Financial Harmony

• By Vaughan Harshman, Ronn Schuman
• Mar 01, 2002

One way to improve your reimbursement is to improve your customers. Unfortunately, not all customers have the same attitude and ability to pay. Financial best practices begins with customer selection.

There are three common tendencies that lead to poor customer selection practices. One is that a company does nothing to select customers; they simply open the doors and invite the world to come and get it. The second tendency is to try to be all things to all people. The third tendency of business leaders is restricting customer selection to the sales function. The entire company should be involved in deciding on the right customer base. Customer selection at its best is born in the core of a company--from there it transcends every function of the company.

The customer selection process has three distinct stages: identification, filtration and penetration. Each of the stages has steps that will lead to the acquisition of customers who are more valuable to a company both economically and socially.

People tend to perform better for customers who they enjoy working with, and they get better satisfaction from the work. This is in turn, is noticed by the customer who responds with more business, referrals and open communications.

The following is a diagram and description of a system that all companies can use in selecting good customers.

The Identification Stage
List your company's core competencies by asking the question: What are we good at? List the products and services that are integrated with core competencies to produce customer solutions. For example, the core competencies of mobility dealers might include seating and positioning. The products and services that are integrated with this core competency might be custom wheelchairs.

List the problems solved with the integrated offering of competencies, products and services that customers will pay you to solve. It is important to expand your thoughts beyond what your company has been doing and beyond what you plan to do. The scope of possibilities should only be limited by what you can imagine.

List all market segments that have problems your company can solve. Be specific. For example "the disabled" is a broad category and can include ambulatory, paraplegic, quadriplegic and more.

The Filtration Stage
A list of market segments may have been identified that needs to be narrowed. The list is narrowed by a filtration process. Customers should be selected based upon their relevance to your company's vision, financial capacity, values and profit targets.

Company Vision Filter
A company's Vision Statement should provide a description of the customers of the future. Eliminate the market segments that do not fit in the future vision.

Financial Capacity Filter
Eliminate market segments that you don't have the financial capacity required to pursue and acquire. Example: A company's financial capacity is insufficient to mount a marketing campaign aimed at all Floridians. So they may eliminate all located outside East Central Florida.

Company Values Filter
Eliminate the market segments that do not enforce the values statement. Then take it a little further by eliminating market segments that the team doesn't enjoy working with.

Profit Targets Filter
Eliminate market segments that will not benefit from your three most profitable products and services.

Once the company has completed the filtration stage, the remaining market segments will be pursued.

Penetration Stage
Capture Leads
Identify leads and appropriate information about each lead from the remaining market segments.

Introduction
The company and its products and services are introduced via selected media and methods to leads from the market segments identified in the Filtration stage.

Fact Finding
The sales person probes to get specific information about the lead's problem and qualify and disqualify them as a prospect.

The sales person crafts the appropriate solution for the qualified lead. The sales person asks for the order, responds to the objections, and asks for the order.

Paying Customer
By using this system your company will have customers who are in harmony with your values and business goals. The employees of the company will better enjoy working with the customers, the customers will feel it and be more positive about your care. And that is really the result that we all want.

This article originally appeared in the March 2002 issue of HME Business.