Point break customers
The more waves a customer generates, the more breaks there are at the point: inside sales or salesman.
Your sales people are just riding those waves.
Customers that make the most noise get the most attention. 
On the one hand there are the ones that make a lot of noise, but once your resolve their issues, they become your most loyal allies, recommending others to your products or services.
Then there are the ones that continuously communicate with you or complain or just attract attention all the time. They are never fully satisfied with anything and probably never will be (for some people this is part of their character). Maybe they shouldn’t have been sold your solution? A CEO I used to work with called these ‘the kindergarten clients’.
Although these customers get the most attention, they are often not the most profitable ones, especially as you have to spend time and effort to satisfy them with answers and care. Time that could be spend attracting more customers of the easy, satisfied kind instead.
At the same time you might be neglecting your better customers.
Customers that are satisfied with your business, that place their orders and pay on time. Customers that are probably much more profitable than the very demanding ones.
A customer should receive the amount of attention that he deserves in relation to the profit generated and in relation to your other customers.
The only way to find out is to keep track of the profitability by customer and the amounts of time spend handling him or her. Often there are no standard tools within the company to do this, but just tracking the time spent in a textfile or spreadsheet for a week can be a real eye opener, giving enough evidence that the customer might be a waste of time. More often than not you will find that these cry-babies shut up without leaving when you stop giving them attention (just like real cry-babies).
Instead of trying to satisfy the noisy customers, wouldn’t you rather nurture the ones you don’t hear about? Or even use that time to attract more customers of the easier kind?
How many noisy customers do you need to to offset losing an easy customer?
If you only had noisy customers, how many would you be able to handle before they start leaving for not getting enough attention?
Don’t forget to nurture your easy customers!
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We once had such an extremely annoying and demanding customer at a company I worked for.
The sales and support teams tracked time spent for this customer in a excel. At the end of a 2-week period, the time amounted to 76 hours: almost equal to 1 full-time job! Upper management was blind to these figures however and decided not to do anything about it. To be honest: this was also a flag-shop customer, who made up in part for the reference having them as a customer could provide. 1 year later the company was on the verge of bankruptcy and was acquired.
One of the first changes under the new command was to re-educate such customers by tracking and invoicing all the time spend for them.
This most annoying customer was happy to pay the bills, but after a while a lot of the customers started leaving after they had found a good alternative. Even the customers we never had any problems with! Even if they almost never contacted us, suddenly receiving a bill when they did had some sort of really negative shock-effect.
I’m a believer in making the customer happy. I use myself as a customer as the perfect example. I am extremely loyal to companies who are respectful and helpful. I’ll be their customer and sing their praises until they mess up someone. At the same time, if they don’t care about me, I’m happy to let the world know, and I do so.
Just remember that it only takes one noisy customer to destrpy 5 potential customers, everyone has a button that will make them happy, you just have to find it. Sales is more then closing the deal, it is an ongoing process that means keepig in contact with your supply line, which happens to be your customer base. Make them happy!
Not sure I agree that you need every customer all of the time. There are some customers where doing business is just a bad fit and you’ll need to part ways. Done properly, there are no hard feelings and no worry about bad word of mouth from the customer. However, I do believe in listening to customers who aren’t happy to find out what can be done.
Of course there are certain custoemrs you can not serve or you don’t want to serve.