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Bad Customers Push Out The Good
By: Dr Gary S Goodman
There is a famous existentialist play that ends on a dour note.
The protagonist concludes, after a tortured process of introspection, that Hell is not a place but instead, it?s other people.
I?m not convinced that?s true, but in business Hell is a situation in which you?re helpless to select your own customers.
That is one of the perks of being in business, being able to serve a niche that you find gratifying, financially and otherwise.
For example, I know another business coach who aims at improving the performance of attorneys and law offices. He likes hanging out with his clients, and I suppose, for him, the law is the path not taken, and by serving attorneys he can still feel he?s part of that world.
Fair enough, as you can imagine, there are numerous folks who would pay good money to avoid having lawyers on their books!
To each his own, but I do know this: If you permit yourself to serve people you consider to be bad clients, by virtue of their personality or behavior, you?re going to under perform, not only with them, but with the good ones, as well.
And to put it starkly, the bad clients push out the good.
Let?s say you decide to serve basket-weavers. What?s going to happen, whether you like them or not?
You?re going to learn the ins and outs of basket weaving and you?ll speak the language of these folks. They?ll become your references, and whenever someone else considers working with you, they?ll call them to see how you performed.
Non-basket weavers won?t find basket weavers credible sources, so you?ll get stuck in a cycle, serving mostly them.
In this way, basket weavers will fill up most of your time and conscious thought and keep you stuck in a vicious circle.
The only way to take charge of your future is to identify who constitutes the WRONG client for you, and then thin out their ranks, and don?t replace them with others like them.
This can be a scary process, because you feel you?re throwing away money, and in the short term, you are. But in my experience, when you lose bad clients, almost right away, you gain better ones.
And you can feel especially good, having bitten the bullet, and taking the heat for making a counter-intuitive decision.
By having better clients, you might also find that Heaven just may be a situation in which you?ve created the luxury of interacting with good people.
Dr. Gary S. Goodman, President of Customersatisfaction.com, is a popular keynote speaker, management consultant, and seminar leader and the best-selling author of 12 books, including Reach Out & Sell Someone? and Monitoring, Measuring & Managing Customer Service, and the audio program, ?The Law of Large Numbers: How To Make Success Inevitable,? published by Nightingale-Conant. He is a frequent guest on radio and television, worldwide. A Ph.D. from USC's Annenberg School, a Loyola lawyer, and an MBA from the Peter F. Drucker School at Claremont Graduate University, Gary offers programs through UCLA Extension and numerous universities, trade associations, and other organizations in the United States and abroad. He holds the rank of Shodan, 1st Degree Black Belt in Kenpo Karate. He is headquartered in Glendale, California, and he can be reached at (818) 243-7338 or at: gary@customersatisfaction.com. |  |
