Small businesses that thrive integrate the customer's perspective throughout their business. They don't market to prospects, they connect with potential customers. They create relationships. When small businesses embrace their customers at their core, customers show them love in return. The result? Unmatched customer satisfaction, loyalty, referrals and growth. Customer-centric marketing doesn't have to be hard. And it doesn't have to be expensive. Customer, LLC is a marketing book just for small business owners. Whether you run a restaurant or a fitness studio, are an attorney or a photographer, make custom jewelry or mass produce widgets, Customer, LLC is for you.

You must deliver an amazing customer experience. Why? It is the competitive edge of new-era business—in any market and any economy. Renowned customer experience expert Shep Hyken explains how consistently amazing customers through stellar service can elevate your company from good to great. All transformations require a role model, and Shep has found the perfect role model to inspire your team: Ace Hardware. Ace was named as one of the top ten customer service brands in America by Businessweek and ranked highest in its industry for customer satisfaction. Through revealing stories from Ace’s over-the-top work with customers, Shep explores the five tactical areas of customer amazement: leadership, culture, one-on-one, competitive edge, and community. Delivering amazing service requires everyone in your organization to step up and be a leader. It doesn’t take a title. It takes the right set of tools and principles. To help you empower employees at all levels, Shep brings the content to a deeply practical level. His 52 Amazement Tools—like “Ask the extra question” and “Focus on the customer, not the money”—are simple, clear, useful for almost anybody, and supported with compelling research and stories. Between these covers, you will find the tools and tactics you need to transform your company into a seriously customer-focused operation that will amaze every customer every time.

Learn how to create journey maps that actually get resultsNearly two out of three journey maps fail to drive customer-focused change. Find out how to make your initiative successful, and avoid the pitfalls that doom so many others, with this authoritative new book. With insights from dozens of CX pros, extensive research, and real-world case studies and examples, How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer will help you understand why some maps drive action - leading to an improved customer experience, greater customer loyalty, and impressive ROI - while others just gather dust on a shelf.

You need loyal customers, not just satisfied ones. Managing the Customer Experience: Turn Customers Into Advocatesshows you how to manage your customer experience and reap the rewards.

If leaders aren't integrating their digital offerings into a philosophy of Customer Success, they will be defeated in the next decade, because technical excellence and other traditional competitive advantages are becoming too easy to imitate. The Customer Success Economy offers examples and specifics of how companies can transform. It addresses the pains of transforming organizational charts, leadership roles, responsibilities, and strategies so the whole company works together in total service to the customer. Shows leaders how their digital implementations will make them more Amazon-like Helps you deliver recurring revenue Shows you how to embrace customer retention Demonstrates the importance of "churning" less Get that competitive advantage in the most relevant and important arena today—making and cultivating happy customers.

Four years ago, the bestselling authors of The Challenger Sale overturned decades of conventional wisdom with a bold new approach to sales. Now their latest research reveals something even more surprising: Being a Challenger seller isn’t enough. Your success or failure also depends on who you challenge. Picture your ideal customer: friendly, eager to meet, ready to coach you through the sale and champion your products and services across the organization. It turns out that’s the last person you need. Most marketing and sales teams go after low-hanging fruit: buyers who are eager and have clearly articulated needs. That’s simply human nature; it’s much easier to build a relationship with someone who always makes time for you, engages with your content, and listens attentively. But according to brand-new CEB research—based on data from thousands of B2B marketers, sellers, and buyers around the world—the highest-performing teams focus their time on potential customers who are far more skeptical, far less interested in meeting, and ultimately agnostic as to who wins the deal. How could this be? The authors of The Challenger Customer reveal that high-performing B2B teams grasp something that their average-performing peers don’t: Now that big, complex deals increasingly require consensus among a wide range of players across the organization, the limiting factor is rarely the salesperson’s inability to get an individual stakeholder to agree to a solution. More often it’s that the stakeholders inside the company can’t even agree with one another about what the problem is. It turns out only a very specific type of customer stakeholder has the credibility, persuasive skill, and will to effectively challenge his or her colleagues to pursue anything more ambitious than the status quo. These customers get deals to the finish line far more often than friendlier stakeholders who seem so receptive at first. In other words, Challenger sellers do best when they target Challenger customers. The Challenger Customer unveils research-based tools that will help you distinguish the "Talkers" from the "Mobilizers" in any organization. It also provides a blueprint for finding them, engaging them with disruptive insight, and equipping them to effectively challenge their own organization.