Do you know who your best customer is?

You may be saying to yourself, my best customer is someone who needs a new, expensive whole home system today. But sticking with the emergency repair mentality is like standing around hoping to win the lottery. Sure, there are things you can do to better the odds, but what if there was a better way to attract the type of business you want, when you want it, rather than waiting for an all hands on deck emergency?

Finding Your Next Best Customer Depends on Knowing Your Current Customers Well

Your next best customer needs your help. They pay on time. They are easy to work with, and trust you to do a good job for them. And they also tell everyone they know about how terrific you are. But how do you find your next Best Customer?

The first step is to understand the folks who you consider your current best customers. Pick 10 to 20 of the best customers over the past two years. Look at what they have in common. If you look for these common factors, you are already part of the way to identifying your Buyer Persona. A Buyer persona is simply a profile of a “perfect” customer based on your current best customers. Ideally, they should be customized to your business and area of the Country, but you can get started by taking advantage of some research done by some of the big players in the HVAC market.

For example, Honeywell did a study to see what sorts of people would be the best market for a home energy management system- what the rest of the world now calls a Smart Thermostat- and they found three basic persona groups- The penny pincher – one who can sacrifice comfort in return for savings on their energy bill; A comfort seeker – one who would like to seek comfort and convenience through automation and technology; and the tree hugger – one who is environment-friendly and is self-motivated to save energy for the planet.

We bet you have customers that can fit into these personas as well.

If you want to drastically improve your marketing, the key is, and has always been, delivering the right messages to the right person at the right time. The more you “know” about your potential customer, the easier it is to highlight what’s most important to them, and help them make a decision that solves their problem.

For someone who is clearly a Penny Pincher, home automation features might seem over the top, unless it comes with significant savings and pays for itself quickly. But Penny Pinchers also aren’t afraid to be uncomfortable if it saves them money, so these folks may always lean towards the bottom of the line models.

In contrast, the Comfort seeker is probably high on your list of best customers. They want their home automation systems to learn their lifestyle and deliver them they comfort they want, when they want it, but also make changes to save them money when they’re not at home. These folks want something easy to operate, easy to control and monitor, and like remote access if possible. These are folks who are excited to learn that ductless could make the attic or basement rooms in their home more comfortable, and are happy to add an additional mini-split to that three-season room. They aren’t always big spenders, but the quality of life and ease of use is important to them, and they really appreciate things like Mitsubishi’s i-See technology which automatically senses and adjusts energy usage based on knowing if the room is occupied or not, automatically.

Tree huggers are customers who need to know about energy efficiency profiles, and might even be interested in hooking up a mini-split system to a solar system. They may appreciate additional comfort, but messages about overall energy efficiency and savings are higher on the priority list than the bottom line, making them more flexible on pricing than Penny Pinchers.

By going through your best customers for the past few years and identifying common traits and factors, it will help you target your marketing messages to new customers just like your current best customers. Don’t forget to look at home type and location too! By knowing as much as you can about your current best customers will help you locate other people just like them- and then deliver the right marketing message to them, to solve their comfort problems ahead of an emergency.