John Melchinger Sample: How to Analyze Your Base

How to Analyze Your Client Base

…and other critical factors to make your practice exceptionally profitable

A handful of truths:

The more similar the client and the practitioner are, the more likely a good relationship will develop and mutually beneficial transactions occur, in the short term and in the long term.
Analysis of the practitioner’s best business and personal relationships will show patterns of similar characteristics s/he can use to focus on segments of people with whom s/he is most likely to develop this good rapport.
For adults new to practicing financial planning, or for those already deep into their practices with large clienteles, the analytical process is the same: only the selection of the right base group for analysis is critical. You do not want to do this analysis on everyone. Choosing the right individuals to analyze takes knowledge of the dynamics of a private professional practice, as well as psychographics and the psychology of tendencies of individuals acting out their beliefs, values, attitudes and interests in their daily behavior.
There are formal tests and less formal, although clearly as accurate, analytical procedures for determining the patterns that identify groups and opportunities to serve them.
The subsequent steps include assessing the practitioner’s patterns of skills, talents and interests, then matching the practitioner’s best characteristics and skills suitably to the best targets and developing the best means to attract and profitably serve those targets.

The more similar the buyer and provider, the more likely a positive outcome, a mutually profitable relationship. The dilemma is that most marketers cannot determine what characteristics need to be matched between buyer and seller, especially in the sale of non-tangible products and professional services. Client relationship analysis simply explores patterns of attitudes, interests and other characteristics such as decisionmaking styles in common between practitioners and the clients with whom they’ve already established mutually successful, rewarding relationships, to determine what the practitioner’s most suitable relationships are and how to find more of them based on the patterns.

More than 85 percent of the time, professional financial services practitioners find their most suitable and lucrative target market segments by first doing a thorough relationship analysis before trying to arbitrarily access “the affluent” or other amorphous “markets” with which the practitioner has little or no affinity. So, first analyze and assess your client base.

The Process

1. Determine how many buyers you service in your total book of business. Specifically, how many pocketbooks do you actively service?

2. With how many of those buyers do you have mutually respectful relationships? E.g., if you called and said, “I have an idea that might fit you, and I’d like to get together to discuss it with you” the client would say, “Okay, let’s get it on the calendar”?

3. Which of those clients would you identify as being ones you would like to clone or replicate, if you have more of them? Hint: don’t just pick the biggest money clients; think through which ones you really want more of as clients.

4. Consider each of the “want more of” clients—one by one—and answer the following questions for each one of them:

Source: where did you find this person or get the name? Who gave you the lead; how did you uncover it?

Occupation: (physician, attorney, builder, manufacturing, engineer, etc.)

Specialty: (surgery, litigation, carpentry, chemicals, hydrodynamics, etc.)

Hobby: what does this person do for fun that is not business?

Activities: what does this person do in earnest that is not business?

Objective analysis based on similarities and/or compatible decisionmaking styles, values, psychographics and other factors should show you things about your proven successful relationships that will also lead the way to developing other similar relationships based on the same patterns of similar characteristics.

Second, assess your expertise, not in your own jargon and professional terms,. but in terms of the client situations in which you can solve problems particularly well. This is called situational expertise, and is the basis for people understanding what you do and what you might be able to do for them. Example, do you do “retirement planning” or help people about to retire to assure their retiring with grace, dignity, enough money and the opportunities to make choices?

Third, match your expertise and your own patterns of attitudes and interests with groups most like yourself or most receptive to your sets of skills, talents and interests. Here’s the key: do all this objectively and know yourself and how others react to you with the same precision you want to know about others who should become your clients.