Meet Meridian CRM
Before opening a spreadsheet, the first questions are qualitative. Meridian CRM sells customer-relationship-management software to mid-market retail chains (50-500 stores). It helps a store manager see a shopper's purchase history, loyalty status, and preferences across every channel. Its customers buy it because switching away from a CRM that already holds years of purchase history is painful and risky, not because Meridian's interface is prettier than a competitor's.
Naming the defensibility
That switching cost is the defensibility, and it's worth naming explicitly: a business model only holds up if you can say, in one sentence, why a customer keeps paying rather than leaving for a cheaper alternative next renewal. "The product is good" is not a defensibility argument on its own; "leaving would mean re-training every store manager and losing years of customer history" is.
| Metric | Meridian, at a glance |
|---|---|
| Customer segment | Mid-market retail chains, 50-500 stores |
| Number of customers | ~140 store-chain accounts |
| Average contract value | ~£140k/year |
| Average customer tenure | 6+ years |
| Estimated switching cost | 6-12 months, re-training plus data migration |
Checkpoint
- Defensibility: the specific reason a customer keeps paying rather than switching, not just "the product is good."
- Switching cost: one common source of defensibility, the pain of moving away, not just of using this product.
If anything here still feels unclear, ask before moving to Lesson 7.