MBA1706 How to Identify Your Best Customers & Get More of Them

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's expired.

Expired in 2012.

Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico. Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood. What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got 1 line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone 5 year price guarantee on my top text and data detour to Metro.

Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile. Just bring your number. $30 first month and $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro or T Mobile in the past 180 days. Hey, welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Because a better business begins with you. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and in today's lesson you will learn how to identify your best customers and how to get more of them. Now this may be controversial, but I believe that not all customers are created equal. Some customers are just a perfect match for your business, for your service, for your product. It's a match made in heaven. These types of customers are low maintenance. They're easier to please and delight because you're exactly what they're looking for. Their lifetime value is a whole lot longer and more and they become your biggest evangelists. They tell other people about your business and bring in more customers. So focusing on identifying who these people are and getting more of them is a worthwhile cause is a good use of your time. This is the epitome of doubling down on what works. So in today's lesson I'm going to share with you a few things that have worked for me and my business. How to identify those star customers that are worth their weight in gold and then how to get more of those people. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon hoping to cash it in at the store. But then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good?

Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one?

Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to geico. Many entrepreneurs, when they look to gain more customers, they don't ask an important question. What kind of customers? Who are you looking for? A lot of us spend a lot of time, a lot of money and energy acquiring any kind of customer, the wrong customer. Instead, what you want to do is you want to find your true fans. As mentioned in Kevin Kelly's blog post, 1000 True Fans. If you're not familiar with the blog post, the theory is, is that if you have a thousand true fans, 1000 customers that absolutely love what you do and rave about it, that's all you need for a successful. You can sell a thousand people something that can make you a living. And the whole point is that those thousand people, of course, are going to tell other people when you love something. When you absolutely enjoy an experience at a restaurant, at a resort, the experience with a new product or software, you can help but tell other people about it, whether it's in person or on social, in your mastermind, whatever. The point here is, is that if you have a thousand people raving about you, you're just going to go gangbusters. So you need to find people that are perfect fit that will do that for you. Now, of course, it's not easy to get a thousand right off the bat, but you're going to start with 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 20, 100, 200. You get the point. So how do we get to those thousand people? How do we attract the right people? Well, we got to know who they are, we got to identify them. Just like if you wanted to attract great talent to your team, you would have a job description, right? You put up a job post describing, this is who I'm looking for. So what I want you to do is you're gonna start creating a description of your best customer, that avatar, that person. Now, you don't have to make this up. You don't have to come out of thin air and say, this person is made up and this is what they do and this is their type of business. Just look at your current customer base. Even if you're new, you will have those special customers, the ones that really are interested in what you do, the ones that congratulate you when you have a new product or new feature via email. They reply to your newsletters, they're on your webinars, they comment on your social posts. I want you to really do some research and identify these people in your customer list. Literally create a spreadsheet and write down their name and email address. Even if this is just like a dozen people or half a dozen people, that's okay. That's a start. Now that you've identified who they are, you got to learn a lot about them. You want to have a full understanding of who these people are individually. For example, I did this exercise, and I continue to do this exercise every single year. And I do customer interviews. So I reach out to my best customers, and I try to learn as much as possible about them. For example, one of our best customers are the merrymaker sisters, Emma and Carla Pappas. They're webinar Ninja users, and they use webinars to grow their business, to bring in new customers into their online yoga and pilates school. And in the process of that conversation, in understanding who they are, we ask questions like, why did you start this business? How long have you been doing this? How big is your team? How did you discover Webinar Ninja? How did you hear about it? Why did you choose us and not the competition? What do you like most about it? What problems does it solve for you? What's next in your journey? What are you excited about in the future of your business? I'm basically interviewing them. Like, I'm interviewing them on 60 Minutes or something or on a podcast. I'm trying to get inside their brain. I want to understand where they're coming from, why they made the decisions they made, what are the circumstances in their business that caused them to use my product? Also, try to dig a little deeper. Find out what is success to them, what are they looking to achieve? I want to know this because I want to be able to help them be successful in some way, whether it's now, with my product or in the future. The point here is that I want to be a part of that success. I'm bought in. So what's the point of this exercise? Well, the reason why you want to get to know your best customers so well is because the better you know them, the easier it is to find people like them. If you ever had an employee that left your company and they were a great employee and they did the job above and beyond your expectations, but they decided to move on or they're changing careers, it's easy to write a job description for that position, because you're basically describing that amazing team member. I'm looking for this person. And it's easy for you to do that because you know who that person is, you know what they've done, you know their story, and you're going to do the same, but for your customers. Now, one of the things that we do in these interviews, in these conversations, in these video calls, is that we actually transcribe them. We actually want to see the words that they use when they talk about themselves, when they talk about their business, when they talk about their problems, when they talk about their challenges, when they talk about why they chose our product. Why? Because, again, I want to attract people just like them. So I want to use the same language. I want to use the same language on my website, on my social posts, in my email marketing. I want my potential superstar customer to read my copy and say, they're speaking my language. This resonates with me because this is exactly how I feel. How do they know? Well, because they did the research, because they did the work. And there's nothing like that feeling when you feel like these people get me. It's hard for you to compete with a company that does that. So your competition is going to have a hard time competing with you because your target market, your customers, your best customers, are flocking to you because you're speaking their language. Now, in this process, what you're gonna find is not everybody is your best customer. You're gonna find a thread, you're gonna find, hey, all my best customers have this in common. It could be they could have established businesses, they could be making at least X amount of money. They have a small team, they've tried other products. This is a really good exercise to make a list of all the things your best customers that you've interviewed have in common. And guess what? There is your customer avatar. And what you're going to find is there's a lot of people outside of that. And that's okay, because it's better for you to attract the best customers. They're going to save you time and money and headaches and problems. What you want are the people that really believe in what you're doing and want what you have. There's nothing worse than trying to convince somebody, hey, we're number one, we're great, trust us. And they reluctantly buy and then they're disappointed. And it has nothing to do with what you did for them. It just means you guys are not a good fit. Successful products, successful services, Successful businesses don't force it. They say, this is who we are, this is who we serve. If that's you, you're going to love what we have in store for you. But none of this is possible if you don't know who those people are. If you don't know who are your best customers. And what's great about business is that success leaves clues, right? The customers that love you, that really enjoy what you do, that comment on your posts, that really like all the things on social, that open all your emails, you have their contact, you can reach out to them, you can ask them some questions. Some of us, when they do this for the first time, you feel awkward. Like, man, who am I to ask for their time for a quick chat? If you feel a little awkward, don't worry about it. They're a fan, they're going to love helping you. And if you want to be super generous, say, coffee's on you and send them a Starbucks gift card. You'll be the best $10 you ever spent.

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Up today's lesson, it's really important for you to find your best customers and attract more of them, not only because it makes good business and it's going to keep your churn down. You're going to have more repeat customers, you're going to have more money come in, more revenue, more repeat sales, all that kind of stuff. But if you don't do that, the opposite will happen, where you're gonna get more customers that you don't really enjoy serving than the ones you do. And that's a bad place to be in your business, where you don't like your customers, where you don't resonate with them when you're annoyed by them. When you have to answer an email, you kind of roll your eyes and you're like, oh, man, this person. That's a horrible place to be. And you have to be proactive about who you want to associate with, who you want to work with, who you want to speak to every day, including your customers. That's the beauty of being an entrepreneur, is that you get to choose who you serve, not the other way around. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 RMBA show. If you love what you hear, hit the subscribe button on whatever app you use to listen to podcasts. Whether it's Stitcher Radio or Apple Podcast or Spotify, we're on every single platform. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. This exercise of identifying your best customers, reaching out to them, interviewing them, transcribing it, studying the language, using that language in every external communication you on the surface, it sounds very simple. It sounds almost too simple and not enough. But I guarantee if you just implement what I just talked about today, you're gonna see a big difference in who signs up for your products and services, who finds your websites via Google because the copies change, who recommends you to other people. It's the simple but yet effective things that make the most difference in your business. Thanks so much. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Free ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care. Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood. What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Text and data detour to Metro. Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile Just bring your number $30 first month at $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro or T Mobile in the past 180 days.