enx magazine

A new year is upon us. 2007 was a challenging year in the copier industry, and you can expect 2008 to be just as challenging, if not more. As a business owner, what will you do differently this year to help ensure that your business can continue to grow, increase profits, and have a healthier outlook for the future?

I came up with 8 questions to ponder for 2008. These questions will take thought, developing a strategy and hard work to implement them, but the reward can be more sales and profits for your company in 2008:

How many customers did you lose last year?

Do you know what happened when you lost their business? What changes are you implementing to prevent that from happening again? What are you spending on marketing to new customers versus what you spend on retaining your current customers? You may want to check. It is amazing how companies invest thousands of dollars trying to attract new customers, and spend pennies on retaining them. I am not saying that investing money to promote new business is not important, just that it may not be the wisest allocation of your resources if a lot of your current customers are walking out the door.

How profitable are your customers?

Do you know? If you have taken the time and effort to develop a reporting system that can rank on a monthly basis how profitable your customers are from highest to lowest, I commend you, and you have no doubt realized how this tool helps your decision making more productive and profitable with regards to managing your customers.

If you do not have a system in place, take the time to get organized and develop one, because it will help you to more effectively make decisions on how to find and keep profitable customers in your business. When you develop this reporting method you may be surprised that you have a lot more unprofitable customers than you originally believed. Some may even be costing you money! Don’t give up! Now that you have identified unprofitable customers, you can come up with a plan to make these customers more profitable. If you can make these customers more profitable, you will be happy to have them as part of your customer base, and if you cannot, 2008 might be time to make those customers available to your competitors.

How well do you know your customers?

Do you know who your top 100 customers are? Your customers are 100% of your revenue and 100% of your profits, so you should get to know them and their business better.

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