Mark Goulston Quotes

It's so important to experience what your customers are experiencing and listen to their suggestions.

Put your consumers in focus, and listen to what they're actually saying, not what they tell you.

When you are truly interested in other people, you will learn what they are interested in and if they have a need for your product. If they like you, and most people like folks who take an interest in them, they'll help you find people who do need what you have to sell, even if they don't.

Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You'd be amazed how many companies don't listen to their customers.

Strong emotional connections between individuals, customers, and salespeople that trust each other will always be 10 times more powerful than the most expensive ad campaign. That's the power social media makes possible.

Customers are your best teachers. Learning about your customer's beliefs, values, and priorities teaches you which selling points you should emphasize.

If you listen, people will tell you exactly what they want - whether it's a business relationship or a consumer relationship.

I'm not shy about asking the customer, because I want to talk about who she is and what she wants from me.

The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

To sell is above all to master the art and science of listening.

You can't learn anything if you are doing all the talking. Sales people should always be developing their earQ, not their IQ. The only way to create a successful sale is to understand that knowledge from listening does not become power until it is used. And ideas without action are worthless.

When you spend time with potential customers, you get to hear about their struggles firsthand. You see their eyes light up with excitement or darken with confusion. You learn things you would never find in a survey, database, or questionnaire. You learn why people buy.

The goal of listening to customers is not to please every one of them. It's to figure out which customer segments serve your needs - both short and long term.

Whether you have incredible products like at Apple or a great service business, it all comes down to fundamental trust and relationship-building with your customers.

My aspiration is that M&M become one of the most customer-centric organizations in the world. If we focus on understanding our customers, we will be able to develop customer-centric innovations.

When you focus solely on valuation and market share, you win some and you lose some. When you focus on the needs of your customers and help them achieve their dreams, you win every time.

If you can't build a relationship with your customers, you're in big trouble. If you can remember the numbers from the reports and spreadsheets you spent hours poring over in your office, but you can't picture the faces of your customers - you're in big trouble.

If you don't listen to your customers, someone else will.

Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.

It takes personal sacrifice to communicate when conditions are right for the other person-during the meal preparation, after a date, a hurt, a victory, a disappointment, or when someone wants to share a confidence. One must be willing to forego personal convenience to invest time in establishing a firm foundation for family communication. When communication in the family seems to be bogging down, each individual should look to himself for the remedy.

Communication is the most important skill in life. We spend most of our waking hours communicating. But consider this: You've spent years learning how to read and write, years learning how to speak. But what about listening?

There may be no single thing more important in our efforts to achieve meaningful work and fulfilling relationships than to learn to practice the art of communication.

Who you talk to is just as important as what questions you ask and what you pull away from it.

...people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well.

Every time a customer calls or you call a customer, you have an opportunity and a choice. What choice are you making?