A Best Marketing Practice: Cultivating "Lead" Customer Relationships for Breakthrough Products and Services It’s been many years since I learned what a “lead” customer is, and how to build lead customer relationships to build confidence and reduce risks of new product or service launches. The concept of a lead customer, or lead user, is probably one of the most beneficial
Every business or not-for-profit has its version of a value system. There are often two types of value systems—internal values to which the culture and behavior of the organization conform and external ones, which represent the unique positioning of the organization relative to its customers, clients, or members. Let’s concentrate on internal values in this article. There are seven examples
Most organizations are struggling with effective management of both internal employee and external customer communications. Three things are clear: the impact of COVID is not going away anytime soon, businesses and not-for-profits were caught unprepared when COVID emerged, and what “work” looks like post-COVID will be quite different from our pre-COVID models. Before COVID, only 7% of the workforce was
Once you've built a team with the potential to be high-performing, the next step to ensuring their success is to empower them. Teams can still achieve great things with hands-off managers, but when we look back over time, trends suggest that the teams with leaders who empower and support them perform better than those without. Over the last two months,
Building a high-performing team is not an easy task. Numerous factors determine the team's success and not all of them are under our control from the get-go. But, there are four practices we can call on to make the process of building a high-performing team easier and more effective. Last month I introduced the biblical approach to building a high-performing
You have probably heard the phrase “Never waste a good crisis.” The quote is attributed to Winston Churchill, who, in the mid-1940s, actually said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” The goal of leveraging a crisis is rapid change—more rapidly than could be achieved in non-crisis situations. It’s a desire to drive accelerated change when the economic and
