Customer Development

How do you develop products that people will actually use and buy? This practical guide shows you how to validate product and company ideas through customer development research - before you waste months and millions on a product or service that no one needs or wants. With a combination of open-ended interviewing and fast and flexible research techniques, you’ll learn how your prospective customers behave, the problems they need to solve, and what frustrates and delights them

What if your next customer didn't have a pulse, preferences, or patience for poor performance? In Machine Customers: The Evolution Has Begun, CX Evolutionist Katja Forbes reveals how intelligent agents, autonomous procurement systems, and logic-driven buying platforms are silently revolutionising commerce. This trillion-dollar transformation is happening now, not in some distant future.

The traditional methods of acquiring customers and generating sales are being replaced. Google’s endless algorithm updates, zero-click results, and AI-generated answers are choking off website traffic like never before. If your business relies even slightly on search engines—or if sudden drops in traffic have blindsided you—Goodbye Google, Hello Marketing is your wake-up call.

Are you a startup founder with a great product but no sales? Do prospective clients say your product is interesting, but no one’s buying? Collin Stewart, founder and CEO of Predictable Revenue, shares hard-earned lessons about navigating the chaos of a startup and the daunting task of finding your first customers. The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers is a straight-talking guide for founders focused on tackling the essential steps to growth in the right sequence.

The subscription business model is hot - from software to music to movies to diet programs, investors and public markets want businesses that create recurring payments from unlimited customers. The old sales and marketing methods can handle attracting new customers for growth; however, only in the last five years has a discipline emerged that views growth in relation to retention, not just sales.

The Customer Success Manager has become a critical asset to organizations across the business landscape. As the subscription model has spread from the cloud and SaaS to more sectors of the economy, that pivotal role will only grow in importance. That's because if you want to compete and thrive in this new environment, you need to put the customer at the center of your strategy. You need to recognize you're no longer selling just a product. You're selling an outcome.

Based on six years of research, Harvard Business School professor Thales Teixeira shows how and why industries are disrupted, and what established companies can do to respond--as well as what potential startups must master if they hope to gain a competitive edge. As it turns out, there is a...

Written in the trenches of helping hundreds of B2B SaaS businesses, The Pricing Roadmap will help you pour gasoline on the fire of your pricing. Ditch the guesswork with this step-by-step guide to designing SaaS pricing that grows your business—whether you’re a startup, prerevenue venture, or an established market leader.

The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a start-up or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice.

More than two generations ago, the venture capital community convinced the entrepreneurial world that writing business plans and raising venture capital constituted the twin centerpieces of entrepreneurial endeavor. They did so for good reasons: the sometimes astonishing returns they've delivered to their investors and the astonishingly large companies that their ecosystem has created. But the vast majority of fast-growing companies never take any venture capital. So where does the money come from to start and grow their companies?

If leaders aren't integrating their digital offerings into a philosophy of customer success, they will be defeated in the next decade because technical excellence and other traditional competitive advantages are becoming too easy to imitate. The Customer Success Economy offers examples and specifics of how companies can transform. It addresses the pains of transforming organizational charts, leadership roles, responsibilities, and strategies so the whole company works together in total service to the customer.

The Revolutionary Sales Approach Scientifically Proven to Dramatically Improve Your Sales and Business Success Blending cutting-edge research in social psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics, The Science of Selling shows you how to align the way you sell with how our brains naturally...

Read by the authors. An essential guide to master any workplace conflict with confidence and ease, have less drama, better results, and thrive at work. In many workplaces today, workplace conflict is an escalating issue. The shift to remote work and hybrid teams has left many people longing for...

If you want to stand out from the crowd, develop a clear and consistent brand voice, and ultimately build a fruitful business - listen to your brand. Stop Listening to the Customer offers insights into how consumers are driving homogeneity in brands and shares the proven strategies you can implement to amplify your own position in the world.

Learn to launch, grow, and scale your membership business with Stu McLaren, founder of Membership.io and host of the Marketing Your Business podcast. Are you tired of wondering how much money you'll make every single month? Do you wish there was an easier way to predict your income and watch...

Let’s face it. Today’s users are impulsive and easily distracted. They don’t have the time (or patience) to try and figure things out by themselves. They expect the product to be intuitive, easy, and fast. What’s more, they want more than they paid (or didn’t pay) for, and they want it now.

Customer 360: How Data, AI, and Trust Change Everything delivers key insight and vision on using emerging technologies to delight customers and become more competitive by providing a superior customer experience. This book helps listeners attract and engage their customers across channels and throughout their journey, from acquisition and onboarding, through service, upsell, retention, and win-back.

A start-up comes to market with a new product. Using cost-effective digital marketing, they get their solution in front of those customers. Growth happens exponentially. VCs and the media pile in. Then growth slows. Eventually, the whole thing peters out, usually three years from launch. How do you prevent this from happening to your start-up? Future Demand explores the realities of how start-ups grow beyond their eager early users, providing evidence and insight into how to build your brand among the much larger group of customers who’ll buy from you in the future.

How do you cut through the noise, commotion, and bad information that is right now cluttering up your customers' digital space? Epic Content Marketing. One of the world's leading experts on content marketing, Joe Pulizzi explains how to draw prospects and customers in by creating information and content they actually want to engage with. No longer can we interrupt our customers with mediocre content (and sales messages) our customers don't care about. Epic Content Marketing takes you step by step through the process of developing stories that inform and entertain and compel customers to act - without actually telling them to.

Subscriptions are shifting revenues, reshaping markets, and changing our expectations for how we buy things. Have you changed your marketing practices to thrive in this new reality? Subscription Marketing offers creative marketing strategies for sustaining the customer relationships that build long-term success.