Many sales experts say better understanding your customers is the secret of successful selling. Existing customers are important sources of information. The more you know about them, the more you can target other people like them as new customers and the more you can increase current customers’ spending. Customer profiling enables lawn and landscape professionals to more easily market and grow their businesses.
This was the topic during one of Thursday, Oct. 18’s Breakfast With Champions tables at LANDSCAPES. Mike Dauer, vp of business development and data at Real Green, ran the eye-opening discussion.
Customer Profiling 101
Customer profiling is, in essence, gathering key customer data to help you better identify who your typical customer is. The key areas many lawn care and landscape professionals focus on are age, home value, square feet of mowable or treatable lawn and zip code, Dauer says.
Profiling is a way of describing customers categorically so they can be grouped for marketing and sales purposes. By target advertising to a specific market segment, companies can find more success in selling a particular service. For instance, if you know homes of similar square footage and value are in a nearby zipcode to your current customers, you can target that new neighborhood in your marketing to acquire new customers, Dauer explains.
Profiling customers also allows a company to target a clear set of messages and imagery to specific customers. This can improve customer experience and improve marketing efficiency. If you knew, for instance, that your customers were mainly from a certain generation, you could target your messaging to address their specific goals to better relate to them.
Finally, the more you know about your customers, the easier it can be to increase their spending with add-on services. By identifying their wants and needs via a customer survey, you can present new services that better fit their needs.
Are You Taking Advantage of Your Biggest Sales Opportunities?
The cost to acquire a new customer is certainly not something that’s decreasing for small businesses today? On average, Dauer says the cost for acquiring a new customer is typically between $75 and $125.
As a result, one doesn’t want to waste those efforts. Dauer urged attendees to rethink the following strategies as your company has already been introduced to these customers. “We can’t know why they told you, ‘No’–we assume it’s price–but sometimes it’s just something they couldn’t do at the moment or want to revisit,” Dauer explains.
He lists the top ways to gain new customers that you might not be using:
- Upsell your current clients.
- Market to your canceled customers; you can get 10% to 15% of them back on average.
- Target your rejected estimates. They already know you so half the battle of selling is done.
- Target neighbors of your existing customers.
- Customer and area profiling.
Not one person at our Breakfast With Champions table used the above areas as potentials for new sales. One attendees, Jonathan Clare at Red Shovel Landscape in Albuquerque, New Mexico, admitted, “I’ve been hesitant to approach potential customers who have already told us, ‘No.'” They all left the table with a list of new ideas to gain more sales.
