Single out your best customers and create a strategy to serve them better.
The old "80/20 Rule" applies: In an established business, 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. These are the customers to focus on. If you don't know who they are -- if you can't list them in order of decreasing sales -- find out. Analyze your sales and make a list -- and hang that list where you can see it every day. And every day, ask yourself, "How can I build my sales with these customers? How can I strengthen my relationship with them?"
It's as easy as growing award winning pumpkins. Here is how the pumpkin planning process works:
1. Plant promising seeds.
2. Water, water, water.
3. As they grow, routinely remove all of the diseased or damaged pumpkins.
4. Weed like a mad dog. Not a single green leaf or root permitted if it isn't a pumpkin plant.
5. When they grow larger, identify the stronger, faster-growing pumpkins. Then, remove all the less-promising pumpkins. Repeat until you have one pumpkin on each vine.
6. Focus all of your attention on the big pumpkin. Nurture it around the clock like a baby, and guard it like you would your first Mustang convertible.
7. Watch it grow. In the last days of the season, this will happen so fast you can actually see it happen.
Pumpkin farmers hold the secret formula for big-time entrepreneurial success. Your get-out-of-jail-free card. The Holy Grail. The missing link. There it is, in black and white...and orange. The answer you have been looking for, for years. Treat your company like a giant pumpkin.
Here is what I hope you understood when reading the above:
1. Identify and leverage your biggest natural strengths.
3. As your business grows, fire all of your small-time, rotten clients.
4. Never, ever let distractions--often labeled as new opportunities--take hold. Weed'em out fast.
5. Identify your top clients and remove the rest of your less-promising clients.
6. Focus all your attention on your top clients. Nurture and protect them; find out what they want more than anything, and if it's in alignment with what you do best, give it to them. Then, replicate that same service or product for as many of the same types of top client as possible.
7. Watch your company grow to a giant size. Grow your business to be a giant "pumpkin."
Caution: A say-yes-to-everyone strategy can not be sustained over time, and it actually stunts growth. It spreads you too thin, wasting energy serving clients who would never make you rich; and in serving them is taking precious time away from the clients with whom you enjoy working, and who could make you rich.
Like a geeky, freaky farmer of mammoth pumpkins, you would now focus all of your attention, time, love, support, creativity and energy on the most promising clients in the "patch."
Sources: Mike Michalowicz: The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field
