Today the hottest new area of marketing is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) -- the discipline of identifying, attracting, and retaining a company¹s most valuable customers. Drawing upon more than ten years of testing, tryout, and implementation in hundreds of companies, CRM expert Jay Curry, and his Internet-expert son, Adam Curry, have written a clear, step-by-step guide to profiting from this exploding movement, with strategies that are aimed at the small and medium-sized business owners who need them most. Jay Curry explains how CRM can help managers boost profits by implementing a customer-focused strategy. Using easy-to-understand graphics, he introduces the customer pyramid -- segmented as "Top," "Big," "Medium," and "Small" -- to help the reader visualize, analyze, and improve customer profitability. Success comes to those who follow this three-step Customer Marketing Strategy: (1) get new customers into your pyramid; (2) move customers higher into your pyramid; (3) keep the customers in the pyramid. Combining practical how-to directives with vital CRM reference information, the book includes a case study, "InterTech," that allows readers to see customer-focused strategy in action. The final third of this practical, easy-to-read book is devoted to the Internet. Here Adam Curry introduces the "Permission Pyramid" and the "e-Customer Marketing Pyramid" to explain the nature of "virtual customer relationships" and how to use them to create, keep, and upgrade customers. This section includes mini-cases and tips to help managers use the Internet to complement current marketing and sales activities and ends with guidelines to test out the new paradigms of e-commerce. Throughout The Customer Marketing Method, the emphasis is always on practical steps to "make it happen." It is essential and timely reading for owners of small and medium-sized businesses as well as managers of small business units within larger firms. Kerstin Plehwe Founder and Chairman, The European Center of Database Marketing There are many books on the topic of Marketing in the Technology Age. But The Customer Marketing Method is a truly excellent and entertaining way to explain what customer relationship management really is. Plus, it not only provides theory -- it also provides numerous cases and offers down-to-earth help to managers in all phases of implementation. -- Review Jay Curry was born and bred in Armonk, New York. He received a B.A. degree at Bates College and a Master of Science degree at the Boston University School of Public Communications. As an independent consultant specializing in introducing and implementing "direct marketing" in companies without experience in that discipline, Jay Curry was often confronted with top managers who had limited knowledge of direct marketing or were skeptical about its benefits. In 1989 he formulated the basic concept of Customer Marketing to resolve this problem. In 1991 he co-founded MSP Associates, an Amsterdam-based consulting company that helps larger and international companies implement CRM, using Customer Marketing as a platform. MSP Associates has served such clients as Xerox, DHL, Kimberly-Clark, ING Bank, Philips, and a number of other European companies. Also in 1991, Curry completed the manuscript for his book on Customer Marketing, which was subsequently published in a number of editions in the Netherlands, England, France, Germany, Italy, and Brazil. His English-language books were published by Kogan-Page in London under the titles Know Your Customers and Customer Marketing: How to Increase the Profitability of Your Customer Base. Chapter 1: "What Business Are You In?" Has a consultant ever asked you this simple but profound question? If so, he may have been trying to appear wise and all-knowing. But more likely he was trying to see if you are product oriented or market oriented. If you answer the question "What business are you in?" in relation to your primary product or service with, for example, "We sell shoes." "We are accountants." "We build houses." then you probably are rather product oriented. And this can be dangerous. As Theodore Levitt pointed out in "Marketing Myopia," his classic Harvard Business Review article published in 1960, the presidents of American railway companies in the early 1900s, if asked, would have answered the question like this: "We are in the business of operating trains." The result of this narrow, product-oriented thinking was that virtually every U.S. rail company went bankrupt or faced serious problems because they missed out on the rapid growth of the airlines and the development of a sophisticated highway system as a way to get things and people from place A to place B. For the railroads, a better answer would have been "We are in the transportation business." Another example is IBM. Thomas Watson, Jr., son of the IBM founder, tells in his book, Father, Son & Co., how IBM almost missed