CHAPTER 1

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Customers are skeptical. They’ve been lied to by just about everyone who’s had the opportunity to do so. From role models who can’t keep extramarital affairs from wrecking their golf game to behemoth corporations betting against their own customers’ investments to politicians regularly resigning for engaging in the very activities they legislated against, no one has been telling the truth. You need an element of trust to get genuine customer buy-in, but we’ve spent a generation and a half teaching the public to trust nobody.

This creates a problem for today’s business leaders. How do you connect with these empowered, educated, skeptical consumers? This is a question of some urgency. If you don’t have ...

Get Customers First: Dominate Your Market by Winning Them Over Where It Counts the Most now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.