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Hire a marketing intern to research 500 of the top companies located within a defined range of your company (i.e. 10 miles, within your city limits, within your county, within your lower 1/3 of your state — you choose the area or market). You are doing this understanding the easiest most profitable sales should be those close to you. That may or may not be true for your particular industry but for most, proximity generally means healthy net profit. Why? There are several reasons.
Reasons why you should focus on customers close to you:
- Customers close to your firm are easier to satisfy when there are problems. You can get to them quickly. The customer will immediately feel better the moment you show up.
- Your service people can get to those customers quickly. Instead of showing up within hours, your service personnel should be there within minutes or within an hour.
- If you provide fast service to this group of customers without exception, they won’t go anywhere. You need to spoil them mercilessly; they are lucrative customers from a cost standpoint.
- Freight costs are minimal or nearly non-existent so you can beat the local competition or those other firms located out of town.
- Close customers are more likely to call you because you are easy to call and because some buyers are underpaid and simply lazy. They will not need much coaxing to remain good customers if they do not have to do much to get what they want. Take advantage of these types of buyers. Make their life easy and they will not call anyone else.
- Of all potential customers, close ones need to be researched and targeted for their increased net profit.
If location of the customer is not relevant, define other criteria. Assign the intern to seek and create a list of companies that purchase raw injected molded plastic, potential buyers of custom metal manufactured goods, buyers of scrap services or purchasing agents seeking transportation services or return loads. Define the market you are attempting to target and assign your intern the duty of researching this data to gather buyers’ names, telephone numbers, an estimate of their purchasing size, size of the company, location, email addresses and possibly their company websites.
