Bill Canady's company decides to stop serving low-margin accounts and kill its cheapest product line. That morning, their biggest distributor emails asking for expanded terms and a huge stocking order for exactly those accounts and products. Should they take the money or stick to the plan?
We had the quads, we had the kill list, and on a Sunday night I sent the note to the leadership team that said, starting tomorrow, here's what we're going to stop doing. Monday morning, 7:40, an email lands from one of our largest distributors, and of course they asked for expanded terms, expanded stocking commitment, a price hold for 18 months. The customer mix underneath it was a B only, the bottom of our customer base buying the bottom of our product line. It was almost line for line the exact set of accounts my team had been told the previous evening we were exiting that week, and here we got a big order on our hands. What are we going to do?
