This book is providing a comprehensive model for doing business in the new customer-focused environment and the practical guidance for implementing profitable, customer-driven marketing programs. It draws on Vic Hunter’s twenty-plus tears’ experience to give all the bottom-line-oriented help that need to: Identify and measure the key economics of customer retention and what they mean for your business plans, Develop an integrated approach to maximizing the value of every customer contact, Assess customer needs and match them with our organization’s core competencies, Evaluate and coordinate all the elements of our communications programs, Use the ten keys to database success to maximize our information-gathering activities, Create a customer community center that builds on a set of shared values and needs, Retain and cultivate our best customers, Acquire new business and new customers more cost effectively, link internal and external communities in a profitable chain of business relationships. It’s a starting point for journey toward building a customer community. We will find that this new “partnership” with the customer delivers substantial benefits. Smarter in the products or services tha we provide as others will be based on documented customer needs, efficient organizations as we processes that will be driven from a customer’s perspective. Our customers will become another sales channel as they take on the role apostle for us and will see revenues and profits grow.