Customer Visits: Building a Better Market Focus (3rd edition)
Edward F. McQuarrie
Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008 (later acquired by Taylor & Francis / Routledge)
ISBN #978-0-7656-2224-2
The table of contents is available on Amazon, along with most of the first chapter, which explains which topics will be covered, and lays out the intended audience. A Kindle edition is available.
Has an abbreviated Table of Contents, and reproduces blurb on the back cover
A preview is available, allowing you to search the contents and / or browse pages of interest.
Back Story
One day in 1990, at my office door, appeared a gentleman who introduced himself as Harry Briggs, an editor for Sage Publications. As editors have done for decades, and still do today, he was travelling around to visit faculty for two purposes: to promote Sage books, but also to recruit new authors for Sage. Was I writing a book, he asked.
Well no, the idea hadn’t really crossed my mind; but I was intrigued by the possibilities. How would that work, getting a book published, I asked. Harry explained the book proposal process to me. I told him about the training courses I had developed for Hewlett Packard, and asked whether that might be an appropriate topic. He encouraged me to prepare a proposal; Sage accepted it; and I wrote my first book.
Moral of the story, for young professors in particular: be nice to those publisher’s representatives who stop by your office.
History
The first edition came out in 1992; the second in 1999; and the third, after Sage released the copyright to me, came out in 2008, from M. E. Sharpe—where Harry Briggs had gone to work. The Dot Com boom around 2000 had been hard on sales; no one thought they needed to visit customers any more. The timing of the third edition was also bad, coming as the Great Recession hit. I had also stopped doing industry workshops about that point.
On the other hand, by the third edition I had got the content shaped exactly as I wanted it. The basic procedure for organizing visits to customers, to listen and learn, is timeless. The skills needed, which are the heart of the book, have also not changed. I believe you could pick up this book in 2018, or 2028, or 2038, and get as much practicable advice as when it was published in 2008.