Learn how to create journey maps that actually get resultsNearly two out of three journey maps fail to drive customer-focused change. Find out how to make your initiative successful, and avoid the pitfalls that doom so many others, with this authoritative new book. With insights from dozens of CX pros, extensive research, and real-world case studies and examples, How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer will help you understand why some maps drive action - leading to an improved customer experience, greater customer loyalty, and impressive ROI - while others just gather dust on a shelf.
Offers an organizational design model for service organizations, covering such topics as funding mechanisms, employee management systems, and customer management systems.
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.
How do today’s most successful tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla—design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business. With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations—dramatically improving their own product efforts. Whether you’re an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success. Filled with the author’s own personal stories—and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love. The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.
The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak. They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question and everyone will lie to you at least a little . As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it and it's worth doing right . Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.
Pork dorks. Craftsters. American Girl fans. Despite their different tastes, these eclectic diehards have a lot in common: they’re obsessed about a specific brand, product, or category. They pursue their passions with fervor, and they’re extremely knowledgeable about the things they love. They aren’t average consumers—they’re superconsumers. Although small in number, superconsumers can have an outsized impact on a company’s bottom line. Representing 10% of total consumers, they can drive between 30% to 70% of sales, and they’re usually willing to spend considerably more than the average consumer. And because they’re so engaged and passionate, they can offer invaluable advice to managers looking to improve their products, change their business models, energize their cultures, and attract new customers. In Superconsumers, growth strategy expert Eddie Yoon lays out a simple but extremely effective framework that has helped companies of all types and sizes achieve more sustainable growth: he’ll show you how to find, listen to, and engage with your most passionate and profitable consumers, and then tailor your decisions to meet their wants and needs. Along the way, he’ll let you into the minds and homes of superconsumers of all kinds, revealing what makes them tick and why they’re willing to spend so much more than other consumers. Rich with data and case studies of companies that have implemented superconsumer strategies with great success, Superconsumers is a fun, practical, and inspiring guide for anyone interested in making their best customers even better.
Four years ago, the bestselling authors of The Challenger Sale overturned decades of conventional wisdom with a bold new approach to sales. Now their latest research reveals something even more surprising: Being a Challenger seller isn’t enough. Your success or failure also depends on who you challenge. Picture your ideal customer: friendly, eager to meet, ready to coach you through the sale and champion your products and services across the organization. It turns out that’s the last person you need. Most marketing and sales teams go after low-hanging fruit: buyers who are eager and have clearly articulated needs. That’s simply human nature; it’s much easier to build a relationship with someone who always makes time for you, engages with your content, and listens attentively. But according to brand-new CEB research—based on data from thousands of B2B marketers, sellers, and buyers around the world—the highest-performing teams focus their time on potential customers who are far more skeptical, far less interested in meeting, and ultimately agnostic as to who wins the deal. How could this be? The authors of The Challenger Customer reveal that high-performing B2B teams grasp something that their average-performing peers don’t: Now that big, complex deals increasingly require consensus among a wide range of players across the organization, the limiting factor is rarely the salesperson’s inability to get an individual stakeholder to agree to a solution. More often it’s that the stakeholders inside the company can’t even agree with one another about what the problem is. It turns out only a very specific type of customer stakeholder has the credibility, persuasive skill, and will to effectively challenge his or her colleagues to pursue anything more ambitious than the status quo. These customers get deals to the finish line far more often than friendlier stakeholders who seem so receptive at first. In other words, Challenger sellers do best when they target Challenger customers. The Challenger Customer unveils research-based tools that will help you distinguish the "Talkers" from the "Mobilizers" in any organization. It also provides a blueprint for finding them, engaging them with disruptive insight, and equipping them to effectively challenge their own organization.
Learn how to Create Journey Maps that actually GET ResultsTop business leaders know that in order to deliver the best customer experience, they must learn as much as possible about their customers. Many understand the learning process often starts with creating a customer journey map to understand how customers interact with their business. However, the tough reality remains-nearly two out of three journey maps fail to drive customer-focused change. First published in 2019, before the COVID pandemic so quickly changed the way researchers gathered data and businesses interacted with customers, this book has become one of the top-selling books on the subject of journey mapping, It has already helped thousands of CX research professionals and business leaders plan and execute successful journey mapping initiatives and avoid the pitfalls that doom so many others. With insights from dozens of CX pros, extensive research, and real-world case studies and examples, this book guides you through the process of creating and using journey maps. This updated edition came about because of the changes created by the pandemic and the skyrocketing use of journey mapping software it helped bring about. Now with an added chapter that focuses on journey mapping software tools, and the ability to create living journey maps, this enhanced edition of How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer? will help you better understand why some maps drive action - leading to an improved customer experience, greater customer loyalty, and impressive ROI - while others just gather dust on a shelf.
“A journey into a powerful idea . . . the more people you involve as creators and contributors, the greater your innovation capacity.” —Polly LaBarre, New York Times-bestselling coauthor of Mavericks at Work Organizations need to offer customers breakthrough products, services, and solutions to effectively compete in today’s innovation-hungry economy. The challenge is customers often don’t know precisely what they want. As Henry Ford is reputed to have said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” To surprise and awe your customers, Chip Bell advises developing co-creation partnerships with them. Co-creation partnerships are about fulfilling customers’ hopes and aspirations, not just their needs and expectations. Co-creation partnerships require (1) curiosity that uncovers insight, (2) grounding that promotes clear focus, (3) discovery that fosters risk-taking, (4) trust that safeguards partnership purity, and (5) passion that inspires energized generosity. Using examples from organizations like McDonald’s, DHL, Marriott, Lockheed Martin, Discover Financial, Ultimate Software, and many more, Bell shows how co-creation partnerships enable you to tap into the treasure trove of ideas, ingenuity, and genius-in-the-raw within every customer. “Innovation through partnership is the blueprint for business growth in the future. Inside Your Customer’s Imagination provides the instruction and inspiration to make it a success.”—Marshall Goldsmith, #1 New York Times-bestselling author “Chip Bell’s unique perspective, lively illustrations, and practical advice result in one terrific resource for anyone eager to tap a customer’s ingenuity for creating breakthrough results.” —Jeanne Bliss, founder and CEO, CustomerBliss; and cofounder, Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)
Joe Girard was an example of a young man with perseverance and determination. Joe began his working career as a shoeshine boy. He moved on to be a newsboy for the Detroit Free Press at nine years old, then a dishwasher, a delivery boy, stove assembler, and home building contractor. He was thrown out of high school, fired from more than forty jobs, and lasted only ninety-seven days in the U.S. Army. Some said that Joe was doomed for failure. He proved them wrong. When Joe started his job as a salesman with a Chevrolet agency in Eastpointe, Michigan, he finally found his niche. Before leaving Chevrolet, Joe sold enough cars to put him in the Guinness Book of World Records as 'the world's greatest salesman' for twelve consecutive years. Here, he shares his winning techniques in this step-by-step book, including how to: o Read a customer like a book and keep that customer for life o Convince people reluctant to buy by selling them the right way o Develop priceless information from a two-minute phone call o Make word-of-mouth your most successful tool Informative, entertaining, and inspiring, HOW TO SELL ANYTHING TO ANYBODY is a timeless classic and an indispensable tool for anyone new to the sales market.
