Customer Development

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

If you’re running a junk removal business—or thinking about starting one—there’s one question that matters most: How do you get customers consistently?

Let’s face it. Today’s users are impulsive and easily distracted. They don’t have the time (or patience) to try and figure things out by themselves. They expect the product to be intuitive, easy, and fast. What’s more, they want more than they paid (or didn’t pay) for, and they want it now.

What if your next customer didn't have a pulse, preferences, or patience for poor performance? In Machine Customers: The Evolution Has Begun, CX Evolutionist Katja Forbes reveals how intelligent agents, autonomous procurement systems, and logic-driven buying platforms are silently revolutionising commerce. This trillion-dollar transformation is happening now, not in some distant future.

The subscription business model is hot - from software to music to movies to diet programs, investors and public markets want businesses that create recurring payments from unlimited customers. The old sales and marketing methods can handle attracting new customers for growth; however, only in the last five years has a discipline emerged that views growth in relation to retention, not just sales.

The Customer Success Manager has become a critical asset to organizations across the business landscape. As the subscription model has spread from the cloud and SaaS to more sectors of the economy, that pivotal role will only grow in importance. That's because if you want to compete and thrive in this new environment, you need to put the customer at the center of your strategy. You need to recognize you're no longer selling just a product. You're selling an outcome.  

If leaders aren't integrating their digital offerings into a philosophy of customer success, they will be defeated in the next decade because technical excellence and other traditional competitive advantages are becoming too easy to imitate. The Customer Success Economy offers examples and specifics of how companies can transform. It addresses the pains of transforming organizational charts, leadership roles, responsibilities, and strategies so the whole company works together in total service to the 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 latest brain research is changing the way we think about sales. How can this help you increase your business? With people being inundated with thousands of daily sales messages, selling is now tougher than ever. That's why you need to learn what neuroscience has uncovered that will...

The New York Times bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick explore why certain brief experiences can jolt us and elevate us and change us—and how we can learn to create such extraordinary moments in our life and work. While human lives are endlessly variable, our most memorable...

Whether you're a manager, owner, or employee, Customer Service Training 101 gets you up to speed fast. The completely revised and updated third edition addresses every aspect of face-to-face, phone, online, social media, and self-service interactions. Using scenarios, guidelines, and practice exercises, this inspiring training manual explains what to say and do, what to avoid, and why interactions go astray.

Companies who define success through business outcomes and put customers at the center of their business realize sustainable, continuous growth. Customer experience is a key driver of technical innovation and business success - Customer Obsessed teaches companies how to leverage it across all levels of their organizations to sustain competitive advantage in the digital era. Customer Obsessed provides a comprehensive road map to help you build a better, more innovative business.

Based on six years of research, Harvard Business School professor Thales Teixeira shows how and why industries are disrupted, and what established companies can do to respond--as well as what potential startups must master if they hope to gain a competitive edge. As it turns out, there is a...

A positive customer experience is absolutely essential to keeping your business relevant. Today's business owners need to know how to connect and engage with their customers through a variety of different channels, including online reviews and word of mouth. Customer Experience for Dummies helps you listen to your customers and offers friendly, practical, and easy-to-implement solutions for incorporating customer engagement into your business plans and keep the crowds singing your praises.  

How do you cut through the noise, commotion, and bad information that is right now cluttering up your customers' digital space? Epic Content Marketing. One of the world's leading experts on content marketing, Joe Pulizzi explains how to draw prospects and customers in by creating information and content they actually want to engage with. No longer can we interrupt our customers with mediocre content (and sales messages) our customers don't care about. Epic Content Marketing takes you step by step through the process of developing stories that inform and entertain and compel customers to act - without actually telling them to.

In 2010, Will Owen started a business from his garage with no formal education, no venture cap money and a string of failed businesses behind him. Today, Will is a ten-time patent holder and founder of JetBoatPilot, a multi-million dollar global brand and the gold standard for products and education within their niche. How did he do it? He ignored the traditional "business-first" playbooks and committed to one radical, unwavering rule: Put the customer’s problem before the company’s profit.

What are companies like Uber, IKEA, Belgo, and Eurostar doing that makes them so profitable? They know how to scale relationships. But online gurus are lying to you about scaling to hundreds of clients without creating an exceptional customer experience. Ben and I created this book with that in mind. When you feel like there is much more to be done in how you serve your clients, we’ve got you. For a long time, marketers--specifically in the online space--have been making bolder and bolder promises.

More than two generations ago, the venture capital community convinced the entrepreneurial world that writing business plans and raising venture capital constituted the twin centerpieces of entrepreneurial endeavor. They did so for good reasons: the sometimes astonishing returns they've delivered to their investors and the astonishingly large companies that their ecosystem has created. But the vast majority of fast-growing companies never take any venture capital. So where does the money come from to start and grow their companies?

The last Instagram marketing guide you will ever buy. Every single growth hack you need to know in order to get 20,000-plus relevant followers fast - and then convert them into loyal customers.

Are you a startup founder with a great product but no sales? Do prospective clients say your product is interesting, but no one’s buying? Collin Stewart, founder and CEO of Predictable Revenue, shares hard-earned lessons about navigating the chaos of a startup and the daunting task of finding your first customers. The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers is a straight-talking guide for founders focused on tackling the essential steps to growth in the right sequence.