I think of clients in similar terms. Dream clients bring me business that’s synergistic with company goals, are a pleasure to work with, and have projects that produce high profit. As with gigging, this doesn’t happen too often. Good clients have two out of the three. Anything less ends up being a Nightmare Client. Also just like music, there is only so much one can do to improve one of these aspects. Personality clashes and company culture differences can be almost impossible to rectify, but sometimes you can dramatically change a project’s scope of work (usually making it smaller) to make the business much more attractive, or you can add a PITA premium to your bill rate to at least make things more bearable. If you can’t get two of the three in balance then it’s time to move on. I always think of a Nightmare Client as a temporary situation.

In general I do agree with you.
A dream client doesn’t mean an easy client. Usually it means a client that takes a lot of work, but have needs you can fulfill and are therefor a very profitable client and a loyal client (provided you do care for them).

The reason I have seen so few “dream” clients is probably two fold.
The first reason is that I see the spectrum as very broad, like I said everything between nightmare and dream is in my (little) world a decent – good client and can be worked with. A dream client is perfect, so I might be going to far with my definition, you might think many of my clients are in fact dream clients.

The second reason is that my industry is very over blown, there are a lot of companies in it, selling similar products at qualities that at first glance look the same. (in reality though they differ a lot, but the customer doesn’t know this until it is to late).

In this industry the customers aren’t very loyal to one vendor, they change vendors and as people move from company to company, we often loose the business of the company when our contact leaves. (It would take to long to explain why, I’ll just give you the short version saying that all the presentations sound about the same, the product is the same and people in Scandinavia are awful at using the internet and therefor don’t really understand what we are selling anyway.)

At the moment we are working on rebuilding or product and service model to create more loyal and stable customers, a lot of work is going into educating our customer base and showing them the value of our product and the difference to our competitors.

This is a year long project (the first of its kind in this industry) and hopefully it will help

//Daniel

1. Why have you met so few dream clients (clients who you can do the kind of work for that will dramatically change their business results)? Is it because they are way harder to penetrate and win?
2. Dream clients aren’t easy to serve. In fact, they will challenge you to raise your game and deliver like never before. But they aren’t adversarial, and they do participate in the effort. Does that change your analysis of some of your clients?
3. If not, what is a decent client? Is it a client for whom you can’t do work that is worth paying more for than your competitor charges? Why are they with you? What can you do to make them dream clients?

We will have to agree to disagree on two points. First, I believe it is difficult to change adversarial clients into something else. Typically, the culture is broken, and you end up in a bad situation that was easy to foresee. Mostly, we stay because of money and the resistance to having to replace them.

Two, let’s take the judgment about people off the table. Lots of companies are full of lots of decent people, even the adversarial nightmare clients. Do you want decent opportunities? Do you want an opportunity to do the mediocre work that no one will notice or talk about? Are you looking for the opportunities to provide the undifferentiated commodity that your decent prospect needs and to which you can add no real value? By focusing downstream, you make yourself a commodity.

What if you were to decide that all of your decent clients should be treated and served in a way that would cause them publicly rave about you and carry your banner? What if you treated them like they were dream clients, instead of just decent clients? What would the result be for you and for them?

Anthony

You know I am a big fan of your writing, but today I have to disagree at least a bit.
Since I started working in sales 8 years ago I have met very few clients I can call dream clients. I could probably count them on one hand.
Most of my clients end up somewhere in the spectrum between nightmare, decent and dream clients.

What is important is that you keep working on fostering the relationship and moving them towards being better and better clients.

The most important thing is that when you meet a customer that is, as you define it, a nightmare customer you got to get out of there ASAP, they only waste your time and energy.

The point I want to make is that I have met to many salesmen who procrastinate on meeting customers because they aren’t their “dream customers”, sometimes you have to realize that we are all just people and people aren’t perfect.
Decent is enough.

Keep up the great work here Anthony, speak to you later.

//Daniel

Makes no sense at all, and yet, we deal with it more than we would like. The blue pill seems like the easy choice until their is no other choice but the red pill, and by that time, the change is a lot harder!

A

Right now, I am lucky. Mostly pretty good clients.