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When you’re first starting your business, you’ll say yes to anyone who wants to work with you. You need the money and are mildly terrified of turning away customers.
But then you get established, and your tolerance for bullshit plummets. You start to value your time and sanity more than money. If you’re good at what you do, you have the luxury of being pickier about who you work with.
The tough part is learning to sift the wheat from the chaff.
WHY IT MATTERS:
You want to spend your limited time and resources on customers you enjoy and who are the easiest to work with. Creating a system for pre-qualifying your customers can help you weed out the problem customers and better identify the ones who are worth investing your time into.
WHAT’S NEXT:
Identify Your Best Customers
Looking For Red Flags
Looking For Green Flags
Find Your Golden Question
Using Your Process To Prequalify Customers
When In Doubt
Identify Your Best Customers
Much like in dating, customers are on their best behavior early on (usually), making red flags hard to spot.
In dating, you loved it when your date said they love animals - until you visited their home for the first time and realized that by “loves animals,” they meant they love decorating with taxidermy.
Being able to spot the customer version of “decorates with taxidermy” is a handy process to build.
Building a prequalification process will help you more quickly identify customers who are a great fit and spot the fox in the hen house so you can lock down the coup.
What prequalifying customers looks like
Every service will be different.
In-depth services, like a parenting coach, may have a more obvious prequalification process. If you offer a sales call, then your sales call is just as much about seeing if a customer is a good fit for you as you are for them. Your prequalification process can be baked into your sales process.
For services that are more straightforward, like landscaping or housekeeping, the prequalification process may be more subtle. It may just come down to how a customer communicates with you and the types of questions they ask. The key is to know what you’re looking for.
Your prequalification is something that you grow over time based on your experience. You start to notice patterns.
For example, a common pattern I hear from people is, “Every customer that says, I like to work with people based on trust, ended up being untrustworthy.”
Will some crappy customers slip through the cracks? Of course.
Will some good customers getaway? Also yes.
It’s not a perfect system, but a process that ultimately saves you time and frustration so you can focus your energy where you want - with your best customers.
Looking For Red Flags
Just like we aren’t perfect, we can’t expect our customers to be perfect. There are certain, shall we say, quirks that we accept because, overall, they’re a good customer.
We don’t want to fully dismiss a customer based on a moment that, without context, looks like a red flag. However, identifying those moments should signal that we need to watch for other signs that the customer may not be a good fit.
With that, keep in mind that what’s one person’s red flag is another’s beige or green flag. The key is to identify what you consider a red or green flag based on how you work best.
I’ll share what I consider generally true based on my own experiences and others I’ve talked to, and you can use that to guide your own red flag criteria.
Red Flags To Watch Out For
🚩 They seem like they’re trying to convince you of how honest, trustworthy, or great they are.
🚩 They do the customer equivalent of “all of my exes were crazy”
🚩 “So and so” is cheaper
🚩 They want fast, quality, and cheap
🚩 Pushing for you to go outside your scope or established process
🚩 “If you give me a good price, there’s a lot more work in it for you.”
🚩 They start treating you like an employee
🚩 Complaining about the price
🚩 Insisting on paying after the service is complete/delivered
🚩 Needing constant, instant contact
🚩 They have unreasonable expectations
🚩 Tries to reach you through multiple channels because you didn’t respond to the first message within an hour.
Important side note: Good people can exhibit red flags. Red flags in this context is a way to identify who is and isn’t a good fit. If someone struggles to communicate clearly, it doesn’t make them a bad person, just not a good fit for you in particular.
Looking For Green Flags
One of the tough lessons to learn when you run your own business is that who we may like personally may not make for a good customer, and vice versa.
Just like we want to look out for customer red flags, we want to actively look for customer green flags so we don’t dismiss a customer who may not be someone we’d want to hang out with but makes for an excellent customer.
It’s nice when a great customer is also someone who we personally enjoy being around, but the priority is that they don’t make your work more difficult than it needs to be.
Green Flags To Look For
✅ They can communicate what they’re looking for clearly
✅ They communicate if/when they are unable to complete something or show up for an appointment in a reasonable amount of time
✅ They respond and complete tasks in a timely fashion
✅ They ask good, clarifying questions
✅ They know what’s most important for them and can prioritize desired outcomes
✅ They may ask questions about your process but respect it
✅ They’re able to communicate what they didn’t like with past services without bashing them
✅ They know what they can afford and can adjust expectations based on that
Find Your Golden Question
The Golden Question is something you can ask to see if your customer’s values align with your business.
BarkBox, one of my absolute favorite companies of all time, asked their customers a single question to help better identify their ideal customers.
“Do you buy your dog Christmas gifts?”
The type of person who buys their dogs Christmas gifts is probably a little over the top in a fun way. They consider their dogs their “furbabies” and aren’t afraid to spoil them.
Someone who buys their dogs Christmas gifts is much more likely to be a fantastic customer for BarkBox.
Parenthetical
BarkBox is also an absolute genius for marketing and social media. Who ever runs their social media, especially their comments section, deserves a medal and raise.
Brainstorm about what shared values you and your ideal customer may have and the traits you appreciate in your favorite customers.
Do you value a customer who is trusting and not a micromanager?
Do you value a customer who has an adventurous spirit and a willingness to try things out?
Do you want someone who values quality above all else?
Then think about a related, existing behavior that would reflect those traits.
Here are a few examples:
A Funky Interior Designer
The Golden Question: Do you re-arrange your furniture (and maybe the paint colors) a few times a year because it’s fun to change things up?
The Shared Values: A sense of fun, a willingness to try new things, and an adventure mindset.
Personal Stylist
The Golden Question: Do you have a closet full of clothes but actually only wear a handful of outfits because those are the ones you look the best in?
The Shared Values: A “fewer but better” mindset and prioritizing one’s own comfort and confidence instead of worrying about others seeing them wear the same outfits repeatedly.
Dog Trainer
The Golden Question: Is your dog the Robin to your Batman, your sidekick who goes with you everywhere you go - even to the bathroom?
The Shared Values: A dog is a true companion and not just something one owns and leaves at home.
When and where to ask your Golden Question
The answer to this entirely depends on how you operate your business. Most often, you’ll see a Golden Question as part of a form or an ad. You can also ask in person, on sales calls, during a consultation, or anywhere else you feel comfortable asking.
Like with almost everything, experiment and see where it’s most natural and useful to you.
Using Your Process To Prequalify Customers
Once you identify what customer behaviors and traits are most important to you, you can start identifying what parts of your process may indicate that they have those qualities.
For example, if a customer’s ability to make decisions quickly is one of the most important traits you look for, a customer who requires multiple meetings before they decide to work with you would indicate that they may struggle with decision-making.
If your service requires a lot of customer involvement, how well they handle providing you with the information you need before a consultation or sales call is pretty indicative of what it would be like to work with them.
If you don’t have much of a process, look at building one to help you better identify your best customers. It doesn’t need to be lengthy, but a step or two that helps filter the right customers to you.
When In Doubt
Our guts aren’t always right, but when it comes to determining things like your safety or who you accept into your life and business, I’m a fan of listening to it unless it has a record of being wrong more often than not.
So if something just doesn’t sit right with you about a customer, you don’t need to justify it. You can say no. Even if your gut is wrong once in a while, as long as it has a strong batting average, then I’m okay with it being wrong sometimes when it comes to protecting you.
That works the other way, too. Sometimes you just have a good feeling about someone. If you feel it strongly, take the leap of faith. You’ll either be right, or you’ll learn a lesson.
THE BIG TAKEAWAY
If you have the luxury of being pickier about your customers, you need a prequalification process to not only weed out the bad customers but also help you identify who is likely to be a great customer.