A-Class Above

Our most recent newsletter at Hot Pyjama Productions:

Getting to Know Your ABCs; Spend better, get more, win big.

You may have heard the saying; “Aim for nothing and you’ll hit it with alarming accuracy”. When it comes to your marketing spend, an amendment of this applies; ”Aim for nothing specific and you’ll hit it with alarming accuracy”.

The core foundation of marketing is selecting a market and selling to it.

Many people make the mistake of saying “Clearly we want everyone to buy our product or service, so our market is everyone”. Feel free to shoot for this target if you have an unlimited marketing budget!

If you’re in business, it’s essential that you classify your customers by various characteristics so that you can better market to your key audience. These categories are traditionally called A-class, B-class, C-class and D-class.

Why categorise?

Knowing your ideal target customer will drive your entire marketing campaign and give your brand some purpose. You’ll know you have a preferred client when you first say no to a prospect.

Spend money attracting a client that will cost you as much money as you’ll get in return and you have a recipe for failure.

Let’s put it in terms of Hot PJ. This morning I had a call from a man, let’s call him James as that was his name, who wouldn’t tell me anything about his company and wasn’t interested in meeting. He was after a price for a single-page website and had no idea about how much he would want to spend.

We pride ourselves in getting to know our clients well before carrying out a project. We take our client’s marketing so seriously that we would’nt be able to sleep at night if we created something for a client that we knew would be a waste of their money. But to know this, we need to get to know our clients better. Any prospect who doesn’t want to tell us about their goals before asking us to be responsible their all important marketing is politely referred elsewhere!

If we marketed to everyone, no one would know the values behind our business processes. We would have more and more prospects of the above nature and the Hot PJ name would lose its credibility as a marketing company.

Class categories

Classes can be categorised via a whole variety of means. These include (but are by no means limited to):

Spend - Not just your revenue but your actual profits. Some clients may be giving you heaps of sales revenue but for sales that are high in costs. Others may spend less but provide you with more profit.

Industry - Are your clients from specific industries? Are they white-collar or blue-collar?

Region - Are your clients within walking distance of your office? Do you market worldwide? If so where is easiest to sell your product to?

Age Range - You may have clients from a full range of ages but which age range is likely to spend more with your company? Which age range finds your company through the cheapest methods?

Employee Numbers - How many employees do your clients have?

Business Practices - Which of your clients know what they want? Which have a budget of exactly what they want to spend?

Knowing your ABCs

So let’s look at what these classes represent and what you get in return for targeting your marketing. For each, we’ll reveal a little bit of inside information on our own clients to give you an idea of the classes put into practice.

D for Donkey

The D-class. These are clients you may have obtained through their “pushing” rather than your “pulling”. These guys shop around for price, are constant bad payers and will happily complain about your company to others. Needless to say, these clients can be happily sacked and no money should be spent chasing them.

Our own D-class will never be interested in meeting face to face, give us the minimum of info and will give knee-jerk reactions to price without investigating the benefits. We would pass these clients in the street without any recognition.

C for Casual

The C-class consists of those clients that will buy off you but not for any particularly well thought out reason. They may pay on time and they may give you occasional repeat business but they are just as likely to pass on through and deal with the next guy.

Our C-class are clients that will do business with us because we happened to be the cheapest at the time. They’ll present us with little information for a project but this could be because they refuse to spend the time with us to establish exactly what they want for their own business. We may recognise these clients in the street but we’d try to avoid contact or enter into an awkward conversation!

B for Basic

Your B-class clients are those with the most potential to become A-class. You may deal with them on a fairly regular basis and yet have little of a real relationship with them. If they have a problem with your service or product, they are at risk of looking elsewhere without telling you the problem and giving you a chance to rectify it.

Our B-class clients are aware of the need for good marketing but have not yet got round to investing the time into establishing a full marketing plan and budget, although they are aware or open to the need for one. We’d stop to chat in the street and invite them for a coffee to further our relationship.

A for Awesomeness

Ahhh the top-profit class. To describe your A-class category, you will need to evaluate the best customers you have now and the ideal customer you would like to attract. Take the top 20% of your clients, lay them side by side and determine which characteristics they have in common. Group these characteristics together and you’ll have your ideal target market.

These guys understand the merits of your product or service and they see the benefits in choosing you over the next guy. They will be approached by other companies as they are a desirable client, but they’ll give you a heads up and give you the opportunity to show your worth before they make their decision.

Our A-class clients are known to all of our staff by name. They have a marketing plan (or want us to help them make one) and either a well laid out budget for us to work too, or ask us for some assistance with working out what budget would be best for them. They would go out of their way to recommend you to other clients that they personally think would help your business.

We’d not only stop to talk to them in the street, but invite them in for a coffee and a slice, chat about our personal life and wax lyrical about how wonderful our working relationship has become!

The underlying message here is that your most profit is going to come from your a-class.

So, you want to keep your a-class happy and encourage more customers of the same characteristics.

The only way you will be able to attract more of these customers is to know who they are, what marketing they respond to and how best to focus your marketing on them.

Do this well and not only will your bank manager be happy, but you and your staff will have a better sense of satisfaction through carrying out great service for your preferred clients.