CHOOSE YOUR CUSTOMER

How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive

Praise for Choose Your Customer

Choose Your Customer provides real-world, practical, and actionable advice for companies to survive and thrive in the New Digital Age. A terrific blueprint to successfully go to market and win against the digital giants.
This book provides a tried and true, data-driven, logical approach to developing and executing a successful strategic transformation in today’s threatening high-risk environment.
Jonathan and John provide compelling examples to understand true profitability by product and customer, using the most atomic level of data: actual sales transactions. They describe useful frameworks to turn analytical insights into initiatives and management alignment, clearly defining a strategy, including what not to do. This book is a road map of initiatives that will drive a 20–30 percent profit improvement.
Choose Your Customer explains how to develop and manage new innovative, win-win relationships with your customers that target and meet their specific, evolving needs. This is critical to success in competing against the powerful digital competitors and aggressive investor-backed companies that are disrupting every industry. Every manager will benefit from reading it.
Dr. Byrnes is probably the world’s foremost authority on profit mapping and effective supply chain management, and all of Profit Isle’s work should be required reading for managers of and investors in any supply chain-related business. In Choose Your Customer, Jonathan and John provide terrific advice on how a company should compete against the digital behemoths by using transaction-based profit metrics to recognize (and then align the organization around) its true customer profit core. If you’re still thinking that maximizing efficiency is a key imperative for your business, then you REALLY need to read this book.
Choose Your Customer is a great master plan for companies to better understand their customers and align to improve performance. It is a readable, common sense framework for managing your business better in today’s digital world. A must-read for today’s managers in a world of disruptive competitors.
Choose Your Customer is an important book that tells managers how to compete successfully against the onslaught of digital giants that is transforming business today. It is essential reading for CEOs, CFOs, and other managers who need to reposition their companies for success. Business school students and all managers will benefit from the book’s explanation of how to become value entrepreneurs.
With profitability as its north star, this book provides the vision and definitive game plan for how to reposition your business to compete successfully in the future. The authors articulate the sweep of disruptive market transitions today, and then surgically offer prescriptive, actionable steps company leaders can—and must—take to win. Favorite quote: ‘Most businesses are doing what they should have been doing five to 10 years ago.’ Amen.
Choose Your Customer is an indispensable guide for companies looking to thrive and prosper in today’s disruptive environment. This book is just what distributors need today. Using practical tips and rich examples, Byrnes and Wass will challenge you to strategically manage your customers, data, business processes, and management team in pursuit of strategic dominance.
I believe that Jonathan and John are pioneers in the area of strategy and profitability management. They have used their deep expertise to bring together a very insightful and practical approach for companies to lead, transform in this new era of digital disruption, and drive value for the consumer. This book has really shaped my perspective in this space, and is a must-read for all executives, managers, and students.
Choose Your Customer is that rare book that combines academic rigor with practical experience. Byrnes and Wass describe why the digital giants are threatening conventional physical businesses, and then provide the tools to fight back. A necessary resource for any CEO looking to collect the granular sales and profit information that can turn their supply chains into a source of competitive advantage.
Through their groundbreaking Profit Isle methodology, Jonathan and John have fundamentally changed the lens with which we view profitability and the levers we use to drive improved performance in our company. They taught us that optimizing our supply chain actually starts at the very beginning—with targeting the right customers. I would encourage any CEO or CFO looking to drive a step function change to read this book.
If you own or run a business, you must read this book. Byrnes and Wass show us that all customers are not created equal. Every business must identify and nurture profitable relationships and neglect those customers who lose you money. Their model of how to segment your customers provides you with the tools necessary to increase your profitability and boost employee morale.
Driving profitable growth is critical for long-term survival. It goes beyond simply defining your value proposition and identifying sources of competitive advantage. It includes prioritizing the game changers and aligning human and financial capital accordingly. In this book, Jonathan and John combine practical advice with a scalable framework to help leaders understand where and how to take action and create a playbook for winning.
In today’s highly segmented markets dominated by big digital giants, Byrnes and Wass show step-by-step how to zero in on the lucrative opportunities that abound, if you only know where to look. It’s a quick read, thought-provoking and informative how-to manual, and go-to source for concrete, actionable insights.
An outstanding book, Choose Your Customer shares significant new insights about how a firm can effectively evaluate and manage its profit core in today’s increasingly heterogeneous markets. The authors keenly understand the critical importance of granular profit knowledge, i.e., via transaction-based profit metrics and analytics that recognize that individual product/customer/service/delivery channel combinations are often unique and must be evaluated and managed as such. They carefully dissect the many ways in which today’s Age of Diverse Markets, increasingly dominated by digital giants, differs markedly from the mass market era, and how today’s executives must think and manage differently to successfully compete. The book is packed with great ideas linked perceptively to practice both within firms and within those firms’ supply chains. It will occupy a worthy place on the bookshelves of top managers.
Kudos to Jonathan and John for continuing their quest to help us focus on ‘where the money is’ via smart and logical analytics. Their magic lies in taking the complexity of millions of transactions, and distilling the data into actionable moves to drive profit and focus on the right customers. There is no substitute for this level of segmentation and stratification.
Choose Your Customer is an authoritative guide with actionable advice that can transform a looming financial disaster into a beacon of business success. The authors discuss the coronavirus pandemic and provide a prescription for survival and prosperity. Their decades of research and business experience permeate this book.
Choose Your Customer is superb. It should be part of every MBA curriculum in the country.
New competition from digital giants is not going away. But as your business landscape changes, so does that of your customer. This book lays out a sensible and methodical way to embrace the forces of change and to become the partner your customers need now.
A road map that starts with the customer and ends deep inside your company, bringing higher profits and stronger strategic positioning, Choose Your Customer offers a must-have toolkit for the new Age of Data-Driven Precision Marketing.
As markets fragment and digital giants take over important customer segments, supply chain managers must coordinate with their sales and marketing counterparts. Such coordination aims to target the segments that will produce sustained profit growth, while assembling and providing customers with the innovative packages of products and services that will enable them to win. Choose Your Customer presents a systematic, proven methodology to accomplish this.
The key for all distributors is to identify your value proposition and then align the business to capitalize on how to sell this profitably. In Choose Your Customer, Jonathan and John have developed a program and system that allows the distributor to analyze the profitability of each customer, enabling it to drive the strengths of the company and recognize the profit levers unique to each customer. This not only benefits the distributor but, in most cases, the customer as well, which contributes to an even stronger long-term partnership.
This is a book about strategy to pragmatically win the war of profitability. It offers real-life scenarios we face in the ultracompetitive business world. The context is relatable to all levels of management.
Through compelling examples, Byrnes and Wass show how businesses can boost their profits, even in a turbulent environment, by choosing their customers well and creating value for them. This lucidly written book offers easy-to-follow steps for developing and executing such a win-win strategy. It is an invaluable read for all managers.
This vital resource reveals smart, actionable, and transformative insights that not only point you to where the profits lie but show you how to unlock and sustain them. I’ve read, quoted, and infused Byrnes’s wisdom in my company for years, and see this book as a lifework that can accelerate your skills and successes by decades.
Jonathan and John’s book comes in a very important period of transition from mass markets to diverse markets. Digital giants are capable of marketing anything directly to customers, which brings them advantages over traditional companies. Choose Your Customer addresses this weakness, empowering leaders at traditional companies to sustain competitive advantage and profits. The authors clarify how profit data supports thoughtfully choosing customers, suggest different strategies on how to align the company to capture, dominate, and grow its target segments, and explain how to manage complex internal business processes. This book is a must-read for all modern managers who want not only to accelerate focused growth but also to enable their companies to respond to a rapidly evolving environment.