How To Uncover And Close Your Most Profitable Customers | Salesman Podcast

Jonathan Byrnes is a Senior Lecturer at MIT, the chairman of Profit Isle, and the author of the brand-new book, Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive. In today's episode of the Salesman Podcast, Jonathan reveals how salespeople can identify and grow their most profitable accounts. Resources: ProfitIsle.com Book: Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive Article: 3 Strategies for Managing Your Profit-Drain Customers Transcript Will Barron: This episode of the show is brought to you from the salesman.org HubSpot studio. Coming up on today's episode of the Salesman Podcast.   Jonathan Byrnes: The traditional way to look at profitability is to look at aggregate revenues for the whole company and to look at aggregate costs for the whole company. And if the revenues are higher than the cost, you've made a profit and you can be happy. When you pull apart a company, there's an incredible complexity. And the absolute wrong thing to do is to equate revenues and profits. The company has to understand where it's making money and where it's not. With good software, that can be configured and put into action in a matter of a couple of weeks.   Will Barron: Hello sales nation. My name is Will Barron. I'm the host of the Salesman Podcast, the world's most downloaded B2B sales show. On today's episode, we have Jonathan Byrnes. He is an MIT Senior Lecturer. He is the chairman of Profit Isle, and he's the author of the brand-new book, Choose Your Customer. And on today's episode, we're getting into how you can identify and then grow your most profitable accounts.   Will Barron: Everything we talked about in this episode is available in show notes over at salesman.org. And so, with that said, let's jump right into it. Jonathan, welcome to the Salesman Podcast.   Jonathan Byrnes: Thank you very much, Will. It's very nice to be here. And I really appreciate your invitation.   Will Barron: You're more than welcome, sir. I'm glad to have you on. Okay, so on today's episode, we're going to take a look at how we can identify and grow our most profitable accounts, seemingly something incredibly important in the current environment that we're living in. But I will ask you a massively loaded and loaded question here.   Is Identifying Our Most Profitable Accounts as Simple as Looking at Who's Driving The Most Revenue? · [01:40]    Will Barron: Is identifying our most profitable accounts, is it as simple as just pulling this spreadsheet from our CRM, look at whoever's driving the most revenue, and scooping off the top five to 7% of those individual accounts? And then, just going after those, regardless of anything else. Is most profitable accounts as simple as that? Or am I underselling it slightly?   “The traditional way to look at profitability is to look at aggregate revenues for the whole company, and to look at aggregate costs for the whole company. And if the revenues are higher than the costs, you've made a profit and you can be happy.” – Jonathan Byrnes · [02:06]    Jonathan Byrnes: Well, thank you for the question. That's a great question, Will, and it's a very good introduction. Because the traditional way to look at profitability is to look at aggregate revenues for the whole company, and to look at aggregate costs for the whole company. And if the revenues are higher than the costs, you've made a profit and you can be happy. So, people say, “Therefore, we should get more revenues,