How Product and Marketing Managers Can Increase Sales in a Frustrating Market (Shh! It’s Lean-Six Sigma. Pass It On!)
March 17, 2009 by Michael
Filed under Professional Articles
By Michael J. Webb and Robert Ferguson An executive from a top three scientific instrument company called me a year or so ago. His product management team was struggling with a variety of challenges. See how many of these have a familiar ring to you:
How to establish a clear cause and effect relationship between promotional expenditure and sales
January 6, 2009 by admin
Filed under Articles, Sales and marketing management
By Justin Roff-Marsh Over lunch, a CEO recently admitted to me that his financial controller was using his organisation’s profits to build quite a substantial commercial property portfolio. When I asked if this was best use of his organisation’s free cashflow, he smiled, “How Read more
Book Review – “Escaping the Black Hole”
January 5, 2009 by admin
Filed under Book Reviews
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.
