El poder de la sustracción aplicado al negocio

En el artículo The Power of Subtraction, Anthony Tijan menciona 5 cosas que deberíamos considerar a la hora de sustraer: prioridades, pitch points, personas, clientes y equipaje. En particular, referido a los clientes dice:

4. Subtract Your Customers. It is not only employees that need regular evaluation and subtraction, but also your customers. Be willing to fire the laggards, regularly subtracting out the least valuable 5% of your customers. It is a fallacy that you need to keep all your customers because many of the small customers will become large ones. Look at your data to see if that has really occurred. What you are more likely to find is a stubbornly consistent 5% of your customers who buy in small volumes and require higher maintenance as a cohort than other groups. You want to give the most time, energy, and service to those who will provide the greatest long-term reward and loyalty. This means realizing that just because you can sell something to someone today does not mean that you should.

Yo he hablado en términos similares aquí sobre ello y, como primera cosa, quiero decir que coincido con la idea de que no todos los clientes son saludables para nuestra empresa. La única salvedad que hago es que el proceso de situar la vara que dividirá a los clientes saludables de los que no debe definirse y ejecutarse cuidadosamente. De otra manera corremos el riesgo de desechar clientes que potencialmente serían importantes para nosotros. Debemos darnos tiempo para conocerlos antes de decidir que no nos interesan.

En segundo lugar remarco algo dicho por el mismo Anthony en este otro artículo It's Time to Fire Some of Your Customers:

Firing your customer does not mean to literally bar the door, but to set conditions whereby lower- priority customers self-select out and higher-potential ones self-select in. For example, for many businesses, first purchase order size is a good leading indicator of future purchases. If you knew that $50 was the average of your top loyalists and $30 was the average of lower tiers, you could simply raise minimum price on an opening order, or only offer free shipping on orders of $50 or above.

La idea sería hacer selección adversa pero con los clientes, no cerrarles la puerta en la cara.

Seguimos pensando..