Customer Business

Companies have invested thousands and even millions of dollars in CRM technology over the past decade, but frontline salespeople and sales executives alike are still groping for solutions. The problem of drift - a common phenomenon in which a prospect simply forgets about the product offering and goes dark - is persistent and rampant. Technology doesn't change behavior on its own. Behavior is changed by adopting better habits. The fact is, 44 percent of salespeople give up after one follow-up attempt. That sad reality presents a genuine opportunity.

Whether you're in the trenches or the boardroom, you're going to encounter demanding, dissatisfied, and disagreeable customers. Are your people (and you) prepared to deal with them? Ignore a valid complaint and you could be the next viral sensation for all the wrong reasons. But give in to every demand and you may be consumed with the often petty complaints of your worst customers and wind up pandering to them with freebies, discounts, and special attention.

Exceeding expectations rather than simply satisfying them is the cornerstone of the Disney approach to customer service. Now, in honor of the 10th anniversary of the original Be Our Guest, the Disney Institute, which specializes in helping professionals see new possibilities through concepts not found in the typical workplace, is revealing even more of the business behind the magic of quality service.

The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a start-up or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice.

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.

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.

Marketers are faced with a stark and challenging dilemma: Customers demand deep personalization, but they are increasingly leery of offering the type of personal data required to make it happen. As a solution to this problem, customer data platforms have come to the fore. CDPs are the hottest marketing technology around today, but are they worthy of the hype? Customer Data Platforms takes a deep dive into everything CDP, so you can learn how to steer your firm toward the future of personalization.

The author argues that in an extremely cluttered marketplace, traditional differentiation is no longer enough—today companies need “radical differentiation” to create lasting value for their shareholders and customers.

In Pick Up the Phone and Sell: How Proactive Calls to Customers and Prospects Can Double Your Sales, sales expert, consultant, and Wall Street Journal best-selling author Alex Goldfayn delivers a comprehensive road map to one of the most important weapons in any salesperson's arsenal: the phone. From the author of Selling Boldly and 5-Minute Selling, the book teaches you techniques to supercharge your sales by making the proactive call the tip of your selling spear.

Clayton M. Christensen is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Michael E. Raynor is a director at Deloitte Research. Together, they outline an innovative plan that urges businesses to create disruption rather than fleeing from it. Named one of 2003's Best Business Books by Business Week, this book is a Wall Street Journal and New York Times best seller.

The ultimate guide to digital marketing and advertising from one of the most influential digital marketers in the world, Alex Schultz, Chief Marketing Officer of Meta. “Alex is one of a small handful of people that I can say without his work, our community would not have connected more than 2...

Sales is a skill anyone can learn and master - and introverts are especially good at it once they learn how to leverage their natural strengths. Introverts aren't comfortable with traditional tactics like aggressively pushing a product or talking over a customer's objections. That's the beauty of The Introvert's Edge: it doesn't focus on the sale itself but on a sales system that helps introverts feel sincere instead of sales-y.

Not all customers are the same, regardless of how they appear on the surface. The most successful companies, from Amazon to Best Buy, understand their best customers are their most valuable asset, and they tailor their acquisition, development, and retention efforts to those customers. In The Customer Centricity Playbook, Wharton School professor Peter Fader and Wharton Interactive's executive director Sarah Toms help you see your customers as individuals rather than a monolith, so you can stop wasting resources by chasing down product sales to each and every consumer.

Most companies treat service as a low-priority business operation, keeping it out of the spotlight until a customer complains. Then service gets to make a brief appearance - for as long as it takes to calm the customer down and fix whatever foul-up jeopardized the relationship. In Uncommon Service, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss show how, in a volatile economy where the old rules of strategic advantage no longer hold true, service must become a competitive weapon, not a damage-control function. That means weaving service tightly into every core decision your company makes.

In today's competitive business climate, you can't just satisfy your customers. You need to give them experiences that they won't forget. The Cult of the Customer is your guide to creating a customer-focused culture that turns satisfied customers into customer evangelists. Author Shep Hyken has spent 25 years studying great companies and the evangelists they create. He describes how to design a strategy that leads both customers and employees through five distinct cultural phases-from "uncertainty" to "amazement".

Dealing with customers isn't easy, they aren't always right or even pleasant. Business author Renée Evenson ensures you’ll always have the right words to defuse tense interactions. Practical and insightful, this book ensures you’ll never again be at a loss for what to say to customers. In Powerful Phrases for Effective Customer Service, she covers 30 challenging customer behaviors and 20 common employee-caused negative encounters.

Internationally recognized “millionaire maker,” Dan S. Kennedy, joined by entrepreneur and financial consultant, Matt Zagula, show you how to break down the barriers caused by the “trust no one” mantra invading every customer’s mind today. They deliver an eye-opening look at the core of all business—trust, and teach you the secrets to gaining it, keeping it, and using it to build competitive differentiation, create price elasticity, attract more affluent clients, and inspire referrals.

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.

You know your product is awesome, but does anybody else? Forget everything you thought you knew about positioning. Successfully connecting your product with consumers isn’t a matter of following trends, comparing yourself to the competition, or trying to attract the widest customer base. So, what is it? April Dunford, positioning guru and tech executive, will enlighten you.

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