Episodes

In the realm of modern business, the quest for customer-centricity takes on the character of a strategic venture—fraught with challenges yet ripe with proven top and bottom-line rewards. However, like intrepid explorers who encounter obstacles along the way, business leaders often stumble upon common pitfalls that unknowingly jeopardize their path to competitive-level customer-centricity. This episode of What’s Your Edge? delves into four prevalent mistakes related to strategy, data, insights, a...

Imagine the business world as an intricate puzzle, with each piece representing a different participant in the business community: prospective and existing customers, suppliers, channel partners, influencers and connectors, and competitors. Just as solving a puzzle requires fitting the pieces together, businesses can strategically connect the dots of their ecosystem to create a comprehensive picture of growth and success. In this episode of What’s Your Edge? we’ll explore how deciphering the eco...

In the vast cosmos of business, growth shines like a distant star, beckoning companies toward success and prosperity. Amidst this celestial journey, businesses seek a guiding light to navigate the ever-expanding universe of opportunities. This guiding light is segmentation. Like the North Star or Southern Cross, it leads businesses to prioritize their efforts, allocate resources strategically, and chart a course toward sustainable growth and profit as found in a Bain & Company study, 81 percent ...

Customers are the gold vein for every business. As such, businesses continuously embark on the exciting treasure hunt to find and keep customers. Unearthing the hidden treasures of customer acquisition and customer retention leads to growth and prosperity. The quest to discover new customers and retain the loyalty of existing ones is not without challenges. Competitors lurk like claim jumpers, often vying for the same valuable customers. Moreover, the map to customer satisfaction and customer lo...

Business leaders must continuously engage in strategic planning to steer their organizations toward growth and success, especially when facing a dynamic and unpredictable environment. In this episode of What’s Your Edge, we’ll explore 12 ways you can de-risk your strategic planning and execution. Strategic planning has both advocates and detractors, especially as to whether it positively impacts operational performance. Bert George, Richard Walker, and Joost Monster conducted an extensive analys...

Business-to-business(B2B) success is measured by growth. Companies that sustain profitable growth over time know how to make sure all aspects of their organization create and/or enable customer value through customer-centricity. This includes every functional department within the organization from Human Resources/Talent Management to R&D, to Finance, to Production/Manufacturing, from Marketing, to Sales, to Implementation/Shipping, and Customer Service. And that all the associated processes suc...

Building a brand is like building a house. You need a solid foundation, strong walls, and a roof that keeps everything inside safe and dry. When you have an authentic brand, you have the foundation for building customer trust and customer loyalty, as well as trust with employees, and partners. But, without authenticity, your brand reputation is like a house of cards, ready to come tumbling down at the slightest gust of wind. Brand authenticity is the degree to which a brand is perceived as bein...

Scaling a business is the focus of this episode of What’s Your Edge? Scaling, regardless of the company stage, has been a recurring topic in many of our customer, partner, and prospect conversations of late. We too have been exploring how to scale which is why we launched our online store. Scaling a business is often compared to climbing a mountain, and for good reason. Both endeavors require perseverance, dedication, a willingness to take risks, and performance management. In this episode we’ll...

Ensure that your organization’s products and services success and enable you to grow, or in the vernacular of the movie industry achieve blockbuster status. These five customer-centric tips used to create successful movies are just as applicable to every organization.

Performance management is essentially your business' GPS for successfully navigating to your destination - growth. By tracking, evaluating, and reviewing performance along the way, businesses can: a) Identify areas for growth and development, b) foster a culture of accountability, and, c) facilitate alignment between the organization’s customer-centric outcomes and business objectives. Explore the 3 most valuable benefits of performance management and 5 routes to better performance management an...

Decision-making is the core of good planning. Data trends and patterns are both important to data-derived insights to support decision-making.

It takes more than effort to have enough wood behind the arrow for any strategy to succeed. This episode employs a case study that highlights how a strategy without the right tactics and associated activities and resources missed the performance target and what they could have done differently to ensure success.

Flying a plane or running a business is hard. Both take skills and practice. Flying is even harder when the weather gets rough. Or in our case, when the economic environment becomes gloomy. Listen and read how mastering four instrument flying skills enable your organization to weather any market condition.

Well-conducted primary research can yield valuable actional insights to guide strategic growth decisions. To gather meaningful responses, it’s important to compose rating scales, a common form of questions, properly.

Five strategies will help you and your business grow and thrive in an environment filled with more hard-to-predict events and manage today’s tumultuous sea of uncertainty.

Is a product-led growth strategy the right fit for you? Here are 5 things to keep in mind should you want to embrace this customer-centric strategy and 7 key measures of success.

Discoverability and engagement are two customer-centric prerequisites to the evaluation, selection, and purchase stages. To grow, ensure you successfully address both.

Companies that experience fast customer growth may find themselves facing the same 4 challenges experienced with fast-growing trees. Here is how to address all four.

A right fitting customer is essential to acquire and keep customers that deliver customer lifetime value. Start with these 7 steps to find and keep customers that fit.

Breaking patterns and creating new ones are essential to growth. Explore four patterns that will help you grow your business and improve performance.

The answer to the two important questions my grandfather asked before every fishing outing will improve your customer acquisition and Marketing and Sales alignment.

Here are 5 ways Marketing leaders can use technology to earn and keep a strategic role and keeps Marketing serving as a growth engine.

An effective strategy is critical to the success of all organizations and often takes time to produce results. Here’s what to do before deciding to change a strategy.

Demand gen is a fundamental capability of Marketing. 5 key gardening steps provide guidance for creating and sowing demand gen that yields quality customer conversations.