Customer Business

Most startups don't fail because they can't build a product. Most startups fail because they can't get traction. Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely. As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die.

Working Backwards is a practical guidebook and a corporate narrative, filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how it has affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously executed principles and practices - shared here for the very first time.

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.

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.

Do you want to make money on your own by letting your creative side shine? If you want to make beautiful balloon garlands and learn the ins and outs of the business, then this book is for you! Here’s the deal: You may love the idea of starting your own balloon business, but you have no idea where to get started. Fortunately, this book will give you the road map you need to build a balloon business that you will love, and the best part is that you can start this business from the comfort of your own home.

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.

Subscription companies are growing nine times faster than the S&P 500. Why? Because unlike product companies, subscription companies know their customers. A happy subscriber base is the ultimate economic moat. Today's consumers prefer the advantages of access over the hassles of maintenance. Simply put, the world is shifting from products to services. As the CEO of the world's largest subscription management platform, Tien Tzuo has helped hundreds of companies transition from relying on individual sales to building customer-centric, recurring-revenue businesses.

Take your passion for event planning to the next level with in-the-trenches advice and tools you need to start, run, and grow a successful business. From writing a solid contract to finding reliable vendors, our experts help you identify your niche, teach you how to scout potential clients, evaluate the competition, market your business, and more.

Endless Customers delivers a proven framework for businesses to become the most trusted and recognized brands in their markets by harnessing the power of developing the right content, website, sales activities, technology, and culture of performance. When executed correctly, this framework enables marketing, sales, and leadership teams to sync up on a business strategy that is transformative to the organization's growth, creating long-term success—and endless customers.

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.

This new edition - more than 50 percent new and revised - is a significant update from the previous one and reveals how to harness the newest data mining methods and techniques to solve common business problems. The duo of unparalleled authors share invaluable advice for improving response rates to direct marketing campaigns, identifying new customer segments, and estimating credit risk. In addition, they cover more advanced topics, such as preparing data for analysis and creating the necessary infrastructure for data mining at your company.

The former EVP of Walt Disney World shares indispensible rules for serving customers with consistency, efficiency, creativity, sincerity, and excellence. Lee Cockerell knows that success in business - any business - depends upon winning and keeping customers. In 39 digestible, bite-sized chapters, Lee shares everything he has learned in his 40-plus-year career in the hospitality industry about creating an environment that keeps customers coming back for more. Here, Lee not only shows why the customer always rules, but also the rules for serving customers so well they'll never want to do business with anyone but you.

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.

From Michael LeBoeuf, the best selling author of Working Smart and the audio programs Working Smarter, Imagineering, and The Perfect Business, comes How to Win Customers and Keep Them for Life. With a hardhitting, action-ready rewards-and-incentives ideology, this is the ultimate program to building a successful business through customer satisfaction.

Packed with behind-the-peel stories, hard-earned lessons, and a few other surprises, Fans First teaches you how to stand out in your marketplace, drive explosive growth, and inspire fanatical loyalty.

What is it that made Starbucks an overnight sensation and separated it from other coffee house companies? Why do many products with great product innovation, perfect locations, terrific customer experiences, even breakthrough advertising, fail to get the same visceral traction in the marketplace as brands like Apple and Nike?

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.

Still struggling through the financial crisis that began in 2008, consumers aren't buying traditional sales approaches anymore. So how do salespeople, corporate communicators, managers, and marketers sell their ideas, products, and services to a generation of customers who are more skeptical and less influenced by conventional marketing than ever before?

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 this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You'll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small.