I loved the promises that the title of this book made,” to discover clients needs, make better products,” yet I’m afraid I was disappointed.

The process outlined may be suited to large organisations and consultants with extensive teams, ie internal teams and external teams, and who can invest resources in a very specific (perhaps arduous) process but I don’t think it is helpful for smaller companies and teams.

Having worked for large national and international companies before starting my own consultancy, I struggled with the author’s need to detail how high level and specific the process needs to be with comments such as, “...assume you don’t take regular and rigorous notes. That will have to be rectified for customer alignment meetings,” and the need to describe how breaks work within the context of full-day meetings! Contrast this with, “Remember this is an advanced technique and should only be attempted by teams of professionals who know how to execute the tactic together,” and perhaps you’ll get what I’m trying to say?

Of course, there are some useful techniques and thoughts, eg: the importance of setting expectations, learning customer goals and challenges, the importance of having the right people in the room, of active listening, but not ones that were new to me.

With many thanks to the author, the publishers, Dover Publications, and NetGalley for my free copy to review.

The book covers information and tips that are applicable in a corporate environment. Author provides good insights on different corporate roles, how to plan and lead a meeting with a corporate client, how to align the team members for great team performance and results while dealing with customer. Unfortunately, not applicable to very small businesses and/or startups. The book is focused on corporate environment. Still with this particular focus it provides a very good information for people who just strayed working with big clients, very good information on customer-facing and not customer facing roles. Sometimes non customer facing employees think they do not need to align with the rest of the team which is a wrong perception. The author gives good grounds on why and how all teams in corporation should work together for customers' and company's success.