Is Your Biggest Customer Your Best Customer?
Thinking that your BIGGEST customer is your BEST customer can be very dangerous. Just because the biggest customer spends the most money, doesn’t necessarily make them the most valuable and the one all efforts should be focused on. A lot more comes into play when looking at the most valuable customer (see the list below of an example of what some companies look at). Biggest does not equal valuable, it can be, but all angles need to be looked at.
A best customer is someone that speaks favorable of your company. Someone that can spread the word about your company and your product. Someone that continuously buys over the years. And yes, also someone that might be the biggest customer.
It is ill-advised to focus just on one customer, in this case the biggest one, because if you put all “your eggs in one basket”, you might end up with a big problem. What if this customer leaves you? What if this customer becomes disgruntled with you and/or your product? Having focused on just this one customer will leave you in a world of hurt if they leave you or no longer like what you are selling.
At one of the companies I’ve worked with, we looked at the following factors to decide who our “best” customer is:
- Purchase size: Yes, purchase size is a factor
- Buyer persona: Is this the right group of people we want to go after (title, department, company size, industry)? Can they spread the word about us in the industry we are interested in?
- Loyalty: Are they saying positive things about us? Can we use them as a reference / testimonials?
- Re-purchase: Will they buy from us again when their contract is up?
- Re-selling: Will they purchase our extras (more seats for the software, educational components and consulting)?
- Geography: We are a small start-up company with only one sales person. Having customers in different countries becomes very difficult with the time zone change and multiple languages. So, we are looking for US and Canada customers only.
For my company example, we need to look at all six of these combined (not just one – the biggest customer) in order to figure out if someone is considered a “best” customer for us.