Advice for small businesses looking to attract the right clients and customers
Assembling your angels and displacing your devils
What a fun title. It sounds apocalyptic doesn’t it? Well, for your small business it can be.
All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin introduced me to this novel idea of identifying who I really wanted to work with and who gets the most out of working with me. In that spirit, I hope this article will give you insight on how and why you’ll want to identify the customers you want to work with most.
In the world of business we have good customers/clients and ones that we sometimes wish were someone else’s clients/customers. How we interact with them can make a huge difference in our sanity and our bottom line.
“Angels” are customers who are a good fit for you. They are easy and enjoyable to work with, and they feel your product/service is of value. Angels like the buying process. They enjoy the experience and enjoy doing business with you.
“Devils,” on the other hand, aren’t necessarily bad people. They are just not good customers for YOU to work with. These are generally the price shoppers and bargain hunters who really don’t see the value in your product/service. Their objective is often to pay the absolute lowest price they can—no matter who they work with. Devils don’t get a lot of enjoyment out of doing business with you or professionals in your space—the enjoyment they get is getting a deal.
In this context, you’ve probably been an angel customer and you’ve at times been the devilish kind. That’s okay. For you as a businessperson, you must identify your angels, those people you enjoy doing business with that want to do business with you, rather than the devils who beat you down on price. The more angels you have the more enjoyable and more profitable business can be for you.
Here’s how to assemble your angels, and then get more of them.
* Identify who you like working with.
* Determine why you like working with them.
* Catalog everything you know about your angels.
* Ask your angels what value they got from working with you and why they chose to work with you.
* Take what you’ve learned about who your angels are and find out where other ones are.
* Take what your angels told you about value and use their feedback (even their exact words and phrases) in your marketing efforts.