Sales have dropped precipitously. The board is meeting next week. Bob, founder and long-time CEO, is urged by his team to hire an expensive management consulting firm and drastically cut costs as a last ditch effort to improve the company’s bottom line.
Stop, Look, and Listen is the story of how Bob puts the principles put forth in Chuck Wall’s Customer CEO: How to Profit from the Power of Your Customers to work. Bob has been running his company as if he controls the customers. Bob is urged to Stop, Look, and Listen, because today, the customers are in control. They are the bosses, the Customer CEOs, and they control the company’s destiny.
Bob must learn to understand his customers’ needs, and more importantly, embrace their power. The three essential steps are to STOP seeing things from the corporate CEO’s point of view, LOOK at everything from the customer’s point of view, even when it hurts, and LISTEN deeply for what the customers’ needs are. This short, entertaining business tale chronicles Bob’s ultimate recognition of his customers as CEOs.
Author Chuck Wall is an expert in understanding the needs of customers, having interviewed and surveyed more than 100,000 of them in virtually every business category. Chuck has helped hundreds of companies, from the Fortune 100 to start-ups, acquire hundreds of thousands of new customers.