Erika Jones, CFO, CCTAProfit First Professionals · Certified Fractional CFO and Profit First Professional

Focus on the heart of your organization Youtube LinkedIn 1

29 May 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:29

In this presentation, the speaker revisits the 80/20 rule and introduces a client‑offering matrix to help organizations identify where their most valuable customers are purchasing. The matrix separates the top 20 clients into three offering categories: (1) loss‑making offerings, where the best customers are buying products that generate negative profitability; (2) middle‑mix offerings, which are break‑even or modestly profitable and require education to move customers toward higher‑margin products; and (3) best‑product offerings, where the most profitable products are bought by the best customers – the "heart" of the organization. For each segment, the speaker outlines specific actions: intervene with loss‑making customers to shift them to sustainable offerings, educate customers on middle‑mix products to elevate them, and concentrate energy on nurturing the core profitable relationship between top customers and top products. The overall message is that focusing resources on the intersection of best customers and best offerings maximizes profitability and aligns the organization’s energy with its strategic heart.

Chapters

A couple weeks ago, I shared with you a matrix, the 8020 rule. How it applies to not just your clients but also your offering. And you got to understand where the heart is. We're going to go back to it. Got a new graphic, I'm starting from scratch here. And we're just going to look at the client side, your best clients. This is your top 20 clients. These are the ones we want to evaluate and we talked about the offering. Well, these clients can buy any mix of offerings they could buy here, which is your low. Actually not even low. It's your loss offerings. These are the things where you lose money. So it's negative income or negative profitability. When your best customers are buying this, there's an intervention. You gotta tell your customers, we love working with you because you're a great customer. What you're buying is not sustainable for us. We have other offerings and see if you can move them up. This is a real challenge because great customers buying things that you're losing money on may not be a great customer after all. The next scenario, I call this the middle mix. And the middle mix is your offerings here that generate some profitability. Sometimes they're kind of break even. These are. Okay, we have to elevate them up through education. And the highest level is your best products are being bought by your best customers. That's where the money is. This again is the heart of your organization and where you need to love upon these customers. So this one is a real hard conversation with them or yourself. They this one is education up to better offerings. And here is the heart of your organization. We want to concentrate our energy.