The Best Customer Award Goes To…
- Cristina Zappullo
- Feb 3
- 4 min read
This 12-minute guide will show you how to identify your best customers.
If you think you know with your gut, you're wrong.
There's a 50% chance you're mistaken using the "Gut Method".
Imagine. You can
understand who your best customers are,
nurture better relationships with them and
understand what makes them stand out from everyone else.
This will lead to you finding and nurturing more "Best Customers".
You do want that, don't you?
Unfortunately, many solopreneurs and small business owners are often pulled in too many directions to check.
In Just 12 minutes, You can Gain Clarity on Your Strategy.
Why wouldn't you want to gain clarity on what's going on in your business?
I know some solopreneurs and small business owners are thinking:
"Give me a break."
"I have a lot of things to do"
"This is going to be challenging"
"It's easy for you to say"
"I'm just trying to survive here"
"I don't know where to find my customer list"
By the end of this post, you'll see it's actually much easier than you thought.
Let's get started!
We're going to follow Chris, our neighbourhood course creator, as she searches for her great customers.
Step # 1: Find Your Customer List and Download It
We need a record of what happened so far!
Chris determines which platform she has recorded each customer on. She begins by answering the following questions:
Do I have all my services and products listed on one platform? Shopify, Wix, and so on.
Do I use a CRM platform where I record all my sales? Hubspot, Salesforce and so on.
Do I have any other Excel files or pieces of paper that will tell me who purchased something? Maybe I need to download the file from PayPal.
In her case, all her students' acquisition records of subscriptions are on [PLATFORM_OF_YOUR_CHOICE], so she goes there and finds the displayed list of purchases and downloads.
If you're not familiar with the process, you'll find an Excel-looking option with a list of the purchases on the platform of your interest. Just go there and click on Download.
Make sure you download all the data covering last year (we'll cover time ranges in a following post).
Step # 2: Group the Purchases by Customer.
Ordering the file by amount of money alone will not give us the total amount per person.
Some of your customers will undoubtedly come back multiple times to purchase again. Ordering the file with the highest amount paid on top will result in customers being repeated throughout your file.
This would give us the wrong result.
We must have one amount paid per each person.
Next, we must order these amount values in descending order. Your best customers will be at the top of this ordered list. We will do this in the next step.
Chris is familiar with Google Sheets, which is part of Google Drive. She imports the downloaded file and makes the necessary changes. Another benefit of using this tool is that you can store all your data in one folder, ready for any situation.
You must comply with your country's data protection regulations. In Europe, it is called the GDPR.
Chris opens the downloaded file in Google Sheets and gets to work.
She must first group customers by amount. She selects
Include > Pivot > Select All > New Sheet.
She then creates a new sheet for her future pivot table and selects the correct tab. She drags and drops the name of the column in "Columns" and the name of the columns with the amount in "Values".
There you go!
Step 3: Now, let's Order the Buyers per Purchase Amount!
You're doing well so far.
We're almost there.
Stay with me.
Chris just needs to go to
Filter > Order and select the column of Purchase Value (descending order).
We now have a comprehensive list of customers ordered by purchase amount, from our largest customer to our smallest.
Is this what you were expecting? Is there anything unexpected?
Optional step: Selecting the Top 10% of Your Best Customers
If you just want to see who's on top of the list, you can skip this step.
You're done!
Well done.
If you want the exact top 10%, you'll be done in 2 more minutes.
Chris wants to send a "Top 10% Best Customer Gift Card" so she needs specifics.
She checks the total amount or rows on the left side and makes the following calculation:
[10% top] = 0.1 * [total number of rows]This determines the # rows in your Excel File from the top as your top customers.
Example: your customers fill 1000 rows > 0.1 * 1000 = 100 > The top 100 rows are your top 10% customers.
What are you going to do for your best customers?
Any Issues?
It may look complex at first, but I guarantee you'll get the hang of it in no time. If you're new to this, you're likely to have some issues.
If you cannot find the purchase history you are supposed to download, check your email. Some platforms sent them by email instead of downloading the file directly (this happens with Hubspot among others).
If you have any of these or other issues, contact us.
If it's a quick issue, comment.
If you have this question, it's likely that someone else has the same one. It's time for someone - you - to step up and take the lead!
If you think it would be helpful to have more face time, we have events where we can help you with this.
Get help from one of our experts during one of our events!
Comments