Points to Ponder

• Profitability depends on building trust, goodwill and ultimately loyalty.
• Loyalty is not a sense of gratitude, but because it is more convenient to deal with you.
• One customer, well taken care of, could be more valuable than $100,000 worth of advertising.
• The marketing paradigm is “Making and Selling”. The CRM paradigm is “Learning and Doing”.
• Research tells us that Boards give 9 times more attention to spending and cash flows than to wondering where it comes from and how it can be increased.
• By reducing your defection rate from 15% to 10%, you can increase your profit by as much as 50%.
• The goal of CRM is to improve organizational efficiency.
• Companies lose up to 50% of their customer every 5 years through poor sales and service interactions.
• The more you are product focused; the more you commoditise your products.
• If you want to know what your future cash flow will look like, investigate where it comes from – the market.
• What if a company’s core competencies have no relevance to the customer?
• What if the company’s differentiators are not understood or appreciated by the customer?
• 64% of the difference between average- and high-performing companies is attributable to CRM.
• Get out of product-first mode and into customer-first mode.
• The deeper meaning of being customer focused is the ability to create superior customer value.
• Customer satisfaction has a direct impact on the primary source of future revenue streams.
• Key customer attraction drivers provide insights into what really drives customer decisions on whether to continue (or discontinue) dealing with their supplier
• Concentrate on the different kinds of customers who buy from you rather than the different types of products you sell.
• The marketing function never has been and never will be effective in an organization with a technical, production, operations, financial, or functional orientation. Such enterprises adopted the vocabulary of marketing and applied a veneer of marketing techniques.
• Value migrates from providers who produce less value to providers who produce more value.
• Companies that show the highest profitability are those that have invested in developing a very specific set of CRM capabilities.
• The long-term value of a company is largely determined by the value of the company’s customer relationships.
• Manufacturers that are customer-centric are 60% more profitable than non customer-centric manufacturers.
• To say the marketing department is responsible for marketing is like saying one family member is responsible for love.
• "Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game. (Tony Alessandra)
• "There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else." (Sam Walton)
• "He profits, most who serves best." (Arthur F. Sheldon)
• "The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer." (Peter Drucker)
• "Biggest question: Isn't it really 'customer helping' rather than customer service? And wouldn't you deliver better service if you thought of it that way?" (Jeffrey Gitomer)
• "Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn." (Author Unknown)
• "Here is a simple but powerful rule always give people more than what they expect to get." (Nelson Boswell)
• "There's a place in the world for any business that takes care of its customers--after the sale." (Harvey MacKay)