Ideal Customers for you
If you completed the Retail V Wholesale spreadsheet , you may already know about who you may be wanting to sell to this year. This next section is going to be about your ideal customer, so we can know about the prices and costs of selling to them. Please note: your ideal customer may change over time, but it's important you come back to this exercise each time it does.
Who is your ideal customer?
if you don't know the answer, you can't know how many customers you need, what you should sell to them, or at what price points, and you don't know where to find them.
A generalisation here isn't any good, you need a build a picture in your head of who it is, (if you've already got customers) or who might be your ideal customers.
I'll give you 3 examples
My ideal retail customer is Mrs Simons, (made up name, but i am thinking of a particular customer). She is a lady who has always loved having flowers, but didn’t know much about them or how to arrange them. Her personal circumstances now mean she has more time to spend on crafts, and the wherewithal to come to workshops and flower clubs as well as buying flowers regularly to arrange herself. She’s in her 50’s with children left home, and drives a mid sized vehicle, in which she can fit buckets of flowers in the back seat.
My ideal wholesale client is Dawn, She's got a lovely boutique florists shop in a village about 25 minutes away. She is a skilled florist and loves flowers and plants herself. She lives near her florist shop, and drives a mini, which she can cram an awful lot of flowers into each week.
My ideal wedding customer is Emily, her mum lives in my local village, and she’s having a big party in the back garden, and getting married at a registry office with just close family. She’s got an aunt who is helping to do the party table arrangements, who’s savvy about flower arranging, but happy to work with whatever she’s given. Emily and her fiancé are both keen on organic and sustainability, and just want to make sure that the bridal flowers don’t clash with the bridesmaids dress colour, but they have no particular colour theme.
An ideal customer won't make you stressed
You'll enjoy working with them, and look forward to the next opportunity.
You won't be worried if you see their name come up on your phone.
You'll know them well enough that you'll be able to look at what you're growing and think "Dawn will like that"
They'll pay on time
Your exercise is to think about your ideal clients, - if you are going to sell to more than one type of customer, then do this exercise with each. There is a downloadable resource to print off below