"not all customers are created equal"

"In the enterprise space, sales are lumpy and a couple of deals may represent most of this quarter’s new revenue. So every prospect is strategic. We go the extra parsec on every opportunity; we see each proposal as a must-win. We’ve never met revenue that we didn’t want, and any technical challenge can be solved with a one-off fix. After all, there aren’t enough F2000 companies that we can chance losing even one to fussy product concerns.
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But not all customers are created equal. At many enterprise software companies, I see one or two outlier customers consuming an inordinate share of support time, product management attention, engineering cycles and roadmap focus — hugely out of proportion to their actual revenue or market value. Maybe we should fire just those two, and free up scarce resources for dozens of more relevant customers.
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Pareto analysis implies that 20% of our customers generate 80% of our profits. Philip Kotler suggests an even more unbalanced mix: that our top 10% of customers represent 150% of profits, and our bottom 10% account for minus 100% of total profit. (In other words, firing the right 10% of our current customers would double profitability!)
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Aren’t They All Just “Customers”?
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Take the Lead with the Customer
Once we’ve sold the idea of firing a customer internally, we have two other big tasks: designing an equitable “out” for the customer/prospect, and having an uncomfortable discussion with them.
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Outlier customers misapplying our products can waste tremendous amounts of time and attention. Sometimes, we have to fire one or two to serve our core customer well."

Trechos retirados de "Let’s Fire a Few of Our Customers"