Everyone is a Customer

Product Description

A proven method for measuring the value of every relationship in the era of collaborative business.


Progressive companies claim to focus on customers, yet too few understand how to profitably deliver what their customers truly value. Award winning business architects, Jeffrey Shuman and Janice Twombly have developed a proven method for measuring the value of every relationship. It is a method specifically designed for today's era of collaborative business. Their book, Everyone is a Customer, offers entrepreneurs and business executives easy to follow advice about how to achieve success through "win-win" collaborative relationships. Readers will learn how to redefine every business relationship as a "customer" relationship; value, measure and manage those relationships; and create new value and improve company performance.
Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #1453520 in Books
* Published on: 2002-08-07
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Hardcover
* 240 pages

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap
Every Single Name in Your Rolodex Represents Potential Income

In today’s business relationships, the balance of power has shifted to the customer. This is not news. But in Everyone Is a Customer, the "customer" has been redefined.

Everyone with whom a business interacts—internally and externally—is a customer. However, companies need to effectively allocate resources to those relationships that create the greatest strategic value in order to improve performance and increase profits.

Traditional customer relationship management (CRM) and partner relationship management (PRM) strategies and technologies recognize that organizations need to interact with customers and alliance partners in a more meaningful way. But they do not take into account relationship currencies. According to award-winning entrepreneurs Jeffrey Shuman and Janice Twombly, collaboration is the key to success in today’s networked economy. Successful collaboration, say Shuman and Twombly, comes through effectively trading in relationship currencies.

Built on the revolutionary concepts from their last book, Collaborative Communities, Shuman and Twombly outline methods every company and businessperson can use to develop and measure win-win collaborative relationships.

Managers, leaders, and business owners will learn how to:

*Redefine every business relationship as a "customer" relationship.

*Value, measure, and manage relationship currencies.

*Realize value through both cash and non-cash currencies.

*Work toward Purposeful Collaboration, that is, the allocation of resources toward the most valuable relationships.

*Determine a company’s value from a new perspective by putting a tangible value on an intangible, such as customer relationships.

In the age of collaborative business, you must think from the perspective that everyone is a customer, that there is quantifiable and significant value in non-cash relationship currencies, and that the intricacies of all forms of business relationships can be objectively measured and managed. By thinking about business from these new perspectives, you can accomplish your goals and achieve success.

About the Authors

Jeffrey Shuman, Ph.D., and Janice Twombly, CPA, are founders of The Rhythm of Business, Inc., a firm that helps businesspeople and organizations measure and manage the value in their business relationships for strategic benefit. Shuman is also professor and director of entrepreneurial studies at Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts, and in 1999 received an Ernst & Young New England Entrepreneur Of The Year Award. David Rottenberg is an editor at Shuman and Twombly’s company and has written for several regional and national publications. Together, they are the authors of Collaborative Communities: Partnering for Profit in the Networked Economy.

Advance Praise for Everyone Is a Customer:

"Many companies are realizing that the relentless forces driving collaborative business—customer-driven markets, smarter applications of business technology, and a relentless drive for innovation—are too powerful to ignore, and they’re trying to jump in, any way they can. Shuman and Twombly’s book can give those companies—as well as those that have yet to take the plunge—not only the broad perspectives they’ll need to make it work but also a set of tactical and tangible tools that’ll help them measure their progress against their objectives."
—Bob Evans, Editor-in-Chief, InformationWeek, and Senior Vice President, CMP Media

"Just when I was beginning to think ‘business book’ was an oxymoron, Everyone Is a Customer lands on my desk. This is the real thing: a substantive, useful guide to rethinking the true value of business relationships. Chapter 3—exploring how to monetize all of your company's relationships—is worth the price of admission by itself."
—George Gendron, Editor-in-Chief, Inc.Magazine

"As the web of the extended enterprise increases in complexity, managers and entrepreneurs need more than good instinct to conduct business relationships profitably. Everyone Is a Customer provides a smart, practical framework and tools that we can use today for measuring and extracting fair value from the relationships we rely on to meet our business goals."
—Gregory K. Ericksen, Global Director, Entrepreneur Of The Year, Ernst & Young

"In an era of uncertainty, economic turmoil, and global unrest, the greatest asset of any business or businessperson is the relationship. Rich in ideas, tactics, and actions, Everyone Is a Customer delivers a clear and crisp framework for understanding and leveraging every business relationship to its fullest. Jan and Jeff have become masters of effectively communicating the essentials of business success and choreographing the road map to business opportunity."
—Thomas M. Koulopoulos, President, Delphi Group, and Author of X-economy

About the Author
Jeffrey Shuman, Ph.D., and Janice Twombly are founders of The Rhythm of Business, a knowledge firm that helps create awareness, understanding, and adoption of collaborative business. Shuman is also professor and director of entrepreneurial studies at Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts, and in 1999 received an Ernst & Young New England Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Janice Twombly and Jeffrey Shuman, Ph.D., are founders of The Rhythm of Business, a knowledge firm that helps create awareness, understanding, and adoption of collaborative business.

David Rottenberg is an editor at Shuman and Twombly's company, and has written for several regional and national publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Collaboration may be the most important concept in business ttoday. A recent search for the term on the Internet turned up thousands and thousands of business-related references. Yet in March 2000, while researching our last book, Collaborative Communities: Partnering for Profit in the Networked Economy, a similar online search came up with just a few references, and they mainly related to cooperative housing and academic or intellectual collaboration.

So why the sudden attention to collaboration? The answer is simple.

Collaboration is important because we live our lives and conduct our business in an increasingly connected and interdependent world. Collaboration is how work gets done when we can’t get it done alone. In our personal lives as consumers, whenever we have the financial wherewithal, we rely on an increasing number of specialists to help us with our needs. In war, we form alliances for very specific advantages. In business, more and more companies understand that to truly succeed in our global and networked economy, growth and profits come through true partnerships with all our varied constituencies.

Indeed, many businesspeople are realizing that significant financial benefits accrue through collaborative relationships with other businesses. And increasingly companies are finding that the best strategy is to collaborate with their customers in the design, development, and delivery of their market basket of goods and services.

So not surprisingly, many businesses have essentially made collaboration their new corporate mandate. It’s as if all you need to do is implement software that allows you to conduct "collaborative commerce" and you’re on the road to success. However, it is our view that to be effective, collaboration requires both a mindset nurtured and developed by an entrepreneurial focus on the customer and the support of technology that provides realtime information and measurements. Collaboration must have a clearly defined purpose. Collaboration driven just by the ability of tools or by the management concept du jour results only in costly failures. Unfortunately, based on what we see and hear, in too many instances it is the superficial approach that is being taken.

Since writing Collaborative Communities, we have worked with dozens of companies to develop collaborative business models, all the while building our own Collaborative Community. And whether using the entrepreneurial clean sheet of paper to start a new business or iterating an xisting business model, we have observed and experienced firsthand the myriad challenges to building a collaborative business.

Lately, we’ve stepped back from all the details to think about what we’ve learned. More than anything else, we realize that what separates the successful from the unsuccessful is the ability to build trusting, purposeful, mutually beneficial relationships. Of course, like you, We’ve always known that relationships are important in business. What we hadn’t appreciated is that in addition to requiring a lot of hard work, successful collaborative relationships require an analytical and disciplined approach.

Like many things in life, some people have an in-born, intuitive ability to build trusting, win-win relationships both in business and in their personal life. However, for the majority of us, this ability isn’t programmed into our DNA. For us, the ability to build trusting relationships requires understanding and practice. With understanding and practice, we, too, can develop this ability.

And that’s fortunate because now, more than ever, we need to work collaboratively to better understand our customers’ changing needs and take aggressive action to profitably meet those needs. Indeed, the necessity to work across traditional boundaries with like-minded people to achieve shared goals and the benefit from doing so have never been greater. But how do you truly evaluate which relationships are the right relationships to develop and nurture?

This book identifies and describes how you build, measure, and manage successful collaborative relationships. We call this skill Purposeful Collaboration and have methodically spelled out the step-by-step process it follows. Further, we have used the detailed description of that process to develop several analog and digital tools that, when coupled with your growing understanding, empower you to successfully build and maintain collaborative relationships.

Once you have developed the ability to trade in relationship currencies, you can focus your limited resources on those relationships that provide you the greatest benefit and offer the fastest return. Very simply, it’s how you do business in the era of collaborative business.
Customer Reviews

Reshaping A Business To Meet Customer Needs5
"Everyone Is A Customer"(2002) is a companion book to last year's "Collaborative Communities"(2001), which taken together, present a realistic roadmap for companies interested in changing with the times. They build on Peter Drucker's insight that when a business thinks through the relationships that make the most sense, it is the customer they should focus on to increase sales and profits. According to authors Jeffrey Shuman and Janice Twombly with David Rottenberg, This well written and insightful book, takes the reader step-by-step through an understanding of what it takes for a business owner to survive, innovate and prosper in the new era of collaborative business that relies so heavily on the networking of relationships to succeed.

The authors urge business owners to recognize the natural process of change that takes place once a business is started, resulting in the unforseen development of new products,new service, and new customers. They call this