The Real Cost of Bad-Fit Customers
Some deals aren't worth winning.
That customer you knew you should have walked away from? They're still costing you.
A bad fit doesn't just kill your margins, they crush your soul at the same time.
Have I made my feelings clear on this yet? 😬
They take too much time. They take too much attention. They take too many of your mental and emotional resources.
And then they beat you up over price anyway.
Finding them is hard. Keeping them around is even harder.
The Avoidable Pain
All of that difficulty can be avoided by getting clear on a few things:
Who your best customers are and why they work with you
Why it’s so valuable for you to work with them
Why you don't work with people who don't meet those standards
Admittedly, that last one is the hard part. I’ve struggled with this throughout my career.
Look, you’ve got a number to hit, and that extra commission check or bonus goes a long way, right? There’s always a birthday or an anniversary coming up. That summer vacation would be a little sweeter, and you’ve been talking about that new driver…
But if you're going compromise your boundaries, you need to be clear about:
Who you're letting them down for
How much you're willing to let them erode
What price you're willing to pay
The biggest problem is when compromise becomes the default. When "just this once" becomes every time. When you stop noticing that you've drifted away from the customers you actually want to serve.
The price you pay for that revenue is hard to quantify until you’re already stuck. It’s best to keep a firm boundary.
The Boundary Problem
When you take a bad-fit customer, you're selling out your boundaries. Literally. You're trading clarity for compromise, and every compromise has a cost.
Sometimes it's visible: the deal that takes twice as long to close, the customer who demands constant attention, the pricing concession that tanks your margin.
Sometimes it's invisible: the slow erosion of you and your team's confidence, the creeping cynicism about whether any of this is worth it.
Both kinds of cost are real.
I learned this lesson several years ago, when I took on a client I didn’t totally vibe with, but thought might be a good test of my boundaries.
I’m here to tell you that if you can say that to yourself, you’ve already passed the test. Move on.
The Swagger Cost
Here's the hidden cost nobody talks about:
Every bad-fit customer chips away at your team's belief.
They grind on deals that drain them. They serve customers who don't value what they bring. They discount preemptively because they've learned to expect the price objection.
All that effort and emotion to be rewarded with a consistent headache and less margin to show for it? Sign me up!
Over time, that erodes confidence, and a sales team without confidence doesn't do the hard things required to grow.
They stop prospecting with conviction. They stop asking for referrals. They treat every deal as a battle rather than an opportunity.
Swagger, that quiet belief in your soul that what you're doing is the right thing, is impossible to maintain when you're constantly chasing the wrong people.
And once it's gone, it's hard to get back.
The Better Question
I’ve said this for years… “You'll never have a better day in sales than when you fire your worst customer.”
When I say that in my workshops, everyone nods, and I inevitably get a few smiles. It feels true because it is. I’ve lived it.
But if that's true, why aren't we intensifying the search for new customers that look like our best ones?
Why do we treat "more pipeline" as the solution when "better pipeline" is sitting right there?
The answer, usually, is that it's easier to keep doing what you're doing than to do the hard work of getting clear on who you actually want to serve.
There’s that hard work again… I’ll remind you that you have a choice.
The Path Forward
The antidote to bad-fit customers isn't just saying no more often, though that helps.
It's getting so clear on what a good fit looks like that you can spot the bad ones earlier and avoid wasting time on them.
That clarity comes from the work we've talked about in this series:
The boardroom work to understand what makes you different
The validation conversations to confirm what your best customers actually value
The integration work to systematize that knowledge across your team
When you know who you're for, you also know who you're not for, and that knowledge is worth more than another hundred names in your pipeline.
Covey always said that on a long enough timeline, any relationship that isn’t win-win becomes lose-lose.
What I’ve seen too often is that the seller recognizes they’re losing long before the customer does.
You deserve better.
This is part of a series on the symptoms that show up when the hard work doesn't get done.
