The Real Cost of Bad-Fit Customers

Some deals aren't worth winning.

I know that's a hard sentence to read. We've got numbers to hit. There's always a birthday coming up, a vacation to fund, or a new driver you've been eyeing…

But that customer you knew you should have walked away from? They're still costing you.

This week's piece for the blog was about the real cost of bad-fit customers.

Not just the margin compression. Not just the extra time and attention they demand, but the hidden costs that nobody likes to talk about.

Every bad-fit customer erodes your team's belief in themselves.

They grind on deals that drain them. They serve customers who don't value what they bring. They discount preemptively because they've learned to expect the price objection.

Over time, that takes a toll, and a sales team without swagger doesn't do the hard things required to grow.

That quiet belief in your soul that what you're doing is the right thing, is impossible to maintain when you're constantly chasing the wrong people.

Once it's gone, it's hard to get back.

The Better Question

I've said this for years: "You'll never have a better day in sales than when you fire your worst customer."

When I say that in workshops, everyone nods. A few smiles. It feels true because it is.

But if that's true, why aren't we intensifying the search for customers who look like our best ones?

Why do we treat "more pipeline" as the solution when "better pipeline" is sitting right there?

Doing the Right Work

My #ThankfulThursday post this week was about Jen Allen-Knuth.

Jen is on a very short list of people I look at and think, "Damn, that's exactly how it should be done."

One thing I really appreciate about her: she talks about there being "more than one way to do it right."

We like to look for guides, best practices, and research to give us plausible deniability for when it doesn't work. Jen preaches something harder: working backward from first principles and figuring things out for yourself.

That's exactly what knowing who you're for requires. There's no template. You have to do the work.

Where Do You Stand?

If you've been following this series, you know the framework: Excavate → Validate → Integrate.

The boardroom work to understand what makes you different.

The validation conversations to confirm what your best customers actually value.

The integration work to systematize that knowledge across your team.

When you know who you're for, you also know who you're not for. And that knowledge is worth more than another hundred names in your pipeline.

I built a self-assessment understand "what good looks like here" in your sales organization. 14 questions, about 10 minutes, free.

Covey said that on a long enough timeline, any relationship that isn't win-win becomes lose-lose.

What I've seen too often is that the seller recognizes they're losing long before the customer does.

You deserve better.

Cheers,
JB