What makes a good customer? What makes a bad customer, and how do you become a good one yourself?
In nearly every business, it's assumed that you should take every possible customer you can get, because Growth.
But what if one of the first things you do as an owner or manager, is determine what makes a great customer? After all, it's about product-market fit. Or said differently, customer-business fit. And you do have the ability to fire customers, or users, if they don't fit with your company's core values.
When you create something completely unique and fundamentally valuable, customer's will want to buy what you have because there's nothing else in the world like it. So you get to set the rules. Nowhere is it written that you have to accept everyone into your business.
Just like "no shirt, no shoes, no service" you can define rules for customers like "respectful communication" and if a customer or user berates your team members, they are blocked from using your product or service.
You have the ability to flip the model on its head. You need to value yourself and your business. When your product or service is so good that you use it for yourself to build yourself, your team, and your business better, then it doesn't matter if your user count or customer count = 1. Because you continue to compound your capabilities.
So what are our customer principles?
Good Customer Principles
- Strong budget
- Trusts the provider
- Implements the instructions
- Values the help
- Achieves returns
- Cites the source of value
Defining a Good Customer
Let's break each of them down:
- Strong budget. If you have champagne taste but a beer budget, you don't understand the value or difficulty of what you're asking. If you want to grow 15% per month, every month, and you're only willing to pay a few thousand dollars per month, then your expectations are far off base. On the flip side, if you're a CFO and you are viewing investments through the lens of ROI and speed to realization, then you know that a $1M budget is cheap if you earn $10M from it. You'll beg me to give you that return in a year.
- Trusts the provider: If you want to micromanage or question an expert in their field, then why are you hiring the work out to someone else? Why don't you just do it yourself? You don't have time and just need a warm body to fill in a gap? Well, in that case, you're looking for a slave, not a warrior. We're not cool with the former, but we take the latter seriously.
- Implements the instructions. You take the spec for success and implement it. You don't question it and try to edit it or debate it. If you sit on the instructions, change them, or never implement them, then why hire the provider in the first place? It's a waste of everyone's time.
- Values the help. Those who can't do, review. If you view the provider as a commodity with low value, then again, just do it yourself. You hired the provider for a reason, their decades of experience and their skills. The next time you review someone else's work, take a day and try to do that work, from scratch, yourself. It's highly likely you can't and fail miserably staring at a blank piece of paper. Only then, do you truly value the intrinsic value of that experience, skill, capability, and work product.
- Achieves returns. You utilize the work in the right way to generate fast ROI. If you can't do that, then you're in serious trouble. Because someone else with the eye of the tiger is coming to beat you using better providers, faster execution, and better work product.
- Cites the source of value. You don't take credit for someone else's work. If you do that, remove the provider or don't pay them, then your business or boss asks you to do it again, and you can't, you're in real trouble. And it's highly likely the provider isn't going to work with you again. Time is a weighing machine and eventually everyone finds out anyways. It just makes you look like a low capability liar. If the provider is one of the best in the world, then you've just limited your growth ceiling while other good customers eat your lunch.
Your mindset needs to shift. The provider needs you far less than you need them. So you better value them appropriately, treat them with respect, celebrate their value, and use it to achieve fast ROI.
Otherwise, you're obsolete, you just don't know it yet.
