Everyone is busy. So why aren't we growing faster?
Maybe the question isn't whether your people are doing enough. Maybe the question is who they're doing it for.
During my years leading the commercial organization at RJG, something changed the way I looked at our customer base:
We were treating all of our customers the same. That was the problem.
The insight came from Kevin Lacey, a senior executive I hired to lead our UK operation.
I hired Kevin knowing there were things he knew better than I did. I've always believed you should never be afraid to have people in the room who are smarter than you. Some of the people who reported to me over my career also became my teachers.
Kevin was one of them.
He introduced me to a methodology for looking at our customer base differently.
We ranked customers by annual revenue and divided them into quartiles.
The top quartile became our A customers. The second quartile became our B customers. The bottom two quartiles became our C customers.
The memorable realization wasn't the methodology.
It was what the data showed us.
We had a relatively small number of A customers generating a significant amount of revenue—and a surprisingly large number of C customers generating relatively little.
Once we could see it, taking no action wasn't an option.
As the head of commercial, my strategy became pretty straightforward:
Retain the A's.
Develop the B's into A's.
Minimize the C's.
Then we started applying that thinking across the business.
Which customers warranted intentional Key Account Management?
Where should Customer Support spend its limited resources?
How should customer importance influence priorities when manufacturing capacity was constrained?
The analysis also changed how we qualified new business.
If we already knew the organizational cost of carrying a large population of C customers, why would we intentionally create more of them?
We established a qualification filter. If a prospect didn't have the realistic potential to generate at least B-level annual revenue, it didn't qualify.
And we began looking differently at customer retention.
Not simply:
How many customers did we lose?
But:
How many A customers did we lose over the last three years?
Keeping an A an A, year after year, became intentional and critical work.
That's what I've come to appreciate about good analysis.
The spreadsheet isn't the Value.
The decisions you make because of what the spreadsheet reveals are the Value.
People, time, capacity and attention are finite.
Treating customers fairly doesn't require treating every customer identically.
If your organization is working harder but growth isn't following, maybe the question isn't whether your people are doing enough.
Maybe the question is who they're doing it for.deeper?
