Book Review – Introduction to Sales Process Improvement: Gaining More of the Right Customers at Higher Margins and Lower Costs with Lean and Six Sigma

Michael J. Webb, Sales Performance Consultants, Inc., $84, 182 pages, June 20, 2005, www.salesperformance.com. Many companies would like to be more scientific about sales and marketing, but fear causing more problems than results. Now, a unique and path-breaking work by Michael Webb enables those companies to apply Read more

Book Review – “The Leaky Funnel Earn More Customers by Aligning Sales and Marketing to the way Businesses Buy”

by Hugh Macfarlane 2003, Bookman Media Pty Ltd (available on www.amazon.com) Submitted by Michael J Webb: HardBits (a mid-sized company in a maturing industry) is struggling because its products are being commoditized by competitors from around the world. Read more

Book Review – “Escaping the Black Hole”

Escaping the Black Hole: Minimizing the Damage from the Marketing-Sales Disconnect Robert Schmonsees, Thompson Publishing, 2005 How much of your marketing and selling budget is wasted? In “Escaping the Black Hole -Minimizing the Damage from the Marketing and Selling Disconnect” (Thompson Publishing, 2005), author Bob Schmonsees demonstrates that in many companies that waste is as much as 25% as a result of misaligned assets, processes, and activities. Schmonsees begins with an examination of the symptoms and costs of dysfunctional sales and marketing relationships, and traces them directly to the heart of the problem: misalignment of the key processes and assets that drive the day-to-day activities of marketing and sales professionals. He also provides the reader with two axioms that will help companies institutionalize the principles of solutions centric-selling and turn the way they go to market into a sustainable competitive advantage.

• Marketing and sales must institutionalize a greater understanding of the customer’s business problems and the implications of those problems on the constituencies and stakeholders they sell to.

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Book Review: “Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way” by Michael J. Webb with Tom Gorman

Reviewed by Paul Harmon (pdf of this article) When most people think of Six Sigma, they think of it as deriving from the Quality Control movement in the mid-Eighties and Read more