Selling is getting more and more complex, yet few companies are implementing formal sales processes that would bring the degree of management control that is needed. Too many managers have no reliable way to measure the performance of sales people other than by orders produced and bulging 30-60-90 day forecasts with little or no backup. There is pressure to adopt sales automation, but there isn't much evidence of its improving sales effectiveness. The decision is not a simple one, successful implementation is even harder. If you want to improve your competitiveness you may need to change the behavior of your salespeople by focusing on the processes that run the business. You can’t change the behavior without changing the processes and inspecting that they are being followed. The book guides the reader to building an integrated system of sales and marketing management processes. But this itself will not bring the desired level of effectiveness. You must also manage the interaction among the management processes and in so doing seamlessly integrate the product marketing strategy, the sales and marketing tactics, and the sales and marketing management processes. This is neither a text book nor a book on sales management theory. It is a step-by-step, here’s-how-to-do-it, guide to achieving integrated sales process management. It evolved to its current state, not as an academic activity but from years of empirical evidence of what works and what doesn’t. In a global business environment where everyone is working hard to achieve a unique edge, understanding and improving your management processes faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage. This book introduces Integrated Sales Process Management to people who are, or aspire to be, marketing and sales executives and provides them with a direction to achieving the concepts in their own organizations. The central theme in the book is that if you want to solve sales effectiveness problems permanently, or prevent them from occurring, you must become more management process driven.

It is the author's conviction that success in performing sales and marketing work is enhanced when formal project management methodology is consistently applied. So the early chapters provide the reader with a clearly articulated project management methodology. At the end of the book he applies the material in the previous chapters to managing new product launches. The reader will find a very ample list of launch program tasks and see how they are related in work breakdown structures. Further, there is a set of "Launch Readiness Checklists" and instructions on using them to control product launch projects.

Hawks, Seagulls, & Mice is an eye-opening resource for executives, entrepreneurs, venture capitalist, and everyone else involved in sales and marketing in business markets. It presents business-tested conceptual and quantitative models for driving performance in creating customers and capturing profits in plain-spoken terms and supported by numerous case studies and examples. Explore business markets from the following perspectives: Strategic growth patterns Sales and marketing organization design Sales and marketing activity management Customer buying process Psychological and business value communication Sales and marketing performance audits ¿Finally! Someone has shifted the old B2B paradigm of sales and marketing and provided some dynamic, new, easy-to-use, quantitative models for integrating the two around business goals.¿ Gordon Hochhalter, Partner, Creativitystrategyconnectivity, Mobium Creative Group fills two major gaps in the marketing book universe¿marketing in business-to-business markets and the integration of sales and marketing functions. Smith addresses these gaps in a systematic and comprehensive manner. A solid effort.¿ Puneet Manchanda, Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Chicago Graduate Schools of Business ¿Smith¿s¿Hawks, Seagulls, & Mice is a just-in-time work, immediately needed by many and useful to all those businesses that wish to grow their revenues in today¿s dynamic and exceedingly complex competitive marketplace.¿ Green R. Miller, PhD, Professor of Economics, Morehead State University A comprehensive understanding of business markets conveyed through abstract, mostly impenetrable prose. Smith, an adjunct professor of marketing at DePaul University and chief editor of the Wiglaf Journal, demonstrates considerable insight about business systems. He reviews various strategies for business growth, examining marketing theory, organizational structure, models of communication between businesses and the integration of sales and marketing. which help simplify abstract concepts. Equally welcome are the few included case studies. Smith's analyses will not appeal to casual readers, but the text has a place in the marketing classroom. Knowledgeable and authoritative. -Kirkus Discoveries

In a very real sense, Michael Lodato has been working on this handbook for over 45 years - starting in 1968 when, as a new CEO of a small consulting company, he attended a seminar on strategic planning at UCLA. The resulting strategy helped run the company but also served as the first template for his strategic planning methodology. Over the years, as a result of working on real issues, faced by him as an executive and client corporations, the template expanded to add tactical planning and features to handle changes in the business environments that may be coming or have already occurred, to quickly assess the impact of such changes on success, and to adapt to the new realities by making changes to its strategies, tactics and processes in time avoid bad results In short, he added agility to the template that is the substance of this handbook. This is not a text book or a book on strategic management theory. It is a step-by-step, here's-how-to-do-it guide to achieving agile strategic management. All of this growth in the strategic management processes came, not as an academic activity. It is written for people who do, or aspire to do the work of strategic management. As you learn about the processes and read stories about how they have applied to a wide range of situations, think through how you might apply them to the situations, issues and opportunities you face. They are intended to help you unleash the talent that resides in your team and organization. The resulting methodology includes processes that guide all the work of strategic management at all levels: from strategic, through tactical, and down to individual action items in such a way that there is a strong interdependence among them.

Big ticket products and services -- what are they? You see big ticket items all of the time. That one-hour photo processing machine at the drug store was sold by a salesperson. The car wash that you go to is a big robotic system that was a big sale for someone and many of the components of that system (e.g. the dryers) were big ticket items when they were sold to the contractor who erected the car wash. Characteristics we find in the sale of big ticket items include. The products or services are of relatively high price. The duration of the selling process is relatively long and consists of several steps. The duration of the process that buyers go through is relatively long. The buyers are usually looking to purchase against a set of specifications - they are looking for a solution. And so there are usually steps in the selling process to learn about and get agreement on the needs and wants of the buyers . There is often a team of people on the buying side. Sometimes the salesperson needs help from others (team sales). The products often need explaining. There is usually competition to deal with. They are rarely sold from a retail store.The complexity and price of such offerings justifies the cost and selling time of a field sales force. This book provides, among other things: Show More Show Less

As business processes are crucial success factors for companies, software-based Business Process Management (BPM) is becoming more and more important. In this area SAP, the market leader for enterprise application software, has already gathered substantial experience. For the characterization, modeling and especially the optimization of business processes, SAP’s consultants use their own BPM approach. In addition to their considerable methodological know-how, the consultants’ profound knowledge of the industries facilitates the focus on core and business-critical processes. This book examines the current market situation, as well as the specific challenges and trends for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. It also explains business process management basics and the specific SAP Consulting methodology, before illustrating the use of such methods and procedures with sample industry-specific core business processes. With the help of these examples from the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, SAP Consulting provides methodological guidelines on how Business Process Management can be used in practice to optimize business processes and make adjustments in response to constantly changing economic and environmental factors.

The managed flow of goods and information from raw material to final sale also known as a "supply chain" affects everythingâ€"from the U.S. gross domestic product to where you can buy your jeans. The nature of a company's supply chain has a significant effect on its success or failureâ€"as in the success of Dell Computer's make-to-order system and the failure of General Motor's vertical integration during the 1998 United Auto Workers strike. Supply Chain Integration looks at this crucial component of business at a time when product design, manufacture, and delivery are changing radically and globally. This book explores the benefits of continuously improving the relationship between the firm, its suppliers, and its customers to ensure the highest added value. This book identifies the state-of-the-art developments that contribute to the success of vertical tiers of suppliers and relates these developments to the capabilities that small and medium-sized manufacturers must have to be viable participants in this system. Strategies for attaining these capabilities through manufacturing extension centers and other technical assistance providers at the national, state, and local level are suggested. This book identifies action steps for small and medium-sized manufacturersâ€"the "seed corn" of business start-up and developmentâ€"to improve supply chain management. The book examines supply chain models from consultant firms, universities, manufacturers, and associations. Topics include the roles of suppliers and other supply chain participants, the rise of outsourcing, the importance of information management, the natural tension between buyer and seller, sources of assistance to small and medium-sized firms, and a host of other issues. Supply Chain Integration will be of interest to industry policymakers, economists, researchers, business leaders, and forward-thinking executives.

With crisp and insightful contributions from 47 of the world’s leading experts in various facets of retailing, Retailing in the 21st Century offers in one book a compendium of state-of-the-art, cutting-edge knowledge to guide successful retailing in the new millennium. In our competitive world, retailing is an exciting, complex and critical sector of business in most developed as well as emerging economies. Today, the retailing industry is being buffeted by a number of forces simultaneously, for example the growth of online retailing and the advent of ‘radio frequency identification’ (RFID) technology. Making sense of it all is not easy but of vital importance to retailing practitioners, analysts and policymakers.

This Book is primarily written for experts and managers in marketing, sales, customer and service management at BtB companies. In addition, the book is also for executives of project and quality management, research and development (R&D), procurement, logistics, and production departments, who deal with marketing-related topics and are working in related fields. The integrated marketing, sales and customer management (MSC) approach aims to lay out and explain in detail the concepts, tools and implementations of a holistic and sustainable customer-focused approach in order to successfully implement important marketing, sales and customer management measures. The concise presentation of various methods, their applications and evaluations allow managers to better choose specific tools and the necessary means of efficient implementation. In addition, this book presents students enrolled in business management and business administration programs and who are focusing on marketing, sales and customer management with a conceptualized and application-oriented guide for the implementation of holistically integrated strategies, programs and measures.

This textbook provides organisational leadership with an understanding of business process management and its benefits to an organisation. It provides a practical framework, complete with a set of tools and techniques, to successfully implement business process management projects.