What the customer wants you to know...

I have recently just finished reading a book called " What the customer wants you to know", written by Ram Charan.

It goes on at great length about "Value Creation Selling", from what I gathered its about knowing your customer well and tailoring your services to their needs and showing them how your the most benificial person for the job:

"Your not focused on selling a specific product or service; your focused on how your company can help your customer succeed in all the ways that are important to that customer."

By doing so you need to get to know your customer, build up a relationship and get a reputation for being reliable and trustworthy:

" The more you know about your customer, the better you and your company will be at identifying his concerns and devising products and services that will help address them."

To enable yourself to become this said person the book gives guidelines of things you must follow for you to achieve it:

" 1. The customer's set of opportunites and the anatomy of the competitve dynamics.
  2. The customer's customers and the customer's competitors
  3. How decisions are made in the customers organisation.
  4.The customer's company culture, its dominant psychology and values.
  5.The customer's goals and priorites, both short term and long term, clearly and specifically."

And if you attain this list then this could in turn boost your revenue given that:

" A happy customer tells others about the product and returns to buy more."

What more could you want?

A little surprise...

I was reading an article on wikipedia about plus size models, I was trying to find out why plus size got its name as I do not find it to be a particularly great way for describing the curvier woman. Also towards the end of the article it went on to say about the critisms of plus size models and it said this:

"acceptance of a plus size model sets a poor health example regarding weight management."

Well from what I have seen on the television, the web and advertisments regarding plus size, the women modelling do not look like they have any weight issues. They actually look like slim, regular sized, real women.
I disagree with the statement. I think in some respects they are more of a role model that your regular sized models, cause not everyone can be a size 4. Even my skinniest of friends that eat healthy and exercise regularly and nowhere near that. It shows that you should be confident and healthy in your own skin and accept the body shape and size you have when you try and take care of yourself properly without having to go on any crazy diet to attain a skinny almost skeletal look.