I wrote a popular post a few weeks ago called, Don’t be the Customer’s Bitch.  You can read it here.  In it I wrote about the importance of not letting your customers or prospects take advantage of you in the selling process.

My friend and author of Selling Fearlessly, Robert Terson blogged about this concept as it pertains to existing clients called, The Bitch to Buy Ratio. The bitch to buy ratio is the relationship between how much work a customer requires and how much they complain in relationship to the profit they provide.

Robert sums it up perfectly here;

You have only so much time to work. You want to spend that time productively. You want to enjoy your work, not dread it. Why put up with a prospect/customer whom you dread calling on and causes you to lose sleep at night? Why put up with a never-ending deluge of moaning, groaning, and complaining from a whiner who isn’t paying you nearly enough to take all his crap?

You don’t have to!

Fire him! Let him dish out his nonsense to some other unsuspecting salesperson. The glory of sales is that there will always be plenty of other fish in the sea for you to go after.

Check out the rest of his post.  It’s great and spot on.

Don’t waste time with customers who are nothing but a pain in the ass.