B2B Lead Generation: Fire Your Customer

Update: Check out this list of top B2B sales blogs. http://www.invesp.com/blog-rank/Sales Note that the b2b sales blog we used to write is nowhere to be found here.

And when I tried to run it through Hubspot’s BlogGrader.com, it does not even have an RSS feed. (We do not mention the customer by name as we do not wish ill upon them.) By the way, since they took the blog in-house 60 days ago, they have publishes a whopping total of 3 blog posts! That is pathetic!

Update: This customer, whose blog used to post daily with quality content, has not updated in almost 3 weeks! Conclusion: You really do get what you pay for.

If your business is young and small, choose your customers carefully. Find New Customers had a customer we should have fired long ago. They sucked up limited resources and limited our ability to deliver the services of lead generation companies to other clients.

Perhaps you can learn from our mistake.

We wrote their blog - 5 days a week without fail for months. But the warning signs were everywhere.

They would be no-shows on the weekly status calls they requested. (We need feedback from our clients.)
They were unable/unwilling to provide keywords. (Search engine optimization is a key advantage of blogs - if done properly)
They never created useful content - ebooks, white papers, videos, etc. (What can we write about?)
They did not provide objectives and plans, so we never had any metric on how well or poorly we were doing. (This was the biggest problem. No plan. No metrics. No way of measuring performance.)

But like most business owners, I loved those monthly checks. But writing a daily blog is a LOT of work and consumes many, many hours. It was not worth it. I

should have fired that customer.

A small business has limited resources. Don’t waste them on problem customers.

P.S. They brought the blog in-house and the blog that used to post 5 days a week, 20 times a month now publishes just twice a month. Pathetic.

What do you think? Do you have customers you should fire?

Please note that our wonderful free “cheat sheet” on lead nurturing “The 7 Keys to Lead Nurturing Success” is a small taste of what you get in our terrific white paper, How to Find New Customers.

Jeff Ogden is President of the B2B lead generation consultancy, Find New Customers. We help companies with between 150 and 5,000 employees who sell complex products to businesses to implement world-class lead generation programs. As companies struggle to create quality sales opportunities, they turn to lead generation companies like Find New Customers.

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4 responses to “Fire Your Customer | Good Advice for Small Firms”

I agree completely. my business partner and I just recently decided to let a rather large contract go for the same reason.The stability a blog maintanance contract can provide is nice, but we want success stories. When the client isn’t taking your advice you turn into the internet’s version of a paper pusher and somehow the position chews up way too much time

The Fearless Competitor, Jeff Ogden says:

April 16, 2011 at 5:48 pm

Thanks, Bryan. Smaller companies have limited resources and an uncooperative client eats up those resources. Glad to hear you and your business partner did the same thing. Good riddance!

Jeff Ogden, President
Find New Customers
http://www.findnewcustomers.com

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There are definitely clients out there that are more of a pain than they are worth. Luckily I can usually tell what kind of client a prospect will be within one phone call. If it’s not going to be a good match I don’t take them on. It’s not worth my time.

The Fearless Competitor, Jeff Ogden says:

April 19, 2011 at 10:00 am

Thanks Nick. I appreciate your comment. In our case, the client was uncooperative - never provided the kind of information we needed to be succesful. But since we were a very young company, we took the deal anyway, hoping we could turn it around. We were wrong. Tigers don’t change their stripes.

Jeff Ogden
Find New Customers

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