Tag Archive 'Place the Customer at the Epicenter of the Business Model'

  • More Lessons From the CEO

  • The Dell direct model is a complex business model that is obviously difficult to duplicate. Still, there are many ways in which your company can become more customer-focused. Here are a few ideas. MAKE A COMMITMENT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR CUSTOMERS. Meet with key customers as often as it makes sense to do so, [...]

  • Structure the Organization Around the Customer (How Dell Acts Small While Getting Bigger)

  • In the late 1990s, Michael Dell took customer focus one step further by structuring the organization around the customer. He had become convinced that organizing by product alone would not ensure the high-quality customer relationships he hoped to achieve. (If the company organizes only by product, says Dell, there is an assumption that the leaders [...]

  • Involve Everyone in Creating Value for the Customer

  • The company obviously gleaned important lessons from its mistake. After Olympic, Dell started talking about "relevant technology," meaning only those technologies that are important to its customers. But Olympic also taught Michael Dell that just about everyone needs to be involved in serving customers—even engineers and technicians. It would have been easy to blame Olympic [...]

  • Involve Customers First to Avoid Disasters

  • Even great companies make mistakes, and Michael Dell admits that his company is no exception. In 1989, Dell introduced a new family of products, code-named Olympic. Olympic was a line of desktop and workstation computers that were able to perform a wide array of tasks. The product introduction—Dell’s biggest ever—turned out to be the company’s [...]

  • The "Demand Side" of the Dell Strategy

  • Obviously, the direct model is an unusual approach to distribution that wouldn’t meet the needs of most businesses. Still, other organizations can incorporate vital elements of Dell’s model into their own operations. For example, Dell stresses that during tough economic times, it is especially important to understand and anticipate customer demand—a crucial element of Dell’s [...]

  • Accelerating Market Share in Bad Times

  • One test of a corporate strategy is to see how well it performs in bad times. By that measure, Dell’s direct distribution model has proved itself to be a solid success. In the recession that gripped the computer industry in the early 2000s, Dell continued to grow at a healthy rate. Despite industry retrenchment and [...]