When it comes to targeting customers, there are a few rules, also known as ABC’s that you will need to follow. In this week’s episode of Velocity Selling TV sale gurus Matthew Whyatt and Bob Urichuck discuss how to target effectively when it comes to finding new businesses or customers that you want to work with.
Velocity Selling TV – Episode 36 – Effective Targeting
Velocity Selling TV Episode Thirty-Six: Effective Targeting
Matthew: Welcome to Velocity Selling TV. I’m your host, Matthew Whyatt, and of course we’ve got the founder of our company, Bob Urichuck. Welcome Bob.
Bob: Hi Matthew, good to see you again.
Matthew: Great to see you too. Now Bob, we’ve been doing this for about a year, or almost a year, and you’ve asked to do a little differently today, so do you want to explain that to the nice people what you’ve been talking about?
Bob: Well exactly. What we’ve been talking about Matthew is me passing the reins to over to you and the idea being rather than you interviewing me, you’re the CEO of Velocity Selling, let me start to interview you and you can share some of your day to day activities and knowledge with our listeners. Would that be alright?
Matthew: Well that sounds great. Let’s go for it. What have you got for me today Bob?
Bob: Well ok. Let’s take a look for the first thirty-five episodes you have interviewed me as the founder and we’ve talked about a lot of different things, all the components of attitude then we went into behaviour and I believe on our last episode we talked about pay time vs no pay time. Which leads us to a whole category or whole new chapter called Behaviour towards your buyers and of course it has a lot to do with time as well because as you know the Velocity Selling system has a targeting market and we’re always looking for better ROTI. So Matthew, why don’t you share with us how to go about prospecting and how to get the best ROTI and maybe even explain what ROTI is to our listeners.
Matthew: Yeah, that’s a great place to start. This is actually where I start with a lot of my customers and it’s a little bit differently positioned in a lot of how businesses operate, a lot of businesses guide the market place ‘Hey we can get lots of these types of customers’ and very rarely are these types of customers the perfect ones. I was actually at a networking event yesterday and we were talking about the best customer for a particular individual and he was saying ‘We want companies like this’ and it was really broad and this is how many businesses guide their marketplace and keep it too broad and they have no niche and they don’t really have any targeting there. So I was on the table with them and I said well let’s narrow it down. Think about your perfect customer and what I mean by your perfect customer is if you were to start your company today, imagine if you were totally well funded and you only ever wanted to do business with the best people who pay you what you’re asking for, they value your services and they are how you want to set your business up in the future. I said categorise those people as you’re A class clients. Now, with Velocity Selling we target and we catergorise customers to A,B, and C. That’s not A for good, B for not so good, and C for crummy, we actually take that in a different way. We say A for absolute, these customers or this company is set up to service these people really perfectly. They pay us on time, they respect and value what we do and they’re able to tell others about us. So they are A for absolute- so A for amazing or A for absolute. B is for Beneficial. So everybody wins in that situation- it’s a good product, it’s a good fit for the customer and they’re still going to pay us well for our services and they respect us for what we do. Now the third category is when most companies actually get it wrong. They actually say well we’re going to go for lots of market share and we call them convenient. Now convenient customers are often going to be- give us only about 20% of our revenue, take up about 80% of our time and really are not the best customer for us. So that’s the first step in understanding how you actually go ahead and develop your market is think about the best customer you’ve got and find more of them. I know that sounds really simplistic, but so many businesses get it so wrong they just want to sell their thing but if they just target in on the one company, so this one chap at the networking event was saying something along the lines of- I said, ‘well whose your best customer, that pays you, doesn’t mind about price, that respects and values what you do?’ he said, ‘Ahh, this company’. And so I said to the table ‘Ok, so do you want more of those guys?’ He said ‘Absolutely’. So I said to the table, ‘Who else knows a company exactly like this?’ and immediately, because he was clear and specific about his A type customer, he was able to get a referral and a connection to grow his business. Because really, all we really want is business owners and as sales people is to find that one great customer in every interaction that will provide us with another great customer because then it becomes a snow ball effect.
Bob: Exactly. So it sounds like 80/20 rule: 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers.
Matthew: Absolutely.
Bob: The top 20% are you’re a customers, your absolute customers and that’s where you get the best return on time invested. Well that’s great Matthew, lets save some more for the next episode and we’ll be back in touch.
Matthew: Fantastic.
Bob: Thanks for the bringing up the importance of the ABC categories and how that all works, so until the next conversation, thank you Matthew.
Matthew: Thanks Bob, Bye-bye.
Matthew has been involved in the growth of many businesses across multiple industries including, health products, software development, IT consultancy, Real Estate and franchise sales with personal sales of over $100 million.
After all of this hard work Matthew took a year off with his wife and two children in Bali. After returning to Australia Matthew was ready to take on his next challenge, following his passion in Sales, and joined the Velocity Selling team as CEO.
