And did you find out how many of the up and neutral clients also came from the yellow pages? That bit of information is useful only if it draws a distinction, e.g. what if the agency only had one working form of advertising?
(Of course this almost goes without saying, and I don't doubt you thought of it, but this is such a common logic error that I thought it shouldn't be left hanging in a public forum.)
Re:How to detect a toxic customer
by JacobAldridge on Thursday December 09, 2010 @05:58PM
(#1989617)
Yeah, sorry I didn't want to make my response longer than needed to be.
None of the Up or Neutral clients were Yellow Pages - most were referrals from the same level (ie, Up / great clients had been referred mostly by other Up clients, and similarly with Neutrals, plus some general networking). Which does reinforce the 'you are who you hang with' conclusion I've drawn.
My experience having done several client management studies with clients, is that jerks have friends ... who are also jerks. (Generalising, of course, but if you've got a solid enough business model you won't mind losing a few good clients if it means not dealing with a larger number of toxic clients.)
Best case study I did was with a branding agency. We got a list of their clients (about 100) and had the owner mark them each as Up, Down, or Neutral in terms of energy. We then had the team explore where each of the 'Down' clients (about 15) came from - half were from the Yellow Pages (again, using my experience, more price-oriented than service or quality) ... and the other half were referrals from the clients who came through the Yellow Pages!