What Does Your Client List Say About You?
In life it is said that you can tell the quality of a person by the quality of the company they keep. The same is true of business. You can tell everything about a company by the businesses they work with.
Almost everyone knows this, but many people don't want to confront it strategically. Revenue is king; no one wants to forego it and few feel they have a choice. But think about it. When you are researching a company, what's the first thing you look for on their website? Chances are you skip over all the marketing mumbo jumbo and check out their clients. That's how you position them in your head.
The problem is: it often is not how they position themselves.
A Hodge Podge? You're Chasing Cash At Any Cost
I've lost count of the number of corporate websites where the client list tells me nothing. Little and large, all over the globe, a gigantic list of completely disparate businesses tells me one thing only: this company will chase cash at any cost. It may be fragile. It can't - or won't - focus. And it isn't strategic.
Contrast this with William Chase when he founded his first company, Tyrrells. Chase was in business to produce and sell hand-crafted potato chips. Not a big complicated business to be sure - but one from which he eventually netted some $50 million. How did he do this? By being utterly focused on what the business stood for.
"We were all about an authentic product, that wasn't mass produced, that wasn't (forgive me) crap. So we wanted to sell through stores that had other products like ours, where quality won over price every time. We knew selling cheap would kill the business. But the bigger point was: we wanted to be among quality products because that's what we were."
You are Who You Sell To
Chase meant it. He refused to sell any of his products to the global supermarket giant, TESCO. And when some enterprising store manager went down the road, bought Tyrrell's Chips and tried to sell them (at a discount) in a Tesco store, Chase threatened to take them to court, and TESCO, unexpectedly, backed down. Chase's victory was, perhaps, his greatest marketing move, establishing his company as a completely committed champion of artisanal food producers. That it won him column inches in newspapers he could never have afforded to buy didn't hurt.
Chase has now moved onto authentic, distilled products. His Chase Distillery Vodka was voted the world's best vodka in the 2010 San Francisco World Spirits Competition. I'm guessing you won't find that in too many supermarkets either.
What do you think your client and customer base says about your company?
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