Your Sales Strategy

2. Your Target Customers

Business growth depends on creating new, profitable business with different customer types.

2.1 Generate business with new prospects.

• Target prospects efficiently. For example, analyse your top ten existing clients and identify customers with a similar profile.
• Plan how you will approach each new customer. For example, to win the custom of a key customer, you may drop your prices - creating a loss-leader - or give your product away on a trial basis.

2.2 Develop more business with existing customers.

• Set out what you will do to get existing customers to make higher value purchases, and buy different products ('up-' and 'cross-selling').
• Plan how to keep key customers happy, and build relationships (see Building customer loyalty).

2.3 Build up a mix of customers, to help safeguard your sales revenue.

Do not rely too much on one customer, especially if that customer is vulnerable to cashflow problems.

• Work out a sensible balance between time spent developing new business and that spent keeping existing customers happy.
• Be aware of, and manage, seasonal sales. Many businesses find that only ten months out of 12 bring income.