interact with your clients in profound ways. Sometimes they interact in subtle ways.
Are you encouraging and training them to capture and share insights?
What do your software developers see? What does the cleaning staff at hotels think? What does the accounting or billing department observe?
Do you know the types of clients the delivery team likes to work with? The ones that they will go out of their way to please? The ones who are nice to the folks in accounts receivable chasing down overdue invoices?
If they get great service and your team likes to help them it stands to reason those people might also be your raving fans.
Your ideal clients may not be the ones that marketing originally defined. They may not be the ones sales typically sells stuff to. They may not be who you thought they were at all.
They may be people or businesses that value your stuff way more. They may be the ones who are more profitable because of it.
Your Perfect Client
If you knew your clients so well that you cannot only define the ideal client, but the perfect client; perhaps marketing and sales could function a lot more efficiently.
Here is the thing. Everyone is in sales and marketing. Everything works better when you are serving your perfect customers because you deliver the most value.
Your perfect clients are a reflection of you, your systems and the company you have built.
