Rules to Break & Laws to Follow by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, PhD

In their instructive book,  Rules to Break & Laws to Follow – How Your Business Can Beat the Crisis of Short-Termism,  Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, PhD share their helpful research.

Many predictions are based upon totally false assumptions – use of cars worldwide would be limited to number of chauffeurs; telephones limited by human operators making connections – blinded by current business model

Rules to Break:

1. Best measure of success is current sales and profit
2. With right sales and marketing effort, you can always get more customers
3. Company value is created by offering differentiated products and services

12 Laws to Follow:

1. Long-term value is as important as current sales and profit. (Examine most resented fees. A $100 customer who has been with the company for 10 years has generated $12,000 in revenue and is likely to generate twice that much if loyal for another 20 years.)
2. Create the most possible value from the customers and prospects available to you. (Not all associates sell the organizations whole range of products to their assigned customer.)
3. Earn and keep the trust of your customers. (Treat the customer the way you would want to be treated.)
4. Treat each customer with the fairness you would want if you were that customer. (Respect customer’s interest; don’t just sell the product being promoted.)
5. To earn your customers’ trust, first earn your employees’ trust.
6. With no customer equity you will have no future earnings. (Create a good enough experience that customers keep buying.)
7. Culture will drive value or drag value. (Front-line employee is the company to the customer. Culture is what employees do when no one is looking.)
8. If being fair to customers conflicts with company’s financial goals, fix the business model.
9. Always use technology to create more trust. (Use technology to improve the customer’s life and you’ll probably sell more products.)
10. Customers may forgive honest mistakes but they will never forgive dishonesty. (Customer trust can be destroyed all at once or with a thousand small demonstrations of incompetence.)
11. Success requires constant innovation. (Encourage creativity.)
12. Dissent and diversity drive creativity and innovation. (A group of only experts tend not to make best decisions because they are less likely to investigate alternatives. Don’t succumb to groupthink.)