Quotes About Customers

Your customers dream of a happier and better life. Don't move products. Instead, enrich lives.

It's very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted.

Sellers who are successful today know that customers can go online and find out all that stuff in seconds.

In my column series 'The Main Thing ' I often talk about how Internet technology can improve the way people communicate - both within a business and between a business and its customers and partners.

The Agile Project Management principles and framework encourage learning and adapting as an integral part of delivering value to customers.

For an agile project, the ensemble includes core team members, customers, suppliers, executives, and other participants who interact with each other in various ways. It is these interactions, and the tacit and explicit information exchanges that occur within them, that project management practices need to facilitate.

The agile value "Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints" provides a focus for rethinking how we measure performance on projects. Although constraints such as cost and time are important, they should be secondary to creating value for customers. All too often, we focus on what is easily measurable and ignore really important characteristics that are harder to quantify. Agile development attempts to change that bias and focus on the most important things, and value is at the top of that list.

The essence of Agile movement, whether in new product development, new service offerings, software applications, or project management, rests on two foundational goals: delivering valuable products to customers and creating working environments in which people look forward to coming to work each day.

Mom has the Touch. She knows what flowers go with what occasions, what hors d'oeuvres work with what people. She believes passionately in the power of food to heal, restore, and stimulate relationships, and she has built a following of loyal customers who really hope she's right. If she's wrong, says Sonia, no one wants to know.

In insurance, for example, USAA has been a stellar performer with a value proposition aimed at low-risk customers. Here's what is essential: finding a unique way to serve your chosen segment profitably.

A company can sustain a premium price only if it offers something that is both unique and valuable to its customers. Apple's hot, must-have gadgets have commanded premium prices. Ditto for the high-speed Madrid-to-Barcelona train and the trucks Paccar creates for owner-operators. Create more buyer value and you raise what economists call willingness to pay (WTP), the mechanism that makes it possible for a company to charge a higher price relative to rival offerings.

value is ultimately defined by customers.

Note that if an industry doesn't create much value for its customers, prices will barely cover costs. If the industry creates a lot of value, then structure becomes critical in understanding who gets to capture it. Industries can, and often do, create a lot of value for their customers or suppliers while the companies themselves earn very little for their efforts.

If you have powerful buyers (that is, customers), they will use their clout to force prices down. They may also demand that you put more value into the product or service. In either case, industry profitability will be lower because customers will capture more of the value for themselves.

For the company with the three-year plan to double market share, the premortem headline is "Company Fails to Reach Market Share Goal; Growth Again Stalls." Members of the planning team now imagine delays in new products, loss of key executives or sales or marketing or technical personnel, new products by competitors, adverse economic developments, paradigm shifts that could lead customers to do without the product or rely on alternatives not on the market or in use, etc.

I do believe states' rights was a sound doctrine that got hijacked by some unsavory customers for a while - like, 150 years or so. I'm professionally obliged to believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, but some kinds of forgetting are OK with me.

Although I loved working on technology - I've always been a computer geek at heart - my professors encouraged me to get a real-world job working with customers.

We need to take excellent care of our customers, and do so at a profit.

A German firm called Friendsurance relies on people forming their own groups, which apply peer pressure to keep claims and costs lower. The result is refunded premiums for customers and profit for the company.

I think the only way to maintain profitability is to meet the needs of the customers.

We have a lot of existing customers which are also considering Linux desktop migrations and rolling out some of these programs, so we're learning from them.

I've made mistakes before of doing different projects just based on my dreams, my hopes, my thing, and not really thinking about my customers.

What we need to do is run our business. We need to come up with a value prop that is so compelling that customers have to go for it.

We can license our intellectual property to new customers and expand agreements with existing ones over time and more.