Archives posted in: Selling

Incentives Aren’t Everything

By Kyle T. Westra February 4, 2016

Therefore, it is important to design a sales incentive structure that puts heavy emphasis on company profit, if that is indeed what your company seeks. Your company probably does. Shifting a company from a revenue or volume sales mindset to a profit mindset can take a good deal of time and effort, but it is an important shift, and one that shows real results.

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Consider Business Growth by Focusing on Increasing Market Penetration

By Lee Flynn February 4, 2016

Increasing your market penetration is extremely helpful, and once you have a larger fan base, you’ll have more people to promote to for your next products and services. This is why a market penetration strategy can be a great option when you’re starting out a business and attempting to increase your fan base. These methods should help you to reach a wider audience around the world to promote your business.

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Generic Drug Pricing Practices under Scrutiny

By Tim J. Smith, PhD January 3, 2016

High barriers to entry must be keeping competitors from providing alternatives to off-patent generic drugs. What could be the source of these barriers to entry?
It isn’t the lack of know how. Many firms are able to produce chemicals, even specialized chemicals in the life sciences. And, that is what a drug is: it is a chemical. As observed in animal health care, agricultural chemistry and many other specialty chemical companies: competition keeps prices relatively low. Yet, in human life sciences, there is insufficient competition.

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Will Ford Find a Market for F-150 Trucks Above $60,000?

By Tim J. Smith, PhD August 10, 2015

With recovery in job security and wealth, and having successfully survived the worst recession in most of our lifetimes, truck buyers are in a better position and mind-frame to spend. Moreover, since many blue-collar entrepreneurs spend a significant part of their day driving their truck, and it is normal for people to want their working environment to be comfortable, they are willing to spend for luxury work truck.

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Keeping Customers Isn’t So Easy

By James T. Berger July 12, 2015

There are other fields – like airlines and hotels – where providers have invested heavily in customer loyalty programs. Here these programs are effective as long as the provider can fly to the right destination of the hotel company has a property there. When that is not the case, the customer seeks other choices and may be attracted into competitors’ customer loyalty programs.

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Managing Value: Where the Problem Lies

By Anirban Sengupta February 17, 2015

After a firm adopts value based selling it comes face to face with the next big challenge: How to manage the process of value based selling?

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New Insight into Strategic Sales Force Hiring: Be Careful of Hiring “Stars”

By James T. Berger September 28, 2014

We all want to hire, or work on, talented teams. But how much time and resources should we devote to bringing in “star”-level talent?

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You cannot sell value to everyone

By Pravin Vemuri and Anirban Sengupta February 5, 2014

Once we know which segment which customer belongs to, we work towards creating our customized pitches for each segment.

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Business Markets, Response Modes, and Price Performance

By Tim J. Smith, PhD July 9, 2013

Having a long list of prospective buyers may be comforting for a salesperson, but a highly applied sales methodology for business markets suggests salespeople should only pursue prospects that fall within two out of four response modes. What are these response modes? How do they affect price performance? And why should salespeople only pursue two of them?

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The Challenge of Developing Accurate Sales Forecasts

By James T. Berger July 9, 2013

Probably the most important task of a sales manager is the development of meaningful and accurate sales forecasts. Amazingly, many sales managers simply look at historical numbers and don’t even bother to try to predict the future. Why and how should they?

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