Don't Be Desperate
Customer Fit & Purging Customers
We’re taught startups and businesses should do anything for early customers.
“Edit your contracts, adjust your pricing… Whatever it takes to close, close, close!”
Candidly, if customers are hard to close— you need a new sales strategy.
Or a better product!
If prospects don’t immediately throw money at you— you haven’t found your customers yet.
You are not solving a real problem.
Everyone also talks about making sure that hired employees fit their company.
“Culture, Culture, Culture!”
But no one ever talks about customer fit.
There are customers you do not want.
Even if these customers are willing to pay triple your normal rate— this second!
In any business, there are easy customers and there are problem customers.
From personal experience:
80% of customers are “easy” customers
15% of customers have occasional questions/concerns
5% of customers are absolute nightmares
This 5% of customers email and call you relentlessly whenever there’s a minor issue.
Frankly, they are annoying and stressful— literally.
They put stress on your team’s valuable time and resources.
How is your team going to succeed when 5% of customers eat up their valuable time?
There are customers whose money you do not want.
When you factor out their cost on your team— they are incredibly unprofitable.
One of the best decisions
made at Scale Online was to regularly review our customers.We’d look at our customer list every few months and see who was straining resources.
Then inform them it isn’t a fit— canceling their subscription and refunding them.
Next time your inbox is full of the same few problematic customers— drop them.
You are better than that.
There’s nothing more freeing than refusing someone’s money out of principle.
You will never know true peace until you cull your problematic customers.