Articles

Customer Insight - Sales and Marketing Excellence
The only way to guarantee increased revenues, stronger, longer, and more profitable customer relationships is to center strategic decision-making on actionable customer insight. Customer Conduits are a key vehicle to obtaining unvarnished customer & marketplace insight, and numerous forms of Customer Conduits are presented.
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Hottest New Title in the Executive Suite? Chief Customer Officer - Handbook of Business Strategy 2005
Many companies are recognizing that customers are harder to win, and more fickle than ever before. So they are seeking ways to increase the value of their customers as a true asset. This article summarizes the results of a recent study of companies such as Cisco, WebMethods, HP, People Soft and Sun that employ "executive-level customer champions." The executive-level customer champion role may have different titles such as: Chief Customer Advocate, Chief Customer Officer or Director of Customer Success. Regardless of the title, the executive-level customer champion can deliver balance to the traditional revenue growth and cost-cutting focus of the C-Suite, not to mention the board of directors. Customer champions increase the focus on customer satisfaction and ultimately customer loyalty for increased profits. The article also details the role and benefits of the Customer Champion, featuring innovative activities that some companies are using to endear their customers to them more fully and solidify loyalty.
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Creating "Insatiable Demand" - Handbook of Business Strategy 2004
How do you create insatiable demand? This kind of demand that significantly increases sustainable revenue from existing and new customers, increases loyalty, decreases customer acquisition costs, and increases profitability only comes as you focus more strategically and tactically upon the Demand Chain. This article introduces the Demand Chain and describes the key differences between it and the Supply Chain. It describes specific steps companies can take to more fully manage their Demand Chain and ultimately achieve Stage 5 of Demand Chain Excellence.
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The Customer Conscience - Destination CRM
Do organizations have a customer conscience, insisting that customers' needs be considered at every turn? We recently studied companies like Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Monster.com, Fidelity, and others that have an executive-level customer champion and found that many companies today have indeed institutionalized the role sometimes labeled Chief Customer Officer. All the executives we interviewed shared the following four critical goals: increase revenue, bring customer balance to executive decision-making processes, manage the customer relationship as an asset, and proactively gather customer insight and drive organization-wide change.
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Arrogant Marketing - Sales and Marketing Excellence
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Customer Insight Conduits - Seligence
Declining prices & margins. Decaying sales. Unprofitable customers. Lackluster market performance. Does your company suffer from these maladies? You will if you don’t understand your customers—what they need, want, and most especially, what they are willing to pay for. The only way to guarantee increased revenues, stronger, longer, and more profitable customer relationships is to center strategic decision-making on actionable customer insight.
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The Age of the Savvy Customer: Only "Clear Customer Insight" Can Seize the Day
Shortest time to market no longer cuts it. Nor does lowest cost. And excellent customer service is now expected. As the old rules for achieving competitive advantage fade away, what can be done to secure customers and vanquish competitors? Increasingly the only true, sustainable competitive advantage is intimate and thorough understanding of customer needs. This article describes ways in which companies can develop such clear "customer insight," then use it to win profits and the loyalty of "savvy" customers.
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White Papers


Why Companies Can't Get It Right: Failing to Profitably Predict Customer Needs
In this time of extreme competition and never-satisfied satisfied customers, it is critical that companies eradicate the attitude of “We know what our customers want—we told them so!” Companies must set aside their pride in their own accomplishments and find out what pain the customers are feeling and what it would take to profitably solve this pain. This article describes how companies can adopt this new attitude and gain business-critical customer insight to realize increased sales effectiveness; create more clearly defined and successful customer centric products, and increase revenue and profits over the long term.
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The Swiss Army™ Knife of Marketing: Demand Oriented Pricing
This article describes a simple technique that solidifies customer relationships, enhances competitive analyses, influences development timelines, and aids in organizational analyses and provides key messages for branding, positioning and other marketing efforts. Oh, and it also provides a very accurate price for your products and services—one that maximizes revenue while leaving nothing additional on the table. Download PDF File Now.

Presentations

Customers? Who Needs ‘em?
A presentation given by Curtis N. Bingham to the Boston Product Management Association, October, 2001

Is your company customer-focused? How do you know? Or does your company have the Bell Labs Mentality, "We know what our customers want! We told them so!"?

No company sets out to build the wrong products, yet why do so many companies continually do so? They stage a massive product launch that may even be properly supported with marketing communications and sales efforts, yet customers don't buy. Why?

Where can you turn to learn more about your customers' "pain"? Once you understand it, how can you develop products and services to alleviate this pain?

How can you leverage this information in your marketing and sales efforts?

This presentation explores some of the symptoms of this "false customer focus" and discuss practical, cost-effective methods product managers can use to gather customer information. It discusses processes that can be used to make sense of it all as you convert the feedback into actual products and services. It also looks at ways in which you can continue to gather customer feedback to refine your understanding of the customers. Perhaps most importantly, it looks at ways in which product managers can enhance their organizational credibility. View the presentation for some practical skills and resources you can use on tomorrow morning to enhance your value to the company and the value of your company's products to your customers. Download Now.