A Stanford Business School instructor with 22 years of experience shares his top 11 lessons for business success. He argues customer retention matters more than acquisition, emphasizes measuring leading indicators like demos booked instead of lagging ones like revenue, and insists every business is fundamentally about selling to customers, employees, and investors.
In 22 years of teaching at Stanford Business School, here are the top 11 things that I teach in under 3 minutes. Customer retention is way more important than customer acquisition. Fix the hole in your bucket and you'll increase the lifetime value of your customers, which will actually make customer acquisition way more profitable.
Agree. No point in acquiring customers if you're just going to lose them.
Number 10: Measure the right things. Lagging indicators like revenue, stock price, or profit just tell you the score of the game. The leading indicators like the number of leads generated or demos booked are gonna tell you how to play the game.
Totally agree, the metrics that you pick have so much to do with your success.
And finally, number 11, you are always in the business of selling. You're selling customers, you're selling employees, you're selling investors. There we go, we got there. To sell anyone anything, you need 3 things. You need an ideal customer, you need lots of them, and you need an irresistible offer.
Yeah, generally good stuff. I do hope they cover more than this at Stanford Business School. Pretty basic stuff, but also pretty dang good for 3 minutes.
