Customer Business

One of the biggest challenges we face as entrepreneurs and innovators is understanding how to make our ideas resonate. We tend to have no shortage of ideas, but we struggle to tell the story of how they are going to be useful in the world and why they will matter to people. Marketing is the way we communicate how our ideas translate to value for people in a marketplace.

With emerging technology transforming customer expectations, it’s more important than ever to keep a laser focus on the experience companies provide their customers. In The Customer of the Future, customer experience futurist Blake Morgan outlines 10 easy-to-follow customer experience guidelines that integrate emerging technologies with effective strategies to combat disconnected processes, silo mentalities, and a lack of buyer perspective.

As a small-business owner, entrepreneur, or marketer, are you absolutely certain that you know what your customer wants? And even if you know what your customer wants, are you sure that you are able to clearly communicate that you offer the exact thing that they are seeking? In this best-selling book, Ryan Levesque lays out his proven, repeatable, yet slightly counterintuitive, methodology for understanding the core wants and motivations of your customer.

Personalized is a playbook for delivering true personalization at scale. In this book, Boston Consulting Group's Mark Abraham and Harvard Business School's David C. Edelman describe Five Promises of Personalization. Personalized is a playbook for delivering true personalization at scale. With detailed examples across industries—including retail, health care, banking, technology, and travel—this book will help executives learn how to put personalization at the center of their strategy, accelerate growth, and capture their share of the $2 trillion personalization prize.

Discover how to create exceptional customer service and a superior customer experience, learning from the greatest companies of our time.

If you want to put your arms around your business and bottom line, you'll want all the updated information and practices found in the landmark business best seller, Hug Your Customers. The only way to stay in business is to have customers; the only way to increase your profit is to attract more customer visits by providing exceptional customer service. It's that simple says Jack Mitchell. Hug Your Customers shares the hands-on practical philosophy that has allowed Mitchell and his Family of Stores to thrive and excel in today's challenging retail marketplace.

An authentic brand community is more than just people buying your product or working alongside one another. This audiobook articulates the critical roles of mutual concern, common values, and shared experiences in creating fiercely loyal customer and collaborator relationships. Carrie Melissa Jones and Charles Vogl argue that in an authentic and enriching community, members have mutual concern for one another, share personal values, and join together in meaningful shared experiences, whether online or off. On the deepest level, brands must help members grow into who they want to be.

Who do you want your customers to become? According to MIT innovation expert and thought leader Michael Schrage, if you aren’t asking this question, your strategic marketing and innovation efforts will fail. In this latest HBR Single, Schrage provides a powerful new lens for getting more value out of innovation investment. He argues that asking customers to do something different doesn’t go far enough - serious marketers and innovators must ask them to become something different instead.

In sales, the worst thing you can hear from a customer isn’t “no.” It’s “I need to think about it.” When this happens, deeply entrenched business advice says to double down on your efforts to sell a buyer on all the ways they might win by choosing you and your business. But this approach backfires dramatically. Why? Because it completely gets wrong the primary driver behind purchasing decision-making: once purchase intent is established, customers no longer care about succeeding. What they really care about is not failing.

The timeless guide to sales success has been revised to help you supercharge personal and team performance in a new economy. "People make buying decisions emotionally and justify them logically." That shrewd insight from the first edition of this best-selling book has become a no-brainer among sales professionals. Now, the new edition of the classic work that has helped millions of sales professionals take their careers to new levels offers critical new insights, information, and tools for success in today's economy.

Based on the success story of a small Seattle coffee shop, this little book is a tasty brew of sound principles and instructive anecdotes. As the coffee shop owner looks for ways to retain his customer base, a consultant helps him focus on what really matters. Authors Yerkes and Decker, renowned for their consulting and business savvy, have done their homework and turned Beans into "a business fable taken from real life".

How do you develop products that people will actually use and buy? This practical guide shows you how to validate product and company ideas through customer development research - before you waste months and millions on a product or service that no one needs or wants. With a combination of open-ended interviewing and fast and flexible research techniques, you’ll learn how your prospective customers behave, the problems they need to solve, and what frustrates and delights them

Whether you're a manager, owner, or employee, Customer Service Training 101 gets you up to speed fast. The completely revised and updated third edition addresses every aspect of face-to-face, phone, online, social media, and self-service interactions. Using scenarios, guidelines, and practice exercises, this inspiring training manual explains what to say and do, what to avoid, and why interactions go astray.

Trusted: The Proven Path to Customer Loyalty and Business Growth reveals how top companies harness trust to secure their market dominance and drive substantial growth. Expert Natalie Doyle Oldfield, a leading authority on trust in business, provides a proven framework for turning customer trust into a powerful revenue engine. Drawing from research and real-world success stories, Doyle Oldfield outlines actionable strategies to enhance your organization’s "Trust Equity™" and convert it into increased sales and stronger client relationships.

In Marketing 6.0, the celebrated promoter of the "Four P's of Marketing," Philip Kotler, explains how marketers can use technology to address customers' needs and make a difference in the world. In a new age of metamarketing, this book provides marketers with a way to integrate technological and business model evolution with the dramatic shifts in consumer behavior that have happened in the last decade.

If all the practice consultants and marketing experts have such great ideas to share, why aren't they using them to run their own successful practices? Finally, a book that offers not just ideas but proven strategies for transforming any financial practice into a highly effective value-delivering machine. Practicing financial advisor Matthew Jarvis uses these exact strategies to run his own wildly successful investment firm.

The Heart of Hospitality is the essential guide to creating exceptional customer service and hospitality for guests of all generations, including millennials, boomers, and more.

CEOs. Leaders without titles. Startups. Corporations. For-profits. Nonprofits. It doesn't matter who you are or what you do - you want to become the best. You want to win, every time. Horst Schulze knows how to win. In Excellence Wins, Schulze, in his absolute no-nonsense approach, shares the visionary and disruptive principles that have produced immense global successes over the course of his still-prolific 50-year career.

The New Gold Standard takes you on an exclusive tour behind the scenes of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. Granted unprecedented access to the company's executives, staff, and its award-winning Leadership Center training facilities, bestselling author Joseph Michelli explored every level of leadership within the organization.

In the old days, when we made physical products, setting project goals wasn’t that hard. But in today’s service - and software-driven world, “done” is less obvious. When is Amazon done? When is Google done? Or Facebook? In reality, services powered by digital systems are never done. So then how do we give teams a goal that they can work on? Mostly, we simply ask teams to build features - but features are the wrong way to go. We often build features that create no value. Instead, we need to give teams an outcome to achieve.