Is it OK to Fire Your Customer?

It is ironic that as a Marketing Professor, I teach my students that it is OK to fire the customer. The key is to identify those customers who deserve to be fired. For some people nothing is good enough. There are those customers who will beat you up on price and run to a competitor the first chance they get. If you are a transactional business, you deserve transactional customers. Invest in good customers, the same way you invest in good employees.

The mistake we make is we sometimes fire a customer because we don’t see them as being profitable. We never give them the chance to grow and develop. Companies rarely win when they compete on price. It’s what they have to do when they don’t have a plan to create meaningful value.

Business, like life, should be about building long-term relationships. And good relationships are always a two way street.