How To Segment Your Rural Customers Quickly And Easily

To grow your rural business you need to understand the buying behaviour of your customers.

Having that data on hand means you can make informed decisions about which customers you should invest most time and energy in, and which ones you won’t.

Amazon nail this with their algorithms when they suggest a new item or book that matched the one you’ve just bought or is still sitting abandoned in your cart. Every mouse move you make or click is recorded.

Like it or not, this allows them to be super relevant and suggest extra purchases that a I go for at least. Good on Bezos.

When it comes to your rural business you don’t need these fancy algorithms. You just need 3 metrics which we call RFM:

Recency

Frequency 

Monetary

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist or have a super-duper expensive CRM system to work this out.

You just need your numbers and a few nifty excel formulas.

Those that have bought from you recently and more frequently in more amounts are your HVCs (high value customers). These are the guys and girls you need to be targeting and seeing more often.

The problem is when you don’t have this data.

It means you and your rural sales team are guessing who their priority customers are. They are flying blind doing their “milkmen” sales rounds with those customers that they are comfortable with, rather than the ones that challenge them to become better.

Because of this your team maybe be over-servicing their lower-value customers (LVCs) and under-servicing highest-value customers (HVCs).

We see this sales crime occur all the time.

You don’t want this to happen when you think of the opportunity cost and lost sales revenue involved.

Do not leave your sales team to their own devices. Guide them and support them and their decision with the right data.

Make sure they are calling on your HVCs and not your LVCs. Work out identifying what else you can sell your HVCs as buyer is a buyer. If someone is willing to buy from you once they’ll continue to buy from you so long as you keeping offering them value.

That way you’ll make more money.