You're no idiot, of course. You skillfully manage your kids' temper tantrums, diplomatically handle office politics, and even pleasantly deal with your friends' bickering. But when it comes to handling customer service, you feel utterly lost. It's time to make great customer service an indispensable part of your daily operation! The Complete Idiot's Guide® to Great Customer Service teaches you how to create the "Service Difference"—service that genuinely pleases your customers and...

In Lead, Sell, or Get Out of the Way, Ron Karr outlines a repeatable process based on the powerful idea that great sellers lead relationships in the same way that great leaders sell ideas. This customer-focused mindset is the key to Ron Karr's proven leadership selling process. Using 20 years of research with companies of all sizes, Karr reveals what great sellers do, and shows how anyone can implement the same powerful principles. He reveals the seven critical traits of a sales l...

In today's sales world there's no room for followers. But there's plenty of room for leaders. Competition is intense, and if you don't take a leadership role in producing results for your clients, someone else will. In Lead, Sell, or Get Out of the Way, Ron Karr outlines a repeatable process based on the powerful idea that great sellers lead relationships in the same way that great leaders sell ideas.No matter what you sell, you must communicate persuasively and effectively what it ...

In the first edition of this landmark book, business loyalty guru Fred Reichheld revealed the question most critical to your company’s future: Would you recommend us to a friend?” By asking customers this question, you identify detractors, who sully your firm’s reputation and readily switch to competitors, and promoters, who generate good profits and true, sustainable growth.You also generate a vital metric: your Net Promoter Score. Since the book was first publi...

Philip Kotler's name is synonymous with marketing. His textbooks have sold more than 3 million copies in 20 languages and are read as the marketing gospel in 58 countries. Now Kotler on Marketing offers his long-awaited, essential guide to marketing for managers, freshly written based on his phenomenally successful worldwide lectures on marketing for the new millennium.Through Kotler's profound insights you will quickly update your skills and knowledge of the new challenges...

Young serial entrepreneur Scott Gerber is not the product of a wealthy family or storied entrepreneurial heritage. Nor is he the outcome of a traditional business school education or a corporate executive turned entrepreneur. Rather, he is a hard-working, self-taught 26-year-old hustler, rainmaker, and bootstrapper who has survived and thrived despite never having held the proverbial "real” job.In Never Get a "Real" Job: How to Dump Your Boss, Build a Business, and Not Go Broke...

Stop pushing products—and start cultivating relationships with the right customers.If you read nothing else on marketing that delivers competitive advantage, read these 10 articles. We’ve combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you reinvent your marketing by putting it—and your customers—at the center of your business.Leading experts such as Ted Levitt and Clayt...

“BRAD HELPED US DEVELOP THE TOOLS TO PICK A-PLAYER LEADERS AT GE.” —JACK WELCHGreat companies, large and small, rise or fall because of their talent; the more high performers on your team, the more successful your organization will be. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Research shows that only about 25% of all new hires turn out to be high performers.But companies that have used Brad Smart’s Topgrading system over the past two decades have boosted th...

Why customer retention is the new acquisitionIf there's anything the recession of 2009 taught us, it was the importance of investing in our customers, but when was this any different? So says Joseph Jaffe, bestselling author of Life After the 30-Second Spot and Join the Conversation, and a leading expert and thought leader on new media and social media. In most businesses, it costs roughly five-to-ten times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an ...

The most renowned figure in the world of marketing offers the new rules to the game for marketing professionals and business leaders alike In Marketing Insights from A to Z, Philip Kotler, one of the undisputed fathers of modern marketing, redefines marketing's fundamental concepts from A to Z, highlighting how business has changed and how marketing must change with it. He predicts that over the next decade marketing techniques will require a complete overhaul. Furthermore, the future of m...

Successful leaders know that leadership is less often about having all the answers—and more often about asking the right questions. The challenge lies in being able to step back, reflect, and ask the key questions that are critical to your performance and your organization’s effectiveness.In What to Ask the Person in the Mirror, leadership expert Robert Kaplan presents a process for asking the big questions that will enable you to diagnose problems, change course if necess...