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14 Travel Hacks for Hassle-Free Business Trips

By Grace Fidalgo November 16, 2017

Business trips aren’t going away anytime soon, nor should they. There’s real value in face-to-face meetings and in-person networking. With thoughtful preparation, you can enjoy hassle-free travel from point A to B, and back.

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Strategic Movements: November 2017

By Tim J. Smith, PhD November 16, 2017

Apple and Qualcomm are in a feud. Issue: Qualcomm makes and holds patents over much of the modem chips that handle communications between wireless devices and cellular networks. Actions: Apple sued Qualcomm over market dominance, and Qualcomm responded by withholding software required to configure their next-gen chips.

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Shaping Customer Behavior Through Commercial Policy

By Tim J. Smith, PhD October 18, 2017

There are two basic approaches businesses take to managing commercial policy. For most, the default approach is tactical decision making. For some, they take the leap and add strategic decision-making.

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Bundling Products to Help Your Customers

By Kyle T. Westra October 18, 2017

Price bundling typically involves combining two or more discrete products with heterogeneous demand, with the demand for the bundle resulting in higher profits despite it effectively being a discount on each individual product.

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Pricing and Sales: How to Begin Building a Better Relationship

By Mary DeBoni October 18, 2017

Sales professionals are always on the go, often driving from one call to another. They don’t have time to sift through a long slide deck explaining sales data analytics. Summarize key findings in just a couple of slides, using only a few bullet points to convey the most vital facts.

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Is Retailing Becoming an Oligopoly?

By James T. Berger October 18, 2017

Certain retail industries such as groceries, cars, cellphones and airlines to name a few have always been oligopolies, but more and more additional retail product categories are leaving the world of pure competition, and entering the world of oligopoly.

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Building High Quality Pricing Systems

By Pravin Vemuri October 18, 2017

These systems typically flow into order management systems and are sometimes built on top of them, or contained within them but often they are stand-alone and talk to the order management system through some standard interface (API). The industry term is CPQ (Configure-Price-Quote), also called pricing or quoting engines.

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Strategic Movements: October 2017

By Tim J. Smith, PhD October 18, 2017

Sonos Inc. felt the heat of Amazon’s Alexa in the in-home wireless sound movement.  What to do?  If you can’t beat them, join them.  Working with Amazon, Alphabet, and Apple, Sonos is planning to make smart speakers for all of them.  Smart move Sonos for the increasing Smart Home.

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Top Salespeople Are NOT Magical Creatures

By Tim J. Smith, PhD September 14, 2017

Neil Rackham, Reed Holden, Andy Zoltners, Prabha Sinha, and many others have all repeatedly found that good salespeople are methodical. They use an approach towards sales that drive prospects through a process.  The process starts with discovery, goes through a learning phase and needs understanding stage, then a proposal that solidifies the tradeoffs, and finally closing.

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Wake Up and Smell the Fumes, Mr. Trump: Renewable Energy is the New Growth Industry!

By James T. Berger September 14, 2017

Urban Green Energy (UGE), wrote: “The distributed renewable energy (DRE) industry has gone through significant changes in the last five years, as the industry grew from a cottage industry to one with worldwide revenues of $100 billion and rising.”

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