Have You Got the Wrong Customer?

As crazy as it sounds, I believe that it is more important to know who the wrong customer is, than the right one.

We put a lot of time, effort and resources into each customer so it is critical to know who is receptive to what you have to say and who will never be.

A mistake that I often see,is that marketers and sales people have a very hard time letting go of customers who are important, but who will never be receptive to what they have to offer.

This inevitably hurts the performance of your brands because you are wasting a lot of time and resources that could be better leveraged elsewhere.

I remember when I started in my role as Brand Manager for Viagra. We had a huge challenge trying to get health care professionals (HCPs) to speak with their patients about their sexual health.

For years an incredible amount of time and resources had been invested in trying to help facilitate these conversations.Despite all the effort, very little impact was seen.

We never completely gave up on it but eventually I had to make the decision to refocus our resources to where we were having more success in stimulating patient treatment.

It was a tough decision but it was incredible the difference that this made in the number of patients who were helped through other means.

It was no different when I was a sales rep.One of the products that I supported was a great medication for treating hypertension, particularly in the elderly.

I remember visiting DrT. Despite being in his eighties, Dr T. was a very busy physician with a huge practice made up almost entirely of elderly patients. Always very welcoming, it was a pleasure to visit him in his 70’s era decorated home basement office.

We had some great conversations, but no matter how much evidence I brought in, Dr T. was emphatic that your systolic blood pressure should be 100 plus your age. He did not believe that hypertension should be treated aggressively if at all relative to the medical guidelines of the time.

Despite numerous visits, I was never able to convince Dr T. to consider treating his elderly hypertension patients more aggressively. I enjoyed visiting him, but eventually had to reduce those visits to focus on physicians who were more open to what I had to say.

It hurt to walk away from someone who had so many patients who could benefit from our medication but the reality was that I had tried everything that I could think of and nothing had worked. By refocusing the time that I had spent visiting him to other doctors, I was able to make more of a difference elsewhere.

So now my question to you is this. When you think of your customers, are there any that you are focusing on that have not changed what they do in the last coupleof years in your therapeutic area?

Unless you have a new brilliant idea on how to affect this, it is time to shift your focus to those HCPs who are open to what you have to offer.

By not putting effort into the wrong customers, you will be amazed at the difference that you canmake with the right ones.