Customer Pain Points


Book Description

There's a chance that your competitor is solving your customer's pain points and you are losing business if you are not directly addressing your customers pain points. Finding the customer's pain point is crucial to understanding how to structure your marketing content and your sales pitch. Many businesses are making the crucial mistake of producing content that fails to demonstrate a solution to their customer's pain points, thereby creating barriers to their business's success. Don't make the mistake of ignoring the issues your customers face. Your brand can learn what customers are looking for if you focus your attention to what they need.




Blue Ocean Shift


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER #1 WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER Blue Ocean Shift is the essential follow up to Blue Ocean Strategy, the classic and over 4 million copy global bestseller by world-renowned professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. Drawing on more than a decade of new work, Kim and Mauborgne show you how to move beyond competing, inspire your people's confidence, and seize new growth, guiding you step-by-step through how to take your organization from a red ocean crowded with competition to a blue ocean of uncontested market space. By combining the insights of human psychology with practical market-creating tools and real-world guidance, Kim and Mauborgne deliver the definitive guide to shift yourself, your team, or your organization to new heights of confidence, market creation, and growth. They show why nondisruptive creation is as important as disruption in seizing new growth. Blue Ocean Shift is packed with all-new research and examples of how leaders in diverse industries and organizations made the shift and created new markets by applying the process and tools outlined in the book. Whether you are a cash-strapped startup or a large, established company, nonprofit or national government, you will learn how to move from red to blue oceans in a way that builds your people's confidence so that they own and drive the process. With battle-tested lessons learned from successes and failures in the field, Blue Ocean Shift is critical reading for leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs alike. You'll learn what works, what doesn't, and how to avoid the pitfalls along the way. This book will empower you to succeed as you embark on your own blue ocean journey. Blue Ocean Shift is indispensable for anyone committed to building a compelling future.




Jobs to Be Done


Book Description

In a challenging economy filled with multiple competitors, no one can afford to stagnate. Yet, innovation is notoriously difficult. How do you pinpoint the winning ideas that customers will love? Sifting through purchasing data for clues about what might sell or haphazardly brainstorming ideas are typical strategies. However, innovation expert Stephen Wunker offers the effective Jobs method: determining the drivers of customer behavior--those functional and emotional goals that people want to achieve. This simple shift in perspective opens up new insights about your customers and a wealth of hidden opportunities. For example, social media newcomer Snapchat used the Jobs process to capture the millennial demographic. By reducing functionality, the company satisfied its users' unmet need to document real life in the moment, without filters and "like" buttons. Packed with similar examples from every industry, this complete innovation guide explains both foundational concepts and a detailed action plan developed by Wunker and his team. In Jobs to Be Done, the groundbreaking Jobs Roadmap takes you step-by-step through the innovation process and reveals how to: Gather valuable customer insights Turn those insights into new product ideas Test and iterate until you find original profitable solutions And much more! Jobs to Be Done gives you a clear-cut framework for thinking about your business, outlines a roadmap for discovering new markets, new products and services, and helps you generate creative opportunities to innovate your way to success.




Sales Engagement


Book Description

Engage in sales—the modern way Sales Engagement is how you engage and interact with your potential buyer to create connection, grab attention, and generate enough interest to create a buying opportunity. Sales Engagement details the modern way to build the top of the funnel and generate qualified leads for B2B companies. This book explores why a Sales Engagement strategy is so important, and walks you through the modern sales process to ensure you’re effectively connecting with customers every step of the way. • Find common factors holding your sales back—and reverse them through channel optimization • Humanize sales with personas and relevant information at every turn • Understand why A/B testing is so incredibly critical to success, and how to do it right • Take your sales process to the next level with a rock solid, modern Sales Engagement strategy This book is essential reading for anyone interested in up-leveling their game and doing more than they ever thought possible.




Data-Driven Personas


Book Description

Data-driven personas are a significant advancement in the fields of human-centered informatics and human-computer interaction. Data-driven personas enhance user understanding by combining the empathy inherent with personas with the rationality inherent in analytics using computational methods. Via the employment of these computational methods, the data-driven persona method permits the use of large-scale user data, which is a novel advancement in persona creation. A common approach for increasing stakeholder engagement about audiences, customers, or users, persona creation remained relatively unchanged for several decades. However, the availability of digital user data, data science algorithms, and easy access to analytics platforms provide avenues and opportunities to enhance personas from often sketchy representations of user segments to precise, actionable, interactive decision-making tools—data-driven personas! Using the data-driven approach, the persona profile can serve as an interface to a fully functional analytics system that can present user representation at various levels of information granularity for more task-aligned user insights. We trace the techniques that have enabled the development of data-driven personas and then conceptually frame how one can leverage data-driven personas as tools for both empathizing with and understanding of users. Presenting a conceptual framework consisting of (a) persona benefits, (b) analytics benefits, and (c) decision-making outcomes, we illustrate applying this framework via practical use cases in areas of system design, digital marketing, and content creation to demonstrate the application of data-driven personas in practical applied situations. We then present an overview of a fully functional data-driven persona system as an example of multi-level information aggregation needed for decision making about users. We demonstrate that data-driven personas systems can provide critical, empathetic, and user understanding functionalities for anyone needing such insights.




Blue Ocean Leadership (Harvard Business Review Classics)


Book Description

Ten years ago, world-renowned professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne broke ground by introducing "blue ocean strategy," a new model for discovering uncontested markets that are ripe for growth. In this bound version of their bestselling Harvard Business Review classic article, they apply their concepts and tools to what is perhaps the greatest challenge of leadership: closing the gulf between the potential and the realized talent and energy of employees. Research indicates that this gulf is vast: According to Gallup, 70% of workers are disengaged from their jobs. If companies could find a way to convert them into engaged employees, the results could be transformative. The trouble is, managers lack a clear understanding of what changes they could make to bring out the best in everyone. In this article, Kim and Mauborgne offer a solution to that problem: a systematic approach to uncovering, at each level of the organization, which leadership acts and activities will inspire employees to give their all, and a process for getting managers throughout the company to start doing them. Blue ocean leadership works because the managers' "customers"--that is, the people managers oversee and report to--are involved in identifying what's effective and what isn't. Moreover, the approach doesn't require leaders to alter who they are, just to undertake a different set of tasks. And that kind of change is much easier to implement and track than changes to values and mind-sets. The Harvard Business Review Classics series offers you the opportunity to make seminal Harvard Business Review articles a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world--and will have a direct impact on you today and for years to come.







Escaping the Build Trap


Book Description

To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. 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. In five parts, this book explores: Why organizations ship features rather than cultivate the value those features represent How to set up a product organization that scales How product strategy connects a company’s vision and economic outcomes back to the product activities How to identify and pursue the right opportunities for producing value through an iterative product framework How to build a culture focused on successful outcomes over outputs




MEDDICC


Book Description

What do the world's most successful enterprise sales teams have in common? They rely on MEDDICC to make their sales process predictable and efficient. MEDDIC with one C was initially created by Dick Dunkel in 1996 when he was at PTC. Since then MEDDIC has evolved to be better known as MEDDICC or MEDDPICC and has proliferated across the world being the go-to choice for elite enterprise sales organizations. If you ever find yourself feeling any of the following symptoms with your deal, you could benefit from MEDDICC: Your buyer doesn't see the value of your solution? (aka they think you are expensive) You are unable to find, articulate and quantify Pain You don't have a Champion or at the very least a Coach helping you navigate and sell You find yourself unable to gain access to people with power and influence You don't know how the customer makes decisions You don't know who is involved in the decision-making process You find yourself surprised by things that come up in the sales process The decision criteria seem to move throughout the process, and you're constantly playing catch up Your Competition is landing strikes against you that you neither see coming nor are able to defend You lose track of where you stand in your deals Whether you are an individual contributor or a sales leader embracing MEDDICC will help you to beat those symptoms and take back control of your deal. Historically, learning MEDDICC has relied upon hands-on training, but now you can learn MEDDICC from an expert who uses it every day. The Book deconstructs MEDDICC into easy to understand and implement steps. Breaking down every letter of the acronym into actionable insights complemented by commentary on how MEDDICC can help sales organizations to revolutionize their sales execution and efficiency. In the words of the original creator of MEDDIC, Dick Dunkel: Whether you are an individual contributor or sales leader, my advice is that you should start to implement MEDDICCinto what you do straight away. Embrace MEDDICC, and you and your team will more clearly understand the WHY to yourprocess, and you'll begin to execute your customer interactions with more purpose and achieve better results.And like so many others before, you will begin to reap the rewards of having a well-qualified pipeline of opportunitieswith clearer paths to success. - Dick Dunkel, MEDDIC Creator.




All In Startup


Book Description

If Owen Chase can't find a way to turn his company around in the next nine days, he'll be forced to shut it down and lay off all of his employees. He has incurred substantial debt and his marriage is on shaky ground. Through pure happenstance, Owen finds himself pondering this problem while advancing steadily as a contestant at the World Series of Poker. His Las Vegas path quickly introduces him to Samantha, a beautiful and mysterious mentor with a revolutionary approach to entrepreneurship. Sam is a fountain of knowledge that may save his company, but her sexual advances might prove too much for Owen's struggling marriage. All In Startup is more than just a novel about eschewing temptation and fighting to save a company. It is a lifeline for entrepreneurs who are thinking about launching a new idea or for those who have already started but can't seem to generate the traction they were expecting. Entrepreneurs who achieve success in the new economy do so using a new "scientific method" of innovation. All In Startup demonstrates why four counterintuitive principles separate successful entrepreneurs from the wanna-preneurs who bounce from idea to idea, unable to generate real revenue. You will likely get only one opportunity in your life to go "all in" in on an idea: to quit your job, talk your spouse into letting you drain the savings account, and follow your dream. All In Startup will prepare you for that "all in" moment and make sure that you push your chips into the middle only when the odds are in your favor. This book holds the keys to significantly de-risking your idea so that your success appears almost lucky. Join Owen and Sam for this one-of-a-kind journey that will set you on the right path for when it's your turn to put everything on the line.