Figuring out what I'm after

I've reviewed the fields on the numerous tables in the database I'm studying, and I'm pretty sure I know what most of them mean. I guess the next step in the process is to figure out what I'm trying to find out in the data, so I can construct additional data and clean existing data accordingly. I think that it might be useful to create a method for identifying valuable customers. I might do this by creating an ordered hierarchy of customers based on how much they spent in a given year (or the average over several years) and assigning each customer a percentile. Then, by looking at the total amount spent by each percentile (likely banded to 2 - 5 percentiles per band) I could identify what percent of the profits come from what percent of the customers. (For instance, everyone at or above the 75th percentile contributed more then 60% of the total profits.)

I'm still not sure how to attack the issue of customer's spending channels - typifying what kind of customers spend how much through which avenues. I think that identifying "valuable" customers may be the first step. Much of this work has already been done (via RFM values for each customer) but I think a different approach might be to just throw out the RFM and look directly at the numbers. On the other hand, it might be enlightening to analyze the RFM values.

I'll have to do some thinking about how best to proceed; I want to find information that will be useful.