It’s important for any business to know who their most profitable customers are.
If you’re a juice bar, your customers who spend the most may necessitate some extra attention. If you’re a consultancy firm, your least profitable clients may not be worth another contract renewal… and so on and so forth.
To figure out who earns you the biggest margins and the most net revenue, best practices dictate that you perform a customer profitability analysis.
Doing a customer profitability analysis isn’t necessarily complicated, but you’ll need to get your hands on the correct data, i.e. how much each customer actually costs and how much they actually earn the business.
From there, simple formulas will get you to your answers.
Using a template is a great way to save time on doing a profitability analysis. We’ll show you a few no-mess, 100% FREE templates you can find online (no credit card required).
Let’s start even more basic with this question– what is customer profitability?
Here’s a great answer from our partners at HubSpot:
Customer profitability is a measure of how profitable a specific customer is. This metric compares how much revenue a given customer generates with the company's spending on acquiring or retaining that customer — in time, resources, or other costs.
Ipso facto, a customer profitability analysis will help you arrive at specific figures that tell you how profitable your customer is.
To perform a customer profitability analysis, you’ll need to figure out how much revenue the client generates plus how much it costs your firm to service that client.
To get your hands on these numbers, you’ll need to take a look at your project data to see how much time, expense, and other resources have gone into said client.
You’ll also need to check your CRM for reports on marketing and sales costs incurred.
Take a look at your invoicing data in your accounting solution to see how much has been paid out by the customer.
If you’re in professional services and use a project-based revenue model, you’ll then put these numbers together to figure out:
These figures from your customer profitability analysis will let you know how much money the customer brings in after costs, the average profit they bring in per project, and your profit margins on that customer.
It’s also recommended to engage in some kind of time and energy analysis. That is, after you know the cold, hard numbers, garner feedback from your team as to whether or not their time and energy is put to good use for said profits. This can go a long way in promoting empathy in your company culture and developing soft skills in your organization.
For more details on how to do a customer profitability analysis, check out this article to get a good feel for what you need.
Ready to do your customer profitability analysis? Make things easy with a template. You can easily do your profitability analysis with Excel or Google Sheets.
There are lots of free templates that pop up on Google, but not all of them are actually free. Many will make you subscribe and/or enter your credit card info.
Not here. These are truly gratis, no strings attached. Here are 10 FREE customer profitability templates to choose from:
A great way to stay on top of your profitability, particularly if you’re in ecommerce, is by segmenting your customer base with what’s called buyer personas. Here’s a link to HubSpot’s buyer personas template, along with a customer profitability example template below:
For medium-sized businesses and really all businesses who are growing, this downloadable FREE customer profitability template (Excel) is a great tool from Rhythm Systems to help CEOs and owners get a handle on who are their most profitable clients.
Need to present your customer profitability analysis in a powerpoint presentation? This FREE template is a great place to start.
Power BI is a great resource to generate all sorts of reports. Learn how to configure your customer profitability report with this sample here. FYI– you can get this custom template using the free Power BI license.
Profitability analysis is exponentially easier when you don’t have to do any of it yourself. The most tedious part of the analysis is finding all your numbers, which may ‘live’ in various software solutions and spreadsheets.
Getting a hold of all that information can take up a lot of time. Not to mention, all that manual data entry can leave you vulnerable to errors…
There’s a better way!
Professional service businesses can simply use PSA software to generate customer profitability reports with a couple clicks.
Instead of spending time trying to locate all your relevant data for customer costs– from marketing to time and expense spent on services, etc– all this information can be aggregated from a PSA tool that’s integrated with your CRM. The PSA solution then simply generates the report.
For example, you can use the Smart Quotes feature by PSOhub to run profitability reports that can show you your margins on all your customers.
Because PSOhub integrates with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Dynamics 365, all your relevant customer data from both sales and projects can automatically be pulled into the report.
It’s the easiest, fastest, most accurate way for professional service businesses to find out their profitability metrics.
To see how it’s done, schedule a demo with PSOhub. Or you can dive right in and start your FREE trial today!