Praise For This Book!

“The core of growing any venture is deep customer insight. Lilia Shirman gives simple, powerful frameworks, practical action plans, and real-world examples for putting such insight to work. This book should be assigned reading in every business and entrepreneurship course.”

Tom Kosnik, Fenwick and West Consulting Professor, Stanford Technology Ventures Program, Stanford University

“Simplistic value claims won’t cut it in enterprise accounts. Don’t leave sales teams to do the hard work of proving worth on their own. Shirman inspires us to stop ‘crafting’ messages and instead to collaborate with customers to understand how and why we really matter. And then to throw the entire organization behind mattering more.”

Rick Jackson, CMO, VMware

“The objective for enterprise solution vendors is to make big deals more repeatable and big accounts more loyal. This is an astute and practical guide to greater customer engagement, more valuable offerings, and go-to-market approaches that produce consistently bigger wins. Keep this useful tool on your desk.”

Eugene Lee, CEO, Socialtext

“Shirman presents incisive ideas about understanding markets, quantifying value, and constructing solutions and industry offerings that really matter in the customer’s universe. Some of these rules are common sense, but certainly not common practice. Many are completely new takes on demonstrating and delivering value. All are thought-provoking and critical reading for everyone on your management team.”

Gail Ennis, CEO, Karmasphere

“This book is an indispensable guide to what it takes to make complex B2B products more relevant to customers and to entire markets. It packs a wealth of go-to-market strategy and execution savvy into a quick read. I’ll be keeping it close at hand as we grow our business.”

Ivan Koon, CEO, YouSendIt

“Want to grow revenue in the enterprise market? Being ‘customer-focused’ is not just a cliché. It’s core to every successful business. Shirman presents fresh thinking and pragmatic approaches for selecting target markets, understanding customer priorities, and communicating and delivering real value to customers. This book hits the mark and should be on the desk of every business strategist.”

Ken Goldberg, VP, Business Planning and COO, Travel and Transportation Industry, HP Enterprise Services

“To avoid commoditization, B2B companies must constantly expand their offerings and innovate how they sell, market, serve, and partner; in short, how they do business. If adding yet another product feature is no longer enough to differentiate, read this book. Shirman provides a treasure trove of strategies for staying relevant and valuable.”

Erik Frieberg, Chief Marketing Officer, 10gen

“We focus on innovation in creating and extending customer value beyond the core product or technology. Shirman provides actionable and repeatable processes for developing integrated go-to-market strategies and aligning companies around what matters most to customers. This is a valuable new tool that we’ll be using to foster business innovation and entrepreneurial success at the Center for Business Innovation.”

Soren Sjolander, Chair Professor of Innovation and Founding Chairman of the Center for Business Innovation (CBI), Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden