Ideal Customer Metrics: User Count

In developing your ideal customer profile, here’s a great question to ask:

"Who are the customers that require the least amount of work and pay me the most?"

Everybody has that ideal customer. They're your easiest customer. They're the most pleasant to talk to and they pay you the most per user.

You can probably feel it. A sense of mutual respect and open communication in that relationship. Understanding why this customer’s needs and your offerings pair so well together will help develop your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), so let’s put them under a microscope for a minute. 

You’ve got data everywhere, whether it’s from your CRM, your RMM, or your EMS. Let’s first examine the specifics of this client, such as demographic and firmographic data. What is their location, size, age of the company, industry and technology requirements? What about their path to growth and profitability?

Next let’s consider some behavioral data. How are they using your services? How do they engage with your business? What is their company culture? Your relationship may extend beyond the typical metrics and may include shared values (psychographics).

How about the number of support tickets they are generating with you per month, and the average time it takes for you to resolve them. This dynamic might give you some insight into customer satisfaction and retention rates.

Not every metric for your best customer may exactly match the ICP you are creating. However, even examining a single metric can be quite revealing.

Let’s look at just one today.

In my former business, we loved the 10 to 20 user customers. It allowed us to simplify management and offer more personalized and efficient support. We also liked businesses with 5 users, but they were often too much investment for the return. Very specific 5 user customers, such as those in a small office performing at a very high level, generally had low overhead - meaning they were more likely to actually have a budget. Those customers made sense for us.

There was one company who I worked with who had four guys in the office and I think I charged them a thousand dollars a month because they were really high-performing. They made control modules and panels for NASA and the NFL. That was all they did. They needed really high performance computers, and so sold them water cooled, redundant, solid state supercomputers. We recabled their entire office with 10 gig copper because they were rendering massive files and they wanted faster data transfer rates.

So, just by looking at my data, at who takes the least amount of time to support per dollar, I’ve determined I love customers with 10 to 20 users, and I’ll take a 5 user customer if they’re really high performing.

User count shouldn’t be the only determining factor when building your ICP, but it’s a great place to start.

In my next post I’ll talk a little bit about optimizing your tech stack to better match your ideal customer’s requirements.