In this presentation, the speaker revisits the 80/20 matrix that aligns a company’s top 20% of clients with its product offerings. He categorises offerings into three profitability tiers: loss‑making (negative income), middle‑mix (break‑even or modest profit), and best products (high profit). By mapping the top clients against these tiers, he shows how to spot dangerous situations where valuable customers are buying loss‑making items, and how to intervene through education or upselling to move them toward more profitable offerings. The core message is to concentrate energy on the intersection of the best customers and the best products—the "heart" of the organization—while addressing the middle mix and loss offerings through strategic conversations and education.
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 cause 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.
