Whatever business you are in — manufacturing, retail, health care, travel, high tech — you must realize that first and foremost, you are in the service business.

We all know how we like to be treated when we conduct a transaction. We also know how we do not like to be treated. There is no excuse not to render exceptional customer service.

But it has always amazed me that some organizations expect their customers to put up with disappointing service. It’s so much easier in the long run to expend a little more effort in putting your best foot forward.

In a previous article, we argued that your sales force could be facing extinction, because the same trends that have revolutionized the consumer experience are now transforming the B2B sales process.

Organizations no longer have the option of waiting to embrace “social selling”—the new model of leveraging online platforms such as LinkedIn to attract targeted buyers.

Social-sales expert Brynne Tillman says lacking clear direction, salespeople are figuring out this new technique themselves. “At the highest level, the challenge is that their salespeople are doing random acts of social,” she says. “There's no strategy or structure or process.”

When Mariam Naficy launched Minted in 2008, she wanted to create a niche business, one that would crowdsource stationery designs from independent artists, ask consumers to vote for their favorites, produce and sell the best-performing creations and share a portion of revenue with the original designers.

But Naficy underestimated consumers’ interest in what she was building, and she soon found herself at the helm of a massive venture-backed design platform that was growing far beyond her original vision. So she rolled with it -- adapting right alongside her company.