One of the most common reasons (excuses) business owners point to for their failure to grow, profit and succeed is the pathetic nature of their customers.
The customers are cheap. The customers are stupid. The customers don’t appreciate the sheer genius of your ideas. The customers don’t even understand the importance of what we do for them. The customers make BAD decisions and poor value judgments. The customers are ungrateful and flat out rude.
As with all excuses, there is a vein of truth in all of this; most of the marketplace for any B2B service are cheap, stupid, broke and make poor value judgments. That’s why only 1% of Americans are rich and only 4% of all businesses ever break the million-dollar mark – and 0.4% the $10 million mark. Sloth, stupidity and ignorance abound.
Plus, it’s much more palatable and easier to blame the customer than to take full and complete responsibility for our business’s performance and the failure of our customers to understand and embrace the value of what we do. We ALL do this, either in a moment of frustration from time to time, or chronically, as the basis of belief for everything we do.
That’s because we fall in love with our ideas so much that we find it inconceivable that anyone would fail to see the brilliance in what we’re providing. It’s an absolute absurdity that anything is wrong with OUR presentation, OUR marketing, OUR services and OUR strategy, given how brilliant we are and how ridiculously obvious it is that EVERYONE needs us. It’s offensive that you even HAVE to try to convince those morons to buy! They should be lining up at the door, check in hand, with a hand-written thank you note appreciating all the work, risk, money and time that went into building the service you’re selling them!
I assure you there are a lot of political elites running our government who are endlessly frustrated that a large group of voters reject and refute their ideas, thinking they’re complete morons unable to think for themselves; a “basket of deplorables” too stupid to grasp the urgent necessity of implementing the initiatives they’re putting forth with OUR tax dollars.
Far too many business owners accept as fact that the MARKETPLACE is made up of people with tiny minds and tinier wallets, and therefore they cannot succeed.
I like to tell the story of the owner of a small break-fix shop in St. Louis that sought out our help, unable to figure out how to package, price and market managed services despite the fact he’d been in business for over 15 years. We failed to convince him to enroll (he didn’t buy). A year later, he comes back, now with desperate “hair on fire” urgency, because he lost his biggest break-fix client to one of “your guys” (meaning one of our members, said in a very snarky tone) who sold them a managed services plan.
Again, we recommended a program that absolutely would have helped him, but he refused to buy, stating that he didn’t believe it was possible to sell managed services in St. Louis, and demanded proof of the ability to sell managed services in the city by allowing him to talk to no less than 3 to 5 MSPs in our program, in St. Louis, who were successful at selling managed services using our advice.
I told him NO and sent him packing.
Here’s why: his personal religion is that ALL businesses in St. Louis, as evidenced by his over 15 years of FAILURE, are incapable of understanding the importance and value of managed services. It can’t possibly be that he couldn’t sell a life raft on the Titanic as it’s going down, that his efforts to promote himself are grossly insufficient or that what HE is specifically offering is of no value compared to what competitors are offering.
With all of that emotional baggage and stubborn insistence to prove his point, no matter what campaign, strategy, blueprint or idea we give him, no matter how much support, encouragement or direction or how many examples we provide, he WON’T succeed. Not with THOSE damned customers in HIS damned city.
Bottom line: if you’re not getting the traction you want in the marketplace, not getting the appointments, sales and margins you need, blaming the customers won’t fix any of this. FIX YOU, not them. THEY aren’t changing.
To be infinitely clear, you should also NOT tolerate and succumb to the worst behavior of the worst customers. As I said in the beginning, there IS a vein of truth running through all of this. Some customers ARE cheap, stupid bastards who you need to steer clear of or they’ll sink your business, and I fear that America is not getting smarter, more studious and more noble as a society. However, if NOBODY is buying, or ONLY the worst of the worst customers are showing up, something is amiss with your approach, your philosophy, your efforts and your message.
That is why you need to be intensely selective in who you want as a customer. Then strategically design the “perfect” solution they’ll want to buy, and then market the hell out of it by creating and presenting the most influential, persuasive and powerful marketing message you can, establishing yourself as THE most trusted authority for your market so that you can more easily secure the customers that ARE lucrative, well-behaved, appreciative and productive.
If you want to know how to do that, make sure you join me at one of the upcoming MSP Marketing Roadshow events…unless you ARE one of the stupid, cheap bastards in the MSP space going nowhere and lacking honest ambition. Then stay home. But, of course, I don’t have to say that because you’ve already decided it’s not for you. See how this works? LOL.
