This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

The truth about customer contribution
It costs money to market.
It costs money to wear a suit to the meeting, to have a storefront, to
develop new software, to keep your items in stock, to run ads, and to pay
for publicity, and a hundred other things.
These are all fixed costs, all spread across your entire customer base.
If you do the math, what you’ll see will look like this:
The dotted line is the amount you’ve spent per person on marketing. And
the bars are how much gross margin you’ve earned from each customer.
Which means that only eight of the customers on this graph actually
contributed a profit to your project.
The theory behind this graph is true for book buyers, restaurant goers,
political donors, philanthropists, stamp collectors, and just about any

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industry where some customers spend more than others.
When you ask, “Who’s it for?” the answer needs to be, “The kind of
customers who are going to show up for us in a way that lets us keep
going.”
You’ll serve many people. You’ll profit from a few.
The whales pay for the minnows.
It can work out. But in order to do your best work, you’ll need to seek
out and delight the few. And in return, you’ll be rewarded with a cadre of
loyal customers who will buy in for all of it.
What’s the purpose of this interaction?
Consider the valuable customer who reaches out to customer service about
a problem.
How do we know if they’re valuable? Well, the customer service folks
have a record of who’s writing or calling, so we begin there. A quick search
shows that this person has been a customer for years, keeps a lot of money
in your bank, tweets about you, never returns items, pays on time, buys
your high-margin items, and so on.
In fact, if you do the math, you’ll see that she produces eight times the
revenue of the average customer, and unlike the anonymous masses that
cost you money, she’s one of the few who generate the income that actually
turns a profit.
None of this would be an innovation if we were talking about a
freelancer with six clients. When the big client calls, the freelancer instantly
knows what’s up.
But we’re talking about your financial institution, the one where the
least-respected and lowest-paid person is busy answering the phone when
your customers call. Or your retail store, where the same thing is true.
In that moment, then, when the phone lights up, what’s the interaction
for?
If the goal is to get it over with, get the person off the phone, deny
responsibility, read the script, use words like “as stated” and “our policy,”
then, please, sure, yes, keep doing what you’re doing and watch it all fall
apart.

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On the other hand, the cost of being human in this situation is easily
covered by the upside of delighting an extraordinary customer.
Get in your car, drive across town, and show up. Talk about it face to
face.
Run down to FedEx and get that shipment in the last pickup of the day.
Amazement and delight go a long way.
Have the CEO pick up the phone and call that customer that you
accidentally triple-charged. It’ll take a few minutes and it will be worth it.
I know you can’t do it for every customer. But you can learn to see and
act accordingly.

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