The Hindu Business Line : Customers are scarcer than capital

The first of the 12 laws that Don Peppers and Martha Rogers lay down for leaders is to create the most possible value from the available customers and prospects. Customers are the only source of organic growth for a company, and they are scarcer than capital, the authors grimly observe. “Your financial budget is an artificial scarcity of money, an imposed constraint on your activities, but your ‘customer budget’ is an actual scarcity of customers,” write Peppers and Rogers in Rules to Break & Laws to Follow ( www.landmarkonthenet.com), a new book in the Microsoft Executive Leadership Series. Someone, somewhere in your company, must be responsible for ensuring that each customer creates as much value for your firm as possible, demand the authors. Law number two is, ‘Earn and keep the trust of your customer.’ Sounds simple, but a necessary thought, the authors argue, because “whole business models often are based on making money by withholding information from customers, or by taking advantage of customer mistakes, or just by selling a customer something he’s prepared to buy even when you know he doesn’t need it.”

Every time your company stoops to this kind of tactic, you ought to feel a little whoosh of air leaving the room, they suggest. “That would be the sound of customer trust being deflated.”

Powerful read.

D. Murali

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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