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customer

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BNET Business Dictionary

Customer: a purchaser of a product or service. A customer is a person or organization that purchases or obtains goods or services from other organizations such as manufacturers, retailers, wholesalers, or...; Customer definition on BNET »

BNET Resources

Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work: What drives growth and profitability in a service business? Highly satisfied customers. And to keep those customers profitable, you need to manage all the aspects of your operation that affect customer satisfaction--what the authors call the...; Tags: Thomas O. Jones, Human Resources, Payroll Solutions, Marketing, Workforce Management, Recruitment & Selection, Product Marketing, Customer Loyalty, Reichheld, Service Quality, Employee Satisfaction, Customer, James L. Heskett, Jr., Gary W. Loveman, In Brief, Leonard A. Schlesinger, W. Earl Sasser, Harvard Business Review; Articles 2008-07-18
7 Tips for Managing Price Hikes: Following the historic 9 percent run up in oil futures June 6, expect your customers to be more concerned than ever about prices. But it's not just customers you have to worry about -- you need to be thinking right now about how to manage your business through the deepening...; Tags: Sean Silverthorne, Marketing, Human Resources, Corporate Law, Internet, Business Operations, Marketing Research, Benefits, Corporate Governance, Blogging, Customer, Price Increase; Blog posts 2008-06-10
Rediscovering Market Segmentation: Fifty-nine percent of recently surveyed companies executed a major market-segmentation initiative in the previous two years. Yet only 14% derived real value from the exercise. What's wrong with market segmentation? Segmentation typically focuses on consumer...; Tags: Marketing Research, Branding, Customer, Segment, Brand, Market-segmentation, Segmentation, Consumer, Marketing, Harvard Business Review, In Brief, Daniel Yankelovich, David Meer, Strategy, Market Segmentation; Articles 2008-05-06
The Best Customer Support Team? Other Customers: When your iPod earbuds aren't working or your chainsaw is hard to start, where do you turn to for help? Just a few years ago, the answer was pretty straight forward. You'd call up the company's customer support line or hunt down an FAQ on its...; Tags: Sean Silverthorne, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Customer, Radio, Team; Blog posts 2008-04-28
The Perfect Message at the Perfect Moment: The Idea in Brief Most customers don't want to hear from your company most of the time. If you're bombarding them with frequent promotional messages, you're probably generating more resentment than revenue. But there are fleeting moments...; Tags: Airline, In Brief, Harvard Business Review, Kirthi Kalyanam, Monte Zweben, Software, Enterprise Software, Marketing, Online Communications, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Retail, Message, Customer, Dialogue Marketing, Harrah, E-mail, Marketing Research; Articles 2008-04-14

How to Negotiate Final Terms: Many sales pros clutch when it comes to negotiating final terms. When the almost-customer pushes back, or comes up with a last-minute demand, the sales pro caves, afraid to lose the sale at the tail end of the process. The result is a deal that's less profitable, and a...; Tags: Geoffrey James, Customer, Sales Pro, Sales Strategy, Sales Force Management, Sales; Blog posts 2008-04-14
Ten MORE Common Sales Mistakes: Last week I posted what's proving to be an extremely popular post, "Ten Common Sales Mistakes". In that post, I asked if I had missed any common mistakes and, as I expected, my brain trust (that's you folk) came up with ten more. ...; Tags: Management, Sales, Strategy, Sales Force Management, Sales Strategy, Customer, Geoffrey James; Blog posts 2008-04-10
Value Innovation: The Idea in Brief Struggling to stay ahead of your rivals? No need. Instead of trying to match or beat them on cost or quality, make the other players irrelevant--by staking out new market space...; Tags: Competition, Customer, Daimler AG, Harvard Business Review, In Brief, Innovation, Management, Renée Mauborgne, Strategy, Value Innovation, W. Chan Kim; Articles 2008-04-01
Using Your Marketing Database Effectively: The information in a marketing database can be used to achieve significant business benefits by supporting and improving performance across the whole spectrum of sales and marketing techniques. Collecting and using data on your customers and your markets helps you gain a better understanding of the market so you can...; Tags: Marketing, Sales, Marketing Research, Sales Force Management, Sales Strategy, Database, Customer, Information, Sector, Competitor Assessment, BNET Editorial, Competitor; Articles 2008-03-03
How Can Depriving a Customer Help?: Upon opening the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday, I scanned through pieces heralding the end of HD-DVD and the death of the middle class to find a little hidden graf. Burger King joints near Las Vegas did the unthinkable. They took away our beloved Whoppers. Sure,...; Tags: Jonathan Haeber, Manufacturing, Marketing, Home Entertainment, DVD, Food & Beverage, Personal Technology, Customer, Hd Dvd, Marketing Research; Blog posts 2008-02-20
Fighting Low-Cost Competitors: Are your rivals slashing prices to capture market share? Learn the right way to keep them at bay — without destroying your profit margins.It's every executive's worst nightmare: You wake up one day to find that a competitor is selling a product much like yours at a much lower price....; Tags: Customer, Product, Competition, Competitor, Competitive Strategy, Costing, Geoffrey James, BNET Feature Package, Andrew Mager, Management, Strategy, Price; Articles 2008-02-19
Do Your Customers Value You?: B2B sales is all about providing value. But do your customer really value you and your firm? And if so, how much? The brainiacs at CSO Insights have done a lot of high quality research into why customers value certain vendors while treating others as...; Tags: Geoffrey James, Outsourcing & Subcontracting, Business Operations, It Operations, Internet, Strategy, Management, Finance, E-business/E-Commerce, Outsourcing, B2B, Business Structures, B2B Sale, Strategic Planning, Customer, Product; Blog posts 2008-02-18
Winning in the Aftermarket: The Idea in Brief In many industries--automotive, consumer electronics, home appliances--the after-sales service market has ballooned to four to five times the size of the original equipment business. And the aftermarket is a high-margin cash cow: in...; Tags: Services, Aftermarket, Vipul Agrawal, Narendra Agrawal, Morris A. Cohen, In Brief, Harvard Business Review, Management, Business Operations, Operational Planning, Sales, Manufacturing, Software, Enterprise Software, Workforce Management, Human Resources, Strategy, Asset Management, Telecom & Utilities, Sales Strategy, Product, Customer, Service, Service Product, Performance Management, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Aerospace & Defense; Articles 2008-02-13
How to Handle "It Costs Too Much": The world's most common objection to buying is, of course, "it costs too much." (Sound familiar?) Since you're going to run into that objection thousands of times during your career, here's how to make sure that it's nothing more than a tiny speed-bump on your road to sales...; Tags: Sales Force Management, Customer, Geoffrey James, Sales, Sales Strategy; Blog posts 2008-02-11
Why Selling Should Drive the Company.: As I expected, there were many complaints about my post stating that the sales function should drive the company. In most cases, these complaints promoted a deeply dysfunctional view of how businesses work. For example, "Lee Feldman" wrote: Business exists in order to produce a product...; Tags: Geoffrey James, Sales, Sales Force Management, Sales Strategy, Starbucks Corp., Customer; Blog posts 2008-01-24
The Perfect Sales Process?: Your sales process is probably broken. Here's how to fix it. Any sales process creates a structure that helps track the progress of the sale. However, most sales processes also encourage dysfunctional sales behavior. I've recently stumbled across a sales process model...; Tags: Sales, Sales Force Management, Sales Strategy, Sales Process, Customer, Problem, Geoffrey James; Blog posts 2008-01-08
MarketBusting: The Idea in Brief You can't outperform rivals if you compete the same way they do. To be king of the jungle, not copycat, you must spur substantial new growth--quickly, profitably, and safely. ...; Tags: General Electric Co., Ian C. MacMillan, Rita Gunther McGrath, Competition, Strategy, In Brief, Asset, Harvard Business Review, Capital Structures, Finance, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Business Operations, Operational Planning, Mortgages, Performance Management, Asset Management, American Home Mortgage Holdings, Service, Quanta, Business, Customer, Quanta Computer Inc.; Articles 2008-01-04
The Seven Myths of B2B Marketing: One more post on this subject and then I'm moving on to more practical topics. I've gotten a lot of comments from my so-called "bashing" of Marketing, so rather than answering them individually, here is a list of the seven most common misconceptions about B2B Marketing: ...; Tags: Geoffrey James, Sales, Marketing, Sales Strategy, Marketing Research, B2B, Customer; Blog posts 2008-01-04
Competing For Profits: The true test of a marketing program is to deliver products and services that are both competitive and profitable. To do this you need to understand the factors that differentiate your business from your competitors and focus on developing your strengths. In some cases that means enhancing your products or...; Tags: BNET Editorial, Profitability, Marketing, Sales, Sales Force Management, Self-service, Service, Information, Product, Marketing Research, Sales Strategy, Customer; Articles 2008-01-03
Hot-Button Topics for Managers in 2007: Much of success in business comes from listening to your customers, and the same is true for those of us writing for a management audience. Your insights shape the conversation, inspiring us all to question what defines strong leadership, what motivates employees to go the extra mile, and what propels...; Tags: Management, Strategy, Lori Deschene, Tools & Techniques, Construction, Globalization, Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Customer, Sustainability; Blog posts 2007-12-18