Customer Reviews

The Mind of the Customer: How the World's Leading Sales Forces Accelerate Their Customers' Success

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Marketing, to be done right, is among the most challenging and difficult functions in any enterprise, and particularly in the highly fluid customer environments of today. When done right, it also yield enormous benefit (i.e., profits) to the enterprise.

This book covers very well the three fundamental concepts that lie at the heart of effective and successful marketing - identifying and packaging value, messaging and communication to the customer of that value, and value selling - the ability to follow through on that messaging and convering it into a profitable transaction for both. The book falls behind in not being able to get into the operational aspects of this pocess, but I still think it serves enormous value just to be able to articulate these core powerful concepts really well.

If only I had this book at the beginning of my selling career!! The Mind of the Customer is a concise guide to maximising success by working in collaboration with your customer. Business relationships have always been important but in today's market they're crucial. This book provides all the tools you need to understand your customer, their business drivers and what will ultimately make you both a success. For anyone looking to move forward in high level sales this is a great book.

It's all about value, and that is exactly what I took away from this book, a genuine sense of value. The Mind of the Customer brings home the message that success is inevitably linked to your ability to "embrace the interests of your client and make them your own". This book is an indispensable tool providing Best Practices for vital sales skills such as asking high impact questions, presentation preparation, and cooperative negotiation. The focus always remains positive, supportive and straight forward. I would highly recommend this to anyone preparing to advance in a changing sales environment.

Mind of the Customer reminds readers that successful selling is not about the seller -- it's about understanding what's important to the buyer... and is inextricably linked to helping that buyer do something important for the buyer's own customers. The close looks at UPS and the other case histories in the book are helpful making these points come alive. Very clearly written and reads well.

Challenges sales leaders who think they are already customer-driven to think again. The authors conducted a study of nearly 100 executive level decisionmakers to find out what customers are now expecting as a condition for doing business - and the results are a real indictment of the so-called "needs-satisfaction" and "solutions-selling" approaches that are popularly offered up as best practice. Advocates an almost telepathic customer relationship that's devoid of artifice and self interest. Redefines the "high achieving" salesperson as an individual who is almost manically focused on helping customers achieve business results. Sounds rather altruistic, but includes some pretty convincing evidence and examples around how what's good for the customer is even better for the seller. Also offers some potentially unnerving conclusions around what customers really value in the people who call on them, why product positioning and differentiation frequently fall flat, and how to keep vertical marketing strategies from drifting off course. Capped off by interviews with a handful of world class sales organization like UPS, Nokia and Lexus concerning the lengths they are going to in order to help their customers succeed.

The Mind of the Customer opens with the parable, "How would you treat your one last customer?" I found this opening to be a memorable and griping way to introduce the importance of customer viewpoint.

Demonstrates practical, measurable, skills that are the key to success in today's challenging and evolving relationship between sales professionals and customers. This is no basic guide to sales. This shows you how to become a valued partner for your customer.

Highly recommended for anyone who is serious about developing lasting relationships with important accounts.

Richard Hodge and Lou Schachter have captured the essence of actions necessary for sales leaders and their teams to accelerate the success of their customers, and their own success in the process. "The Mind of the Customer" presents four pillars of thought leadership that define the straight forward, business oriented selling skills and processes that have been defined by customers within highly admired organizations as world class and worthy of long term relationships that weather the challenges of changing business needs.

I highly recommend this book to all those who are commited to being successful business people in the chosen profession of consultative selling and who have a passion for the success of their customers.

Overall I think this book is just ok. It starts off very strong with some great insights on what types of questions to ask, building your value in an account, and how to tell a story about your offering in presentations. The book starts to go into a rough sales process but then switches to an entire sales skeleton for an organization.

The book then starts to talk about the sales managers role in an organization and how that interaction should play out with sales professionals. The book continues on into what to do with poor performing sales reps where there are some good ideas, but by this time I am thinking the book is going off the tracks for what I wanted it for.

This book is great for a VP of sales that is looking to build or rebuild their sales department. It lays out what sales reps should do, what managers should do, a sales process, and even how to run training, and grow the business. For a sales professional and individual contributor like myself it was over kill, and all over the place. The book also has a website that goes along with it that has some useful account planning tools. Overall I would not recommend this book for sales reps but I would recommend it for leaders in larger organizations. For smaller boutique companies I think this book is overkill and would come off as impersonal if a lot of the processes were implemented.

I really enjoyed this book. It gives the reader some good areas to focus on, when it comes to moving your sales approach, from selling products and solutions, to consultive sales. I have given this book to several of my customers and prospects.

We were fortunate at our company to receive an advance copy of this book. The concepts embodied in this work are imperative to any organization's sales excellence. The authors' expertise and their exceptional writing talent combine to make key concepts accessible and immediately useful. This book helped us redefine our corporate approach to customer relationships. The book has become an essential tool for our senior management team.

If you are looking for effective advice and have little time to spare, then you will find the opening parable alone is worth the price of admission. However, this book produces more than that one gem. It is a dense collection with page after page of ideas, concepts and real world advice.