I spent this last weekend thinking about my next post here. I was intrigued by a post written last week by Dr. Jim Anderson on “Tough Times Call for You to Fire Your Customers.” I did some more research, and had a nice draft written. Just a little clean up and I was ready to post it this afternoon.
Then, I opened my RSS feeds of my blogroll, and I have a lot, only to see that this morning Steve Johnson beat me to it and wrote a post referencing the “fire your customer” concept.
So, now, what do I do? If I do a complete post using the nicely worded draft, I look like a copycat; and, if I don’t post it, I look like…well, the early bird with the best intentions who missed the worm.
Yep, that’s me.
The only thing I would add to the esteem colleague posts above – and this will only make sense if you read the two posts referenced – is that at the end of the day, while you may want to “fire your customer,” there is another option. I had the chance to ask Forrester Research’s CEO George Colony once if he ever fired his “troubled or over-demanding” customers. His response, which I think is the best one I have heard, was simply “No. I don’t fire them. I invite them to my competitors.”
From the outside looking in – there are two lessons in this post: 1) don’t wait to act – despite taking time to learn, craft and put in due diligence, sometimes you need to follow your gut and act more swiftly; and, 2) if you can’t make a customer happy, let your competitor spend their time, money and resources doing it. It will leave you with more to go after the rest of the market.
