Gearing Up For 2016

• Who were my best customers this past year?
• What made my best customers the best? Can I identify any patterns among this group?
• Who were my least profitable or most difficult-to-deal-with customers? Can I identify any patterns among this group?
• Did any industry or segment comprise a particularly noteworthy portion of my deal flow?
• Which of these industries or segments did I spend the most/least time researching and/or pursuing?

The goal of this exercise is to take a bird’s eye view of your year, to identify what did and did not work, and to determine what skills you may have developed in the past year that you can leverage in 2016. Let’s say you spent a lot of time in 2015 working with a specific industry, segment, organization, or professional role, and you can now honestly say you know how your solution maps into benefits they care about.  Guess what?  Simply cloning those profiles should give you plenty of prime target(s) for 2016.

You may be familiar with Scott Channell’s “60/30/10” rule, which states that 60% of your success comes from who you call, 30% comes from what you say, and 10% comes from everything else. You can make the most of the “60%” by profiling your 2015 customers (both the good ones and the bad ones) and vowing to pursue only the ones that fit the “good” profile. Bottom line, don’t waste your time spinning your wheels on bad prospects. Life’s too short.