Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Step
Go back a review ALL past clients and proposals (even if they didn't convert to projects). There are books and articles that explore just this one step.

Step
Architectural and Engineering design firms submit their work for industry awards. Research the awards received by your closest competitors, then read about their clients for this awarded projects. What do you notice about these special clients? Can you detect a pattern? Can you write a profile that matches your wish-list clients?

many more steps to follow ..

Jacob,

looking at your clients directly, consider not only the profit you make from them, but also the amount of money they generate for your firm - which is not quite the same thing. Look carefully at the number of complaints they make and the quality of their complaints - some will be justified others not. There are a good number of things to consider and the results won't be easy to analyze - which is why I usually ask the owner themselves to do this work! Because then they get a feel for something that is otherwise totally fuzzy. Whilst the evidence remains inconclusive, the owner of the firm will have a clear idea of what their best customers are. That is when evidence that has been overlooked suddenly becomes obvious.

Into the realms of 80-20 and you will find that at least 40% of your profits will come from the top 20% of your clients. Defining these people will do wonders for your business. Remember also that 40% of your complaints come from 20% of your clients - just removing this kind of client from your company records *can increase profits*. Because the worst clients actually cost your firm money.

You could also ask your clients to give you a review in as frank terms as possible. Including the negative sides of the business. The point is to allow them the freedom to say what they like - and since you haven't guided them, they have that opportunity. You can go through the answers as they come in and using your own definitions, discover the sort of things they appreciate about your firm and the things they don't. Don't steer the question in any way at all, and the results will astonish you. Whilst the results won't be statistically meaningful, there will be sufficient in what they say to base a real questionnaire on later should you wish. These results will give you a clear indication of how to tackle your client records so that you can discover the hidden qualities that lie beneath the surface.

In short, let the clients guide you! Sort of marketing backwards, if you will.

Any thoughts might inspire more thoughts, anyway, do have fun!

Moriarty

if this were my project, I would break down my target market into major categories (e.g., government, major contractors, other architectural firms, referral sources, etc.) and I would subdivide each category into A, B, and C class prospects.

Also, if this were my project, I would look for financial disclosure information from publicly traded competitive firms and use marketing information from their 10K and other documents as examples.

When we do projects like this, we typically start by conducting interviews with our clients' customers to ask them a bunch of questions about likes/dislikes and experiences with providers (like our clients). Then we get the client to tell us which are considered good customers, which are not-so-good customers, and which are customers they wouldn't knowingly serve again (i.e., really bad).

Armed with that information we look for commonalities in our interview notes that characterize the good, not-so-good and bad customers to see if on hindsight we could have determined in advance which would be which.

Because we are "outside consultants" the customers are almost always candid with us, so we learn things they might not be so comfortable discussing directly with their supplier/our client.

With a small sample our findings are not statistically projectable to the larger universe, but we feel like we get a pretty good picture, and our findings generally "ring true" with the client. When they don't, we probe with the client why that might be.