Some customers are less profitable than others. Know who they are.

To improve your bottom line, concentrate on selling to your more profitable customers, and de-emphasize the less profitable ones.

Here are some less-profitable customers you may recognize, and whom you may wish to subtly weed out:

1. Complainers. How much time and money do you spend responding to complainers? While you must hear and address legitimate complaints, chronic complainers will never be satisfied. They are a continual drain on time and resources, and damage your image by bad-mouthing you to potential customers.

2. Cheapskates. Service providers recognize cheapskates as people who want 120 percent of what you sell for 80 percent of your price. Obviously, if your profit margin is predicated on delivering 100 percent of what you sell for 100 percent of your price, these folks shrink your bottom line.

3. Bargain shoppers. These buyers are loyal only as long as your price is lowest. Almost always, targeting bargain shoppers is a losing proposition. Every sale must be won anew. Since you only won them in the first place because you were cheapest, don’t expect them to come back when someone else become cheaper. Also, realize that price-cutting wars only reduce your bottom line.

One caveat: Sometimes more profitable customers begin their relationship with you as less profitable customers. If you have a good understanding of your target market, you should be able to identify those less profitable customers with potential to graduate to more-profitable status.

Don’t chase them away.

Help them mature by doing what’s necessary to make them more profitable. Usually, that means giving them what they want, at a price and in a manner they find to be fair.