Building to Customer Demand


Book Description

The processes used by Dell Computer, Dow Chemical, Hewlett-Packard and others to ship a wide range of products quickly and cost effectively via the Power of Postponement.




The Four Steps to the Epiphany


Book Description

The bestselling classic that launched 10,000 startups and new corporate ventures - The Four Steps to the Epiphany is one of the most influential and practical business books of all time. The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the Lean Startup approach to new ventures. It was the first book to offer that startups are not smaller versions of large companies and that new ventures are different than existing ones. Startups search for business models while existing companies execute them. The book offers the practical and proven four-step Customer Development process for search and offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture. Rather than blindly execute a plan, The Four Steps helps uncover flaws in product and business plans and correct them before they become costly. Rapid iteration, customer feedback, testing your assumptions are all explained in this book. Packed with concrete examples of what to do, how to do it and when to do it, the book will leave you with new skills to organize sales, marketing and your business for success. If your organization is starting a new venture, and you're thinking how to successfully organize sales, marketing and business development you need The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Essential reading for anyone starting something new. The Four Steps to the Epiphany was originally published by K&S Ranch Publishing Inc. and is now available from Wiley. The cover, design, and content are the same as the prior release and should not be considered a new or updated product.




Connected Strategy


Book Description

Business Models for Transforming Customer Relationships What if there were a way to turn occasional, sporadic transactions with customers into long-term, continuous relationships--while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiency? What if you could break your existing trade-offs between superior customer experience and low cost? This is the promise of a connected strategy. New forms of connectivity--involving frequent, low-friction, customized interactions--mean that companies can now anticipate customer needs as they arise, or even before. Simultaneously, enabled by these technologies, companies can create new business models that deliver more value to customers. Connected strategies are win-win: Customers get a dramatically improved experience, while companies boost operational efficiency. In this book, strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in industries such as healthcare, financial services, mobility, retail, entertainment, nonprofit, and education, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways--respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution--for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies. Whether you're trying to revitalize strategy in an established company or disrupt an industry as a startup, this book will help you: Reshape your connections with your customers Find new ways to connect with existing suppliers while also activating new sources of capacity Create the right revenue model Make the best technology choices to support your strategy Integrating rich examples, how-to advice, and practical tools in the form of "workshop chapters" throughout, this book is the ultimate resource for creating competitive advantage through connected relationships with your customers and redefined connections in your industry.




Pitch Perfect


Book Description

You have a home-run startup idea and a whip-smart team to execute it. Everything should be in place to kick-start your company and secure funding. However, there is one more step that can make or break the entire deal: the pitch. Founders everywhere struggle to nail the perfect pitch to garner VC backing, and this book is here to help. Pitch Perfect by Haje Jan Kamps expertly teaches you how to tell your startup’s story. To raise venture capital, it is absolutely crucial that your foundation is a story that is accessible, compelling, and succinct. Kamps uses his invaluable experiential knowledge to guide you through your presentation, from slide deck specifics to storytelling details to determining a fundamental philosophy for your business. In the process of creating and formulating a pitch deck and the story to go with it, founders often discover deep flaws in their business idea. Perhaps the market is non-existent. It could be that the “problem” isn’t worth solving. Maybe the idea is so simple that it would be too easy to copy. Maybe it’s already been done, or the team simply is not up to the job. Pitch Perfect has all of those bases covered so that you can excel. How do you convince an institutional investor to part with their money and fund your company? The small block of time you are given for a pitch holds your startup’s future in its grasp. Learn how to craft your startup story in a way that will get people to lean into your message with Pitch Perfect. Your dream is only one pitch away.




Social Marketing to the Business Customer


Book Description

The first book devoted entirely to B2B social marketing B2B markets are fundamentally different from consumer markets. Decisions are made on value, not impulse. Buying cycles are complex, often with many stakeholders involved. Relationships and support are critical. Bet-the-business decisions demand discipline, knowledge, and lots of information. This hands-on guide covers topics unique to this segment, including cost justification, prospecting and lead generation, matching tools to the sales funnel, building, B2B search engine optimization, social media monitoring, social media policy development, long-term client relationships, gaining stakeholder support, building a more transparent organization, and what's coming next. Features plentiful examples, case studies, and best practices Focuses on the channels that are most effective for B2B marketers Builds on the authors' more than 30 years of combined experience in the new media/social media space, as well as two previous successful books Leverage the vast business-to-business potential of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many other social media platforms today with Social Marketing to the Business Customer!




Converted


Book Description

When the world’s biggest brands want to sharpen their digital marketing strategy, they call Neil Hoyne – Google’s Chief Measurement Strategist and Senior Fellow at the Wharton School. In his first book, he offers a simple, research-backed playbook that anyone can use to find their best customers and develop relationships that last. Under pressure for quick results and facing fierce marketplace competition, too many marketers are boxed into spaghetti-to-the-wall forms of digital marketing that limit the potential of their long hours, countless experiments, and warehouses of data. And in the end, they watch their competition sprint ahead. But what if you built a business around long-term relationships with customers, using data to understand who they are, what they need, and where to find more customers just like them? You can. And you’ll leave your competitors, with all of their data and their short-term thinking, to poke around in the scraps. In Converted, you will learn how to: • Understand the full value of each relationship • Engage in an ongoing conversation with your best customers • Ask the right questions so you can anticipate your customers’ needs • Find more great customers A real person is always on the other end of the transaction. Converted shows you how to win their hearts.




Building Brands Directly


Book Description

New competition, technology and economics have changed the behaviour of markets and the practice of marketing. Customers are more discerning, and demand more quality, service and choice. Established brands are under threat. New brands are tougher than ever to build. How to create business value by sustaining existing brands and building new brands is the priority of our major business leaders, the managers to whom they entrust their brands and the students who are the brand stewards of the future. In this book Stewart Pearson explains how to build your brands directly: by investing in the loyalty of your customers and explains the commercial realities behind today's marketing headlines.




Superior Customer Value


Book Description

Superior Customer Value is a state-of-the-art guide to designing, implementing and evaluating a customer value strategy in service, technology and information-based organizations. A customer-centric culture provides focus and direction for an organization, driving and enhancing market performance. By benchmarking the best companies in the world, Weinstein shows students and marketers what it really means to create exceptional value for customers in the Now Economy. Learn how to transform companies by competing via the 5-S framework – speed, service, selection, solutions and sociability. Other valuable tools such as the Customer Value Funnel, Service-Quality-Image-Price (SQIP) framework, SERVQUAL, and the Customer Value/Retention Model frame the reader’s thinking on how to improve marketing operations to create customer-centered organizations. This edition features a stronger emphasis on marketing thinking, planning and strategy, as well as new material on the Now Economy, millennials, customer obsession, business models, segmentation and personalized marketing, customer experience management and customer journey mapping, value pricing, customer engagement, relationship marketing and technology, marketing metrics and customer loyalty and retention. Built on a solid research basis, this practical and action-oriented book will give students and managers an edge in improving their marketing operations to create superior customer experiences.




CustomerCentric Selling, Second Edition


Book Description

The Web has changed the game for your customers—and, therefore, for you. Now, CustomerCentricSelling, already recognized as one of the premiermethodologies for managing the buyer-sellerrelationship, helps you level the playing field soyou can reach clients when they are ready to buyand create a superior customer experience. Your business and its people need to be“CustomerCentric”—willing and able to identifyand serve customers’ needs in a world wherecompetition waits just a mouse-click away.Traditional wisdom has long held that sellingmeans convincing and persuading buyers. Buttoday’s buyers no longer want or need to be soldin traditional ways. CustomerCentric Selling givesyou mastery of the crucial eight aspects ofcommunicating with today’s clients to achieveoptimal results: Having conversations instead ofmaking presentations Asking relevant questions insteadof offering opinions Focusing on solutions and notonly relationships Targeting businesspeople insteadof gravitating toward users Relating product usage instead ofrelying on features Competing to win—not just to stay busy Closing on the buyer’s timeline(instead of yours) Empowering buyers instead of tryingto “sell” them What’s more, CustomerCentric Selling teaches andreinforces key tactics that will make the most ofyour organization’s resources. Perhaps you feelyou don’t have the smartest internal systems inplace to ensure an ideal workflow. (Perhaps, asis all too common, you lack identifiable systemsalmost entirely.) From the basics—and beyond—ofstrategic budgeting and negotiation to assessingand developing the skills of your sales force, you’lllearn how to make sure that each step yourbusiness takes is the right one.




The Lean Product Playbook


Book Description

The missing manual on how to apply Lean Startup to build products that customers love The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup 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. The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to successfully adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing. If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to develop winning products, this book is for you. This book describes the Lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit. It walks you through how to: Determine your target customers Identify underserved customer needs Create a winning product strategy Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Design your MVP prototype Test your MVP with customers Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products. As a hands-on consultant, he refined and applied the advice in this book as he helped many companies improve their product process and build great products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Epocrates, and Medallia. Entrepreneurs, executives, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find The Lean Product Playbook an indispensable, hands-on resource.