The answer, obviously, is no.
Your customers are not created equal. Give or take a few percentage points, 80 percent of your sales will come from 20 percent of your customer base.
It is wise, therefore, to categorize your clients into five distinct categories. Use -5, or AE (or some other rating system that you develop), with 1 or A being your best and most profitable clients and 5 or E being the clients with whom you spend a great deal of your time but from whom you make very little profit.
” Twenty percent of the customers account
for 80 percent of the turnover; 20 percent of the components
account for 80 percent of the cost and so forth.”
Vilfredo Pareto, Pareto’s Law
After you have categorized all of your customers, I suggest that you “fire” the ones that make up the bottom of the list. I know that this sounds like a bold thing to do, and maybe even a little bit crazy, but you will find that your business is more profitable in the end.
The easiest way to rid your business of the troublesome “low-end” clients is to raise your prices. Again, this sounds like a bold thing to do, but your better customers know that price isn’t everything.
Your business should have the service and value to back up your prices. A price increase should send your “low-end” customers to your competitors.
Believe it or not, you will benefit from this. These customers don’t care about the value that you offer and they take up a lot of your time.
These clients are not interested in anything but price. Let them go! Let them slow down your competitors and give them the headache of being busy for very little profit.
Meanwhile, you will be able to spend your valuable time working with the better customers on your list. You already know that most of your profits come from your best clients. Therefore, focus on keeping only the better clients.
Work to get all of them to the “number one” category by offering amazing value when they give you their business.
How many clients do you have in each category?