Pick the right customers

Imagine you are running a donut shop and a customer comes in and pokes his finger in six donuts before purchasing one. This customer has probably put off other customers from purchasing your products and damaged your merchandise. You don't need or want customers like this.

Not every customer is a good or profitable customer. Learn to say 'no'. Some customers take too much of your time for too little revenue. Imagine a customer going into Wal-mart or Tescos and taking up an hour of a shelf-stackers time on every visit asking them where to find the bread and other item and then arguing that the supermarkets are charging too much. If they ended up buying the bread and spending $1 while taking up $10 worth of time from the shelf-stacker working in the store - this isn't a customer you want.

Also some customers will just be a ache to work with - if they are giving abuse to your employees or just causing you stress in dealing with them, perhaps its time to learn to say 'no' to the money and move onto someone else. Some customers might spend hardly anything with you but they will be the ones that you want. For instance they might just come in once a month to buy bread from you - but they will have 100s of friends that they will tell how good your store is. These small spending customers might be more valuable than your biggest spending customers. Just as customers pick their supplier, suppliers also need to pick their customers.