Understand needs early and avoid being let down

Understanding requirements early is the secret if you want to avoid feeling let down. It’s the secret to good school grades and happy customers in almost every field.

You got paid, but the customer does not use is bad news: You might feel good that you got paid and there are few customer support calls. But this could be a very costly strategy if many buyers are non-users. It turns the B2B buying center on its head. If many customers don’t experience the value of your offering, customer satisfaction, referrals, and market share can only go down.

Privacy: Direct Customer relationship data is more important than ever

Mailing list providers were the original third party cookies. They gathered contact details of different demographics and you could buy lists to mail (junk mail) to them.

The “S” Curves of radical and incremental innovation

What are the “S” curves? Each of the above S curves represent a technology platform. Movement up an “S” curve is incremental innovation while stepping down on a lower new “S” curve now, may lead to radical innovation, as the new “S” curve surpasses your existing “S” curve.

The Cost and Performance Y axis, Time on X Axis: If you look at the Y axis you see performance going up and cost coming down. Just as time goes on. In other words over time a particular S curve and technology platform gets improved. This improvement is through factors such as experience, techniques like 6 Sigma, more adoption by customer. The adoption by customer mean higher sales volumes and costs keep going down. However there is a catch for each S curve.

Unlocking Innovation: What does our Customer Success Tomorrow look like?

It’s hard to explain to everyone in an organization – that their role includes “marketing”. And focussing on constant innovation. Hence the term “Customer Success.”

[Note: Thanks to the interest of our dear readers this post from September 18, 2018 is updated April 7, 2021. During COVID everyone was forced to become more tech friendly. We hope that this revised post will help our dear readers prepare better for a post COVID world}

The Customer Success term is particularly popular in the SaaS (Software as a Service ) industry. SaaS companies need customer renewals. To do so, SaaS companies try to align the organization including programmers, sales , finance to working towards customer success. SaaS companies also have a separate Customer Success function that faces the customer and helps in getting the most out of the SaaS product.

Marketing vs. Sales- What’s the difference?

The Marketing vs. Sales difference is a crucial one for all businesses to understand. To simplify: Sales is trying to sell what you have. Sales followed from the production era where in the early part of the 20th century, entrepreneurs like Henry Ford famously produced only one color of car (black) and could bring downContinue reading “Marketing vs. Sales- What’s the difference?”

Innovation: Do you have a Product Innovation Charter (PIC)?

Having a “Product Innovation Charter” (PIC) is like having a mission statement for innovation.

Employees First -Customers Second – the enabling CEO and Gen Y

Vineet Nayar ‘s ideas are quite remarkable and yet simple. He says that its really important to be able to motivate employees through transparency ,empowerment and enabling. The employee should truly feel that this is her/his company, cause and customer and s/he is the “owner”. Also Nayar  is one of  the first large company CEO’sContinue reading “Employees First -Customers Second – the enabling CEO and Gen Y”

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