Customer Marketing

Over the past decade, Inbound Marketing has changed the way companies earn buyers’ trust and build their brands - through meaningful, helpful content. But with that change comes unprecedented access to information in a few quick keystrokes. Enter the age of the empowered buyer, one who no longer has to rely on a sales rep to research their challenges or learn more about how a company’s offering might fit their needs. Now, with more than 60 percent of purchasing decisions made in the absence of a sales rep, the role of the rep itself has been called into question.

Martha Humler, who spent her career in retail and advertising and is married to one of the kings of customer service—an executive with the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co.—shares her frustrations about mediocre customer service in a series of vignettes.

This isn't your average restaurant business book. Burns fearlessly dives headfirst into the brutal truth of what's been holding restaurants back from greatness. No more sugar-coating or industry double-speak–it's time for a savage wake-up call!

In our increasingly complicated and data-driven world, many new developments are so complex that only experts comprehend their nuances. But what they don't grasp is how to tell the world about them. Communicating technical content to nontechnical listeners has fast become a critical 21st-century skill. Explaining what you do and why it's important drives funding, policy decisions, media exposure, public awareness, and customer adoption.

Steve Rangoussis has been there. He started his first career as a sales rep, learning the ropes and steadily climbing the sales ladder. Nearly 25 years later, Steve has served in just about every position in the sales hierarchy, uniquely qualifying him to demystify the sales world for sellers and non-sellers, alike. Sometimes, sales feels like alchemy. Sometimes, it feels like science. Sometimes, it feels like a foreign world, hard to penetrate and even harder to successfully navigate, with its particular jargon, professional pressures, and overall culture.

Hillary Carpio and Travis Henry of Snowflake helped scale the go-to market program behind one of the fastest growing software companies in history. Not satisfied with the traditional model of separate sales and marketing functions, they married both into integrated, account-based, cross-functional teams that targeted and closed business at historic rates—what they call "one-team GTM." In Busting Silos: How Snowflake Unites Sales and Marketing to Win Its Best Customers, Carpio and Henry map out how you can do the same at scale.

Slow Down, Sell Faster! does this by introducing a simple yet powerful method for buyer-focused selling that is practical, repeatable, and easily customizable. This buyer-focused approach extends to proposals and presentations, loyalty and retention, and, of course, cultivating more business. Each step in the book corresponds to a role you should adopt to meet customers’ needs at each stage of the buying process. Increasing sales is not just about learning more sales techniques; it’s about understanding the buying process - from your customer’s point of view.

The Big Data-Driven Business: How to Use Big Data to Win Customers, Beat Competitors, and Boost Profits makes the case that big data is for real, and more than just big hype. The audiobook uses real-life examples - from Nate Silver to Copernicus, and Apple to Blackberry - to demonstrate how the winners of the future will use big data to seek the truth.

Scarcity isn't just one of the key principles of influence, it's arguably the most powerful—invoking the kind of primal instincts that were essential to our ancestors' survival. It's also the explanation for why, in the mid-1990's, $29.99 Tickle-Me-Elmo dolls were being scalped for $7,000 apiece. In The Power of Scarcity, Dr. Mindy Weinstein leverages her deep expertise in both marketing and psychology to reveal how this influence principle can be used to boost sales, win negotiations, spark action, develop community, build customer loyalty, and more.

A pioneer of content marketing, Joe Pulizzi has cracked the code when it comes to the power of content in a world where marketers still hold fast to traditional models that no longer work. In Content Inc., he breaks down the business-startup process into six steps, making it simple for you to visualize, launch, and monetize your own business.

Prospect the Sandler Way shares 30 core principles for mastering stress-free lead development by phone and over the Internet, in accordance with the selling system developed by David H. Sandler. Includes updated strategies on 21st-century topics like conducting effective online pre-call research, and using LinkedIn to generate referrals.

Business relationships are still dominated by a narrow perspective—trying to match products to customer needs and making deals. It's a buyer-seller relationship built on a transactional mindset, and it's not how you should be doing business. There's a better way—orchestrating growth—in which suppliers and customers collaborate to build strategies and grow together. Christoph Senn and Mehak Gandhi lay out the Triple Fit Strategy framework, which will help you escape the product-centric mindset and put customers at the heart of your business strategy.

The phenomenal international best seller Fish! told the story of a fictional company that transformed itself by applying lessons learned from Seattle's Pike Place Fish market. Now, with Fish! Tales, listeners can learn how people in real-life businesses boosted morale and improved results by implementing these same principles. Here are specific and tested techniques that can be put to use right away in any kind of business or organization, even at home.

This groundbreaking audiobook takes you beyond relationship marketing and permission marketing and into the realm of the next big thing - meaningful marketing. This new concept addresses the modern consumer's desire for 1) fewer intrusive, hard-sell marketing messages and 2) more value-focused messages, independent of calls for purchase.

Sales Badassery: Kick Ass. Take Names. Crush the Competition. is a no-nonsense guide to transforming your entire attitude to sales, turning the old way of doing things on its head to shift all the power to you. The common myth of sales strategy tells you to approach a prospect from a position of deference - they hold the superior position, forcing you to supplicate, beg, make undue concessions, and be at their beck and call during and after the sale. This indispensable work shows you that leveling the playing field is not enough, you need to slant it in your direction.

Ninety percent of dissatisfied clients will take their business elsewhere and never tell you why. However, 95 percent will become loyal customers again if their needs and problems are addressed and remedied. Speaker and salesperson Michael Aun shares these secrets and many more in It's the Customer, Stupid!, a guide to growing any business by gaining new customers, and, more importantly, by keeping the ones you have happy and coming back for more.

Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. The Lean Product Playbook helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice. The Lean Startup movement has contributed new, valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they lack guidance.

In this essential audiobook, leading business growth strategist David Meerman Scott and fandom expert Reiko Scott explore the neuroscience of fandom and interview young entrepreneurs, veteran business owners, startup founders, nonprofits, and companies big and small to pinpoint which practices separate organizations that flourish from those stuck in stagnation. They lay out a road map for converting customers’ ardor into buying power, pulling one-of-a-kind examples from a wide range of organizations.

The Brain Audit is a complete system that enables you to understand what's going on inside of your customer's brain. It's a system that is based on a deep understanding of how our mind works. It shows you the bags inside your customer's brain. It gives you an understanding of how the brain responds to specific psychological triggers. And it speeds up the sales process, without the need to be pushy.

The Zappos Experience takes you through - and beyond - the playful, offbeat company culture Zappos has become famous for. Michelli reveals what occurs behind the scenes at Zappos, showing how employees at all levels operate on a day-to-day basis while providing the "big picture" leadership methods that have earned the company $1 billion in annual gross sales during the last ten years - with almost no advertising. Michelli breaks the approach down into five key elements.