Growth often starts with a bold decision, such as choosing to do less, better. For mid-sized manufacturers serving a large, diverse customer base, the path to sustainable and aggressive growth doesn’t always require more customers. Sometimes, the real opportunity lies in consolidating and doubling down on the right ones.
That’s the core of this conversation: how do you move from spreading your resources thin across more than 100 accounts to intentionally serving the ones that grow your business? This blog unpacks a real-world question posed by a manufacturing business leader—and offers practical, proven steps for customer segmentation, prioritization, and long-term relationships with high lifetime value customers.
“Please provide some insights on the most effective way to strategically condense our customer base as we position for sustained, aggressive growth. As we aim for 25–30% year-over-year growth, we understand the importance of focusing our efforts on long-term partnerships that involve medium to high-volume production runs. If you have strategies for identifying and prioritizing the most profitable and scalable customer relationships, I’d greatly appreciate your advice or lessons learned.”
This is a timely and critical question, especially for mid-market leaders facing the complexity of managing diverse customer portfolios while still targeting aggressive growth. Reducing your customer base might seem counterintuitive—but done right, it’s one of the most efficient ways to unlock margin, focus sales efforts, and align operational capacity.
Here’s a breakdown of the customer segmentation and consolidation strategy we use with clients at Atomic Revenue:
Start by deciding what matters most to your business:
This becomes your rubric to score clients objectively.
Audit your service levels, pricing structure, contracts, and offerings. Then adjust around the needs and preferences of your ICP as well as your most favorable business conditions and risk tolerance. This often involves raising minimum order quantities, adjusting SLAs, and sunsetting low-margin or operationally complex offerings.
Bonus: These structural changes help your non-ideal clients self-select out—freeing up time and resources without needing awkward offboarding conversations.
Case Study Insight In one engagement, we conducted a two-year analysis of 500+ clients. We found that 60% of profit came from just 12 clients. While it was tempting to focus only on those 12, we uncovered an additional 27 clients who had the potential to behave like the top performers.
That meant we had 39 clients to prioritize—focusing account growth, marketing, and GTM strategies on those. With changes to value props, pricing, and service levels, we:
The bottom 233 clients? They represented less than 2% of profit. Policy changes encouraged most of them to find alternative vendors—no hard feelings, no churn panic.
Strategic segmentation is just the first step. Following through on implementation across the entire organization is where most companies struggle or panic which undermines the whole effort and devalues the potential outcomes. You need aligned teams, refined messaging, updated contracts and collateral, as well as consistent execution to turn vision into value.
Tara is the Owner and CEO of Atomic Revenue, where she continues to problem-solve, innovate, and define the formula for and establish the discipline of revenue operations that launches client growth with stronger foundations and better ROI. As the company's EOS® Visionary, it is her passion to share what she has learned over the course of her career and help other business owners and leaders increase revenue and grow with consistency. She is also a renowned national speaker.