Accelerating Results: How Businesses Succeed

There are a number of ways to quantify and qualify business success and results. One that has been widely popularized by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema in their book The Discipline of Market Leaders, and affirmed repeatedly by business leaders, suggests that market leaders can be categorized into one of three disciplines in which they excel:
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Developing intimacy with customers as a way to foster loyalty and repeat business.

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Creating products or services that customers find indispensable.

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Managing a business in the most efficient way possible, cutting costs and improving productivity.
In each of these disciplines, innovative software helps market leaders to either perform better or gain the flexibility to shift focus to other areas. Let’s look at some examples.
Customer Intimacy


Companies who seek to build on a foundation of exceptional customer relationships strive to deeply understand and connect with their customers. One outstanding example of this is Nordstrom, a retailer that has thrived in that competitive industry by using customer service and customer data to acquire and maintain customers and to build unparalleled loyalty. Amazon.com, another retailer that understands how important a deep connection with customers can be, uses technology to understand the customers’ shopping habits and more effectively provide them with suggestions and personalized shopping experiences.
Many industries can profit from a focus on customer service. One example is Sandvik Coromant, a world-leading company for tools used in metalworking applications. The company needed a new way to connect with customers, so it used Microsoft technology to create a new browser-based ordering tool that gave customers extensive access to Sandvik Coromant’s products and customer services. Furthermore, Sandvik Coromant took a larger part of becoming the solution in some cases, actually deploying engineers, and in sometimes employing existing staff at a factory, in order to better provide the needed services and results to customers.
Now, it’s easier for Sandvik Coromant’s customers to do business with the company, making them more likely to do so in the future. Sandvik Coromant estimates that more than 1,000 customers are accessing its information and transaction processes via its new interface. The company believes that the new solution is both reducing costs and boosting revenues by attracting new customers and increasing its business with current customers