Archives posted in: Selling

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Product Management v. Sales: Profit Based Incentives for Both

By Tim J. Smith, PhD May 15, 2017

Can both product managers and salespeople have their incentives and key performance indicators aligned to the corporate goal: profits?  Yes.  They can…

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Should You Fight for Market Share?

By Kyle T. Westra May 15, 2017

Market share is not intrinsically valuable. In the world of business, good profit dollars are what has intrinsic value. Profit dollars, earned by serving customers, are the existential purpose of a firm. Anything else is merely instrumental.

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Product Management v. Sales: Don’t Confuse Your Market

By Tim J. Smith, PhD April 12, 2017

Notice that the solution many companies have taken results in sales and product management being unaligned. Sales focuses on their individual account needs while product managers focus on creating solutions to address challenges, which may be faced by multiple customer segments.

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Strategic Movements: April 2017

By Tim J. Smith, PhD April 12, 2017

What can sales managers do to reduce the risk of account loss? According to their research, putting top salespeople on the account doesn’t do the trick at all. Rather, putting a person familiar with the account’s industry on it, even if their past sales performance is average or even below average, can almost eliminate the risk of account loss.

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Pricing in the Life Sciences

By Kyle T. Westra March 8, 2017

What is the value a consumer may place on a new drug that softens or even eliminates an otherwise terminal condition? Nearly limitless. That isn’t to say that prices therefore can or should be limitless, but it does underline the fact that price is determined by the value to the consumer, not the cost to the producer.

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Price Isn’t Cost

By Kyle T. Westra February 7, 2017

Once the investment is made, its cost no longer factors into the marginal cost of producing a product. Fixed costs are an important part of a go-or-no-go decision for a company at the onset of production, but should not factor into the price of a product going forward. Fixed costs are sunk costs.

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Pricing Cannabis Gummies

By Kyle T. Westra January 3, 2017

Different consumers care about different things. Some will care that their THC-laced gummies have fewer other chemicals, some won’t. But the ones that do are probably willing to pay a premium for those products. We certainly see that in the organics aisle at a grocery store. Why would cannabis products be any different?

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Will PlayStation VR Succeed?

By Tim J. Smith, PhD November 1, 2016

Not that I can or am stating that everything Sony did was perfect. And I am definitely not stating that everyone will find Sony’s design tradeoffs to result in a good offering. But they did define their target market and product design requirements in such a manner broadly appearing to be compatible with a highly successful product, launch.

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Colombian Coffee and Flowers – How the Best Gets Exported

By Kyle T. Westra November 1, 2016

Colombians are correctly proud of their coffee and flowers, but at first it came as a surprise that Colombia may not always be the best place to buy Colombian agricultural goods. Much of their optimal produce is destined for export.

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Advertising’s Funny Balancing Act

By Lindsey Shaw October 5, 2016

From the Mountain Dew ‘Puppy Baby Monkey’ to Allstate Insurance and their beat up actor personifying a claim, right down to the Budweiser Frogs, the cast of characters making up a pseudo hall of fame for niche commercial campaigns could be growing at a rate that exceeds that of their intended revenue.

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