Unlocking Growth: How Understanding Your Best Clients Can Drive Business Expansion

Getting a really good understanding of your best clients is a powerful strategy for unlocking business growth. In this article, we look at the best way to get closer to your clients, and how to upsell and cross-sell your services.

Finding the Perfect Customer

As a small business owner, pinpointing the clients you enjoy working with can illuminate what makes your business successful. Retaining these clients is not only cost-effective—being five times cheaper than acquiring new ones—but also opens avenues for upselling.

Identifying your ideal clients starts with analysing your current customer base and there’s no better way to do this than by using the data you have stored in your CRM.

Look for patterns among the clients you most enjoy working with and those who bring the most value to your business. Consider factors such as industry, company size, and the specific problems they need solving.

Once you have this information, you can create detailed ideal client profiles that highlight their needs, preferences, and behaviours.

Taking a targeted approach like this does three things:

1.????? allows you to refine your marketing efforts and tailor your services to better meet the needs of your top clients.

2.????? helps you to replicate this success with new clients (or other existing clients)

3.????? helps you avoid less profitable clients and focus your resources more effectively.

It’s also the first step in creating a more personalised and efficient customer journey.

Mapping the Perfect Customer Journey

A customer journey is a series of steps, which starts with brand awareness before someone is even a customer, that leads to purchase and eventually customer loyalty.

The bit of this journey that often gets forgotten is what comes after the sale is made. This incorporates every interaction your customer has with your brand and service delivery. It takes account of their satisfaction levels, your communication approach and even how they share their experience with others.

By mapping out the customer journey, you can identify opportunities to offer additional services or products, maximising your own business growth.

To build a rich picture to inform this customer journey, you can look at several areas:

• consider positive outcomes and measureable results from current relationships
• gather testimonials and case studies that highlight the benefits your clients have received
• conduct a thorough audit of the products and services each client currently uses and identify gaps

Once you have opportunities identified, there are lots of marketing strategies that can breathe life into them, from email campaigns alerting your existing customers to what others are saying about their experience to implementing a referral program to encourage satisfied clients to recommend your services to others.

Drawing a Product Staircase

Consider the concept of a “product staircase” to visualise what you find.

This involves mapping out a progression of products or services that provide increasing value. By presenting these options at strategic points in the customer journey, you can encourage clients to move up the staircase, enhancing their loyalty and satisfaction.

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By capitalising on what works, you can enhance and expand your service offerings, turning existing success into new business opportunities. This strategy not only strengthens your client relationships but also drives sustainable growth in your business.

If you’d like to know more about customer journey mapping, or how to use your CRM to enrich your company data, you can contact Julia on [email protected] or call 01635 592020.