Quotes About Customers

Brad explained to me how they hold themselves accountable for their new innovation efforts by measuring two things: the number of customers using products that didn't exist three years ago and the percentage of revenue coming from offerings that did not exist three years ago.

We adopted the view that our job was to find a synthesis between our vision and what customers would accept; it wasn't to capitulate to what customers thought they wanted or to tell customers what they ought to want.

We must learn the truth about which elements of our strategy are working to realize our vision and which are just crazy. We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want. We must discover whether we are on a path that will lead to growing a sustainable business.

Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.

The growth is all coming from an engine of growth that is working—running efficiently to bring in new customers—not from improvements driven by product development.

selling the product to visionary early customers called early adopters. Before new products can be sold successfully to the mass market, they have to be sold to early adopters. These people are a special breed of customer. They accept—in fact prefer—an 80 percent solution; you don't need a perfect solution to capture their interest.4

Second, lead users are a much broader category than customers of a specific firm, and many have incentives that differ from those of customers. Lead users generating innovations of interest to manufacturers can reside, as we have seen, at the leading edges of target markets, and also in advanced analog markets. The innovations that some of these develop are certainly disruptive from the viewpoint of some manufacturers—

Most entrepreneurs don't need as many customers as they think. A lot of people think 10 is too few for a sample. But if all 10 refused a product, why is that not enough? If you want 100, 1,000 or a million customers, you first have to get 10.

A contingent bailout policy - implicit or explicit - must be coupled with some regulation of what banks can and cannot do. For example, a ban on lending to uncreditworthy customers might well make sense.

If we can provide a benefit and make money, it's a chance for us to expand the population of customers we serve, expand the products we put in the marketplace, and reinvent ourselves going forward.

There is no one thing that can turn around a rejection. But there is one answer: begin talking to your customers who have already bought from you and discover why they bought.

Favored Nations is a long-term commitment. Our hope is that those who are passionate about real musicianship will want to hear and own most of our albums. We will set out to attain the same direct relationship with our customers that we have with our artists.

From the beginning, we believed that it was possible to develop direct relationships with customers at a relatively cheap cost, and our plan was to build a lifestyle brand that was also an Internet company - a rarity for eyewear.

Stay externally focused - on your customers - and focus internally when you have to hire.

If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does, he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees.

I still believe heavily that we have to be careful about having this ego and hubris as a successful corporation, that we should do it all. Because then I think we start to fail our customers and we're too focused on taking over the world.

We fully recognized that our customers have a variety of devices. They're carrying all sorts of things. And we want to bring our world-class apps to those devices.

Moving our headquarters to Chicago is another significant step in our journey to build a better McDonald's. This world-class environment will continue to drive business momentum by getting us even closer to customers, encouraging innovation and ensuring great talent is excited about where they work.

North Carolina enjoys a worldwide reputation as a center for textile research and workers. Our excellent business climate and location offer international firms an ideal place to reach and serve customers in the United States.

I don't really like to talk specifically about customers by name - but we work with nearly all the leading manufacturers of consumer products worldwide and at quite a detailed engineering level.

As I spent tons of time with customers, not just in the United States, but in emerging markets, in Europe, in Latin America, top of mind for everybody is how do they drive growth for their business going forward.

Social media can be a powerful tool to listen to, engage with and gain access to customers that you would otherwise not be able to connect with.

One in five of our customers books for business. But it's scaling very fast. As a result, we have tools for medium or small-sized companies to allow them set their price and give basic reporting functionality.

One of the big aha moments is how many large companies still don't use collaboration tools and aren't using digital technologies internally. They're engaging with their customers, but they haven't invested in the infrastructure that allows their employees to telecommute.