Okay this sounds crazy and it can be very scary. Common sense asks why one would ever do such a thing as fire customers? Well, simply put, it may make your business more profitable! I can hear you now, “Huh? What’s Al’s problem today?”

Just listen for just a minute. I’m not the only blogger in the universe who writes about this stuff, in fact it’s a pretty common theme.

We, as business owners in this crazy industry, don’t often want to look at the facts of doing business. The point is, some clients don’t deserve us and we don’t deserve some of them. The wise course is to sit down and really look at your client list, the AGI they generate, the thoughts of your Account Executives who handle the client from day to day and consider what I call the “Sleepless at Night Factor.”

Having a client that generates a lot of AGI but an equal amount of AE fatigue and the Sleepless at Night Factor should urge you to consider your options. Why do good AE’s leave? Well my experience over the last 30 plus years has shown me that while money is often a motivator, what generally pushes folks to make a change is they don’t like their clients. Now I admit, sometimes my answer to that is ’suck it up and get to work,’ but the reality is sometimes the AE is right.

Just take a look at your list and talk to your AE’s candidly. You might be surprised.

Oh, and Happy New Year. Here’s to hoping for lots of new business for all of us in 2008.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 9:42 am and is filed under Advertising, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.