Why SMBs need customer intelligence in their toolboxes
One of your biggest clients just called you with a massive, urgent order. They are one of your best repeat customers, who always pay on time. You are very tempted to postpone another client’s job to tackle it. But which job do you postpone at the last minute?
Sales are up 200% from this same time last year—it’s GREAT news, but that data doesn’t help you figure out how to prioritize the existing billable jobs. It’s a lot of clients to sift through for a quick decision that will really impact your bottom line.
Two words: Customer Intelligence.
It's not your standard business intel
Business intelligence helps you understand your high-level key performance indicators (KPIs), like knowing your sales are up 200% this year compared to last year.
Customer intelligence tells you exactly which customers drive your business forward. Knowing that can help you create actionable insights. Like postponing projects for a late payer to make room for a more reliable client, and hopefully preventing losses like the above scenario.
Only customer intelligence would show that the client who called contributes 30% to your revenues. Thus making his project much more important to your bottom line than ALL your other current projects combined.
Categorizing your customers based on their transactions and behaviors is an optimum way to implement Customer Intelligence. Although the highest spenders are valuable customers, those who pay on time are important to your cash flow. This analysis can help you break down your best clients, form an action plan to determine their needs, and create more value for them. And your business.
Read on for 4 other key ways you can use Customer Intelligence to keep and grow your customer base.
1. Avoid customer concentration risk
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Too many sales from the same few customers, or what we like to call, “Customer Concentration Risk,” means that losing just one single customer might cause a 10-25% drop in overall revenue. If you identify this issue ahead of time, you can diversify your business more upfront, instead of having to deal with downsizing later on.
2. Group customers so you can focus
Boost your efficiency and results by grouping customers based on their past performance and momentum. Segmenting customers (to use the technical marketing term) surfaces new insights from the underlying data to inform better decisions. For example, grouping customers into segments such as “Champions” or “Give Attention” can direct sales and support resources allocation.
| Customer | Segment | LTV | Purchases | TTM Sales | Prev TTM Sales | Avg Days to Pay |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Langosh and Sons | Champion | $1,638,417 | 129 | $698,175 | $451,249 | 33 |
| Hintz Sauer Inc | Champion | $1,067,922 | 589 | $183,140 | $237,132 | 1 |
| Bailey Group | Late Payer | $964,484 | 77 | $196,467 | $332,329 | 77 |
| Lehner Hyatt Corp | Don't Lose Them | $84,938 | 4 | -- | $84,938 | 10 |
| Herzog Group | Good | $82,982 | 27 | $24,206 | $28,829 | 53 |
| Schulist and Barton | Good | $77,765 | 14 | $756 | $2,867 | 46 |
| Harber Bros LLC | Give Attention | $67,167 | 5 | -- | $33,599 | 55 |
3. Drive repeat business
A 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits 25% to 95%. The fastest way to drive revenue growth is through repeat businesses with your current customer base.
Help your sales team concentrate on customers who’ve bought before, and haven’t bought for a while, by syncing segment information as well as sales and payment histories into your CRM.
4. Get paid faster
Late payments hurt. In fact 57% of payments to SMB’s in 2020 were collected late. Completely writing off customer debt is really painful.
Customer Intelligence can analyze individual customer payment histories and use them to make predictions of which customers will probably pay on time. By better anticipating customer payment problems before they happen, small to mid sized businesses can make cash flow more predictable, improve sales-to-cash, and better manage customer credit risk.
Get started with customer intelligence
Now you can easily get Customer Intelligence to your team with Tally Street.
The first Customer Intelligence tool of its kind, Tally Street uses purchase history and behavior data to build a personalized, 360-view of your customers.
Anticipate problems before they happen. Uncover the customer stories and insights trapped in your accounting software (QuickBooks, Sage Intacct and Xero) using reports auto-created in Tally Street and then pushing them to each team in their favorite format.
Get the ground truth on all your customer analytics so you can keep each team aligned and centered on the customer. Register today for a free trial of Tally Street and get to know your customers a little better each invoice cycle.
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