If you've spent any time thinking about the definition of best customer, you totally know what I'm talking about.

The CFO defines best customer as most profitable. CS defines best customer as most friendly. The sales rep defines best customer as highest commission producing. The marketing department defines best customer as the one who helps them understand the audience the most.

Well, at least that's one set of possible definitions.

The reality is finance, customer success, sales, and marketing all view this idea of best customer in a different way in most companies.

So when you start trying to figure out what creates the best customer... well, the definition of best customer is not the same, so everybody's going to go in different directions.

And this comes back to a common thing we see over and over and over again in data. Typically, one tool will define something like a contact one way. And maybe it's prospect in another tool. Lead in another tool. And each of them has different properties.

So when you try to bring the definitions together, they kind of overlap. And they kind of don't. And where they do overlap, maybe they conflict. Maybe they've got different phone numbers, maybe they've got different emails. Who knows? And where they don't overlap, maybe they don't line up.

So what exactly does it mean to resolve this difference of opinion?

What we're really seeing, at least from my point of view, is the same lack of specificity in the tools that the people who made them have. Which is to say, if you took the people at HubSpot and you took the people at Salesforce and got them in a room to discuss why their data model is the way it is, they would likely disagree with one another. At least to some degree.

And it all kind of comes down to this idea of everybody needs to be right.

Well, how about we set aside the desire to be right? And we start deciding what things mean together. Because once we work from one clean, distinct definition, we can figure out what's actually going on.

And honestly, I would offer that the idea of best customer is BS. Best at what?

Instead, we can be way more specific about what we mean.

So instead of asking "who were my best customers in Q4?" — I think we need to be asking "who were my most profitable customers in Q4?"

Instead of asking "who were the most agreeable customers?" (see the friendly question from the CS department above) — we can ask it a different way: "Who are the customers that showed up to all of their customer success meetings with positive sentiment?" I know somebody's going to say Net Promoter Score or Engagement Score or whatever — sure, if that's working for you. Do what works.

Instead of asking which customers produce the highest commissions, we can instead ask "which customers consistently re-up their deals?" or "which customers consistently bring in new business?"

And instead of asking "which customers help us get a bead on more customers?" — we could instead ask: "Which customers come in from which marketing campaigns and pay us the longest?"

These are meaningful differences in the way we ask these questions. And they change how we track or look at the data available and which data we gather.

So if you actually want to drive effective change in this realm where we're not talking about the same thing, we actually have to decide what it is we want to learn first. And then actively go learn it.

Which means, of course, collecting the data that we need in order to get it, and figuring out how to collect that data if we don't know how.

And some people might say that's easier said than done. Buuuuuuut... in my experience, almost all data is capturable. You just have to get smart, creative, and determined to get it done.

And frankly, there's more data sitting under your nose than you're probably aware of.

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