NEW BOOK
– “The Paradox of Excellence: How Great Performance Can Kill Your Business,” by David Mosby and Michael Weissman, Jossey-Bass, $22.95
What you’ll learn: Top-notch performers, whether they’re businesses or individuals, often find that excellence is taken for granted by their customers. The result? The slightest deviation from excellence becomes a contentious issue; the customer dwells on the negative.
How does one deal with the problem? Take your cues from the book’s protagonist as he salvages the relationship with the firm’s largest account by making his firm’s overall performance visible to the customer and showing how his firm adds value. In the story he also commits to an ongoing strategy as opposed to a performance-review process. This provided both firms a stage to share information about their businesses.
By sharing, they became business partners, and the line between customer and supplier blurred.
–Jim Pawlak, BizBooks
NEW BOOK
– “Loyalty Myths: Hyped Strategies That Will Put You Out of Business and Proven Tactics That Really Work,” by Timothy Keiningham, Terry Vavra, Lerzan Aksoy and Henri Wallard, John Wiley & Sons, $24.95
What you’ll learn: The gist of this book: Not all customers are created equal, but most sales tactics ignore this fact. As a result, companies acquire costly and break-even customers at a higher rate than desirable ones.
Complicating matters is that customers change over time. This is especially true in the business-to-business sector, where customer needs are affected by business cycles, industry cycles, their strategy, budgets and decision-making, etc. That can turn today’s desirable customer into tomorrow’s costly customer.
–Jim Pawlak, BizBooks
