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Bar the gates, fill the moats. The Wall Street Journal reports that luxury retailers such as Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy's, Nortdstrom, and even Neiman Marcus (sort of) are opening their websites to customer reviews, following in the path of book, electronics and heaven forbid, office supply retailers.  Kidding aside, the... read more →

FROM THE OCTOBER ISSUE OF OUR NEWSLETTER, REFERENCE POINT: (to subscribe, email me by clicking "Contact Me" on the right) Customer video 2.0. What will that look like? How can you give your customer reference videos a jump on your competitors'? It's worthwhile thinking about these questions, because customer videos... read more →

There's a great deal of interest now in Influencer marketing--finding and engaging with the mavens, connectors, network hubs and the like in your marketplace and getting them to say positive things about you. The Web has created a platform in which bloggers, often unaffiliated with traditional media or analyst firms,... read more →

A great customer video. No glossy production values. No one says "state of the art," "seamless," "best of breed," or other tiresome buzzwords. It's about the customer. Notice you learn very quickly how his business benefits from the vendor's solution. You get a sense of his emotional response to what the vendor... read more →

C-level customer buyers can be exceptionally valuable. In some cases, they can make a business. Such customers tend to have substantial budgets with which to buy, and broad networks of peers they can refer you to for additional business--if you deliver the goods to them. Persuading C-level prospects to buy, and... read more →

From the September issue of our newsletter. Looking to freshen up your reference program, and improve its impact on the business? The ways in which customer advocates or promoters can improve your business are almost limitless--and go well beyond providing traditonal sales and marketing references. To stimulate your thinking, here... read more →

San Francisco's Ed Gallagher was an avid sailor when he went blind 15 years ago at the age of 44. But in the last few years he and a couple of other disabled sailors began experimenting with some gizmos that would allow Ed to actually said a boat again--by himself.... read more →

AUGUST ISSUE: REFERENCE POINT Last month we saw that "reinventing customer relationships" is one of the three top issues for CEOs today, according the the recent IBM survey of 1500 global CEOs. Reference programs can be a key player in such an effort. This month I'll provide some more* tips... read more →

Great article in Newsweek The Creativity Crisis which (after deploring the way most kids are taught these days in American schools) provides a compelling example of how learning should occur. It comes from Ohio's National Inventors Hall of Fame School,a middle school in Akron. Looking for something better than the... read more →

"Reinventing customer relationships" is top of mind for CEOs today. That's the exciting conclusion from IBM's recently released Global Chief Executive Officer Survey. I encourage you to read through it, because it has exciting implications for the strategic importance of customer reference programs. Following are a few thoughts on how... read more →