When is it time to FIRE a customer?
When is it time to fire a customer?
We all have been faced with a situation where we are dealing with a customer that we want to get rid of. Yes, I am talking about deliberately firing a customer for various reasons. Either they are slow pay (or no pay), have unreasonable service requests, just over demanding, or a myriad of other reasons. Your management teams sometimes help you in creating arbitrary lines of disengagement such as; sales at or below this target, profitability below this target and so on. Then there is always that one customer you don’t want, but your company can’t make a decision about firing them. They might be in your target market, or a high level of sales and profit might be visible on paper. Your management team is scared to let them go, even though they know that this customer could be unethical (share your secrets), or they put unreasonable requests on your products (which just adds company overhead and costs). It’s generally the hidden costs of doing business with these customers that we, the sales and service teams see, that management turns a blind eye to. As professional sales people, we ask ourselves … “what can we do better to make this relationship better?” … “what am I missing?” … We are fairly sure that it must be partially our own company’s or principal’s fault, right? We put on our suit & tie, and go out year after year to try and improve this relationship and make it better for all, a win-win! Sometimes though, just like there are bad people in the World, there are bad customers! Yes folks, we have to accept the fact that we can’t help everyone. We need to realize that our time, effort, and our company’s assets can be better utilized with other customers. We have to ask ourselves if our time can be better spent cultivating other customers and prospecting for a better match. There isn’t a formula for this decision. Usually an objective analysis is needed for both the sales and management teams to see what is obvious to outsiders. Pinnacle Sales can offer you and your group this type of objective analysis and coaching expertise. If you have a problem, let us take a look …
We might give you the advice to fire em’ or firem’ up!
Pinnacle Sales, LLC
418 Main Street, Suite 6
Belleville, MI 48111
(734) 516-0221
Pinnacle Sales is an agency that offers support to clients in any part of the sales & marketing process. From planning to implementation,
business development to training.
Pinnacle Sales offers Service Above the Rest