The Sport of Sales gets right to the point, offering useful, direct advice to get more customers. This book is informative, inspirational, short, and easy to read, a powerful tool for sales professionals or sales managers. The Sport of Sales is filled with ideas, tips, and tools that you can put to work right away. You can take away enough new ideas to keep you busy for a long time and generate tons more sales and money. The Sport of Sales is great for those who are new to sales, as it simplifies the entire sales process, but it's just as effective for a tenured sales rep who wants to improve or revitalize their sale career by making sales fun and easy.

Personal branding is going to be one of North American business's most critical strategic initiatives in the next three to five years. Information is more accessible on individuals than ever before. Social media is making details about people more accessible and creating a wealth of data to help people form opinions about individuals. "Brand Damage: It's Personal " deals with the ever-growing importance of personal branding. This book is a practical guide for everyone from teenagers to seasoned professionals. It provides information on how to create and proactively manage your brand, items that can damage a brand, and entertaining stories and illustrations.

Kooperationen und Verikalisierung in der Konsumguterdistribution: Die kundenorientierte Neugestaltung des Wertschoepfungsprozess-Management durch ECR-Kooperationen: D. Ahlert, S. Borchert: Das Beziehungsgeflecht zwischen vertikalem Marketing und der kundenorientierten Neugestaltung von Wertschoepfungsketten.- Die Implementierung des Total Quality Management in ECR-Kooperationen.- Die Situation in der deutschen Lebensmittelbranche als Initialbranche fur wertschoepfungsprozessverandernde ECR-Kooperationen.- Die Ausgestaltung des ECR-Konzeptes als wertschoepfungskettenverandernde Kooperation in der Lebensmitteldistribution.- Zum Status quo des ECR-Konzeptes in der Praxis der Konsumguterdistribution: H. Meffert: Trends im Konsumentenverhalten - Implikationen fur Efficient Consumer Response.- M. Grossweischede: Category Management aus Sicht der Lieferanten des Lebensmitteleinzelhandels - Grundlagen und ausgewahlte Ergebnisse einer empirischen Studie.- H. Wiezorek: ECR - eine gemeinsame Aufgabe von Hersteller und Handel.- G. Wagener: ECR und die Enabling Technologies - EAN-Standards in Kommunikation und Logistik.- F. Speer: Category Management: Vom verbraucherorientierten Ansatz zum Equity Management.- K. Eierhoff: Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) - ein neuer Weg in der Kooperation zwischen Industrie und Handel.- U. Kalmbach: ECR - Positive Erfahrungen dargestellt am Beispiel der REWE AG.- F. Bruin: Efficient Consumer Response bei Albert Heijn - The State of the Art.- H. Milde: Category Management aus der Perspektive eines Marktforschungsinstitutes.- M. Kaldik: Dienstleistungen eines Marktforschungsinstituts im Rahmen einer Catergory-Management-Kooperation zwischen Hersteller und Handler.- S. Marlow, J. Mebus: Trading Information Exchange - Creating the Intelligent Supply Chain.

What has neuroscience got to do with branding? The link may not be immediately obvious, but the fact is, our brains select brands in much the same way that Google selects websites. So, just as web marketers play on Google's algorithm to make sure their site appears as high up the search list as possible, brand marketers should play on the "brain's" algorithm to make sure their brand is at the top of their customers' minds at the moment they choose which brand to buy.

This ground-breaking new book brings the proven effects of hard science to the creative practice of branding. It shows you how to harness this powerful combination to your own advantage by helping you understand how customers' brains work when they choose brands. A strong brand cannot be build effectively without taking into account the laws of the brain - which, as this book shows, really exist and can be scientifically proven to work. Once you know this, you can apply the familiar branding laws of relevance, coherence and participation more precisely, more confidently and to much greater effect. This means your brand will have a much greater chance of being chosen by customers than your competitors' brands.

"Branding with Brains"shatters the conventional approach to branding, which is based on hunches and intuition, by uncovering the hard, scientific truth about "why" customers choose some brands over others. Insights into company stories, from Leica to Innocent Drinks, from Starbucks to Schipol International Airport, give you the fascinating truth about how the processes that go on in our brain affect our decisions to buy a particular product or service. All in all, this breathtakingly radical new book from Tjaco Walvis presents a daringly different, state of the art approach to brand strategy that will help you build powerful brands more efficiently, more effectively and more reliably than ever before.

Branding really is all in the mind - and this book proves it

Demonstrating the potential of building strong brands in the energy sector, this book explores the challenges of shifting the perception of energy from a commodity business into a consumer brand. Energy suppliers are increasingly being met with skepticism, indicating the need for a greater focus on marketing and branding in the energy industry. The author examines both perspectives of energy as a commodity business and a consumer brand, as well as the perception of energy consumers across Europe. Topics discussed include green energy, the liberalisation of the electricity industry, and the relationship between consumers and executives in the energy market. One of the first of its kind, this book offers a unique and innovative study of the development of branding in the energy industry, and sheds light on future marketing strategies.

This interdisciplinary book extends knowledge by comparing rivalry and rival group behavior in sport within areas outside of sport, such as consumer brands, political discourse, and product/service preferences. It examines how out-group behavior differs among relevant groups. Readers are introduced to the phenomenon of rivalry, using the sport setting as an example. Then, the author offers separate quantitative and qualitative investigations to compare how rivalry and group behavior differ among sport and non-sport settings. Incorporating research from marketing, psychology, political science, and sociology, this book offers researchers in several fields a new understanding of individual and group behavior.

To survive in today's competitive business environment, marketing professionals must look to develop innovative methods of reaching their customers and stakeholders. Social media is a useful tool for developing the relationships between businesses and consumers. Building Brand Identity in the Age of Social Media: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical scholarly resource that examines the media consumption and habits of consumers to evaluate the challenges of brand building. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as brand identity, brand loyalty, and social media branding, this book is geared towards marketing professionals, business managers, and individuals interested in how social media fits into today's marketing environments.

This book focuses on the applications of optimal control theory to operations strategy and supply chain management. It emphasizes the importance of optimal control theory as a tool to analyze and understand fundamental issues in the respective fields. Delving deeper, the book also elaborates on how optimal control theory provides managerial and economic insights, enabling readers to comprehend the dynamic activities and interactions in operations. Given that optimal control theory is not a dominant approach to studying operations management in the current literature, this book fills that gap by showing its effectiveness as a tool to supplement other methodologies in operations.

This book is for product managers, product owners, product marketing managers, VPs and Heads of Product, CEOs, and start-up founders. In short, it serves anyone interested personally or professionally in software product management. You'll learn how to plan, coordinate and execute all activities required for software product success. It enables you to find the right balance for delivering customer value and long-term product success. The book offers a comprehensive introduction for beginners as well as proven practices and a novel, holistic approach for experienced product managers. It provides much-needed clarity regarding the numerous tasks and responsibilities involved in the professional and successful management of software products. Readers can use this book as a reference book if they are interested in or have the urgent need to improve one of the following software product management dimensions: Product Viability, Product Development, Go-to-Market / Product Marketing, Software Demonstrations and Training, The Market / Your Customers, or Organizational Maturity. The book helps product people to maximize their impact and effectiveness. Whether you're a seasoned practitioner, new to software product management, or just want to learn more about the best-of-all disciplines and advance your skills, this book introduces a novel and "business" tested approach to structure and orchestrate the vital dimensions of software product management. You will learn how to create focus and alignment on the things that matter for product success. The book describes a holistic framework to keep the details that matter for product success in balance, taking into consideration the limiting factors, strategies and responsibilities that determine the overall product yield potential. It explains how to leverage and adapt the framework with regard to aspects like product viability, product development, product marketing and software demonstrations and training, as well as more general aspects like markets, customers and organizational maturity. The book focuses on the unique challenges of software product managers or any related roles, whether you are a founder of a small to mid-sized software company or working in the complex ecosystems of large software enterprises or corporate IT departments.

From remarkably frank and credible responses to their comprehensive research questionnaire, Tian and Keep provide a unique, wide ranging catalogue of frauds that customers perpetrate on businesses--and what marketers can do to combat it. They were able to receive and analyze more than 250 written descriptions--"a 71% response rate "--of the acts that customers committed and the methods they used. Instead of merely a checklist, Tian and Keep obtained their data in the customers' own words, resulting in highly detailed and reliable insights into why customers did what they did. They find that customer fraud has emerged as a form of guerilla warfare against companies, that it is adapted to specific situations, and that underlying customers' motivation is a need to get even. Ethics has little do with it. In fact, some respondents even asserted that they had an obligation to commit fraud: they did it to retaliate against what they perceived as unethical acts that businesses committed against them. The result is a rare documentation of the specifics of fraud, how it threatens not only business but entire economies, and the actions--bold and subtle--that marketers can take in self-protective response.

Not only will corporate management, particularly in marketing, get detailed descriptions of their customers' fraud strategies and tactics, but they will also receive insights into where they are vulnerable and why. Tian and Keep show that fraud has become so socially acceptable among middle class customers that they are willing to share their tactics, strategies, and secrets with their friends. With this as their foundation, the authors give practitioners an arsenal of detection and deterrence methods. Equally important, they provide ways to implement them without alienating their other, blameless customers. They also show marketers what they can do to reestablish trust in their marketing exchanges with customers, and improve relationships in ways that will diminish (if not fully eliminate) the incidence of fraud. For management generally as well as marketers in companies of all sizes and type, Tian's and Keep's book is essential, engrossing, and useful reading.

Are you in sales? Want fast results selling more? Then this book is for you. The sales methods given in this book apply to salespeople of all kinds--from clerks selling in retail stores and servers in restaurants to sales representatives in high-end golf communities selling homes for millions of dollars. Veterans and beginners alike will benefit from this new approach to sales that gets fast results. Thousands have already gained the benefit of the methods given in this book. It is a great advantage to anyone wishing to improve their selling techniques and earn more money immediately.

Numerous golf course communities, new home and real estate companies, and manufacturers' representatives throughout the United States have been using these techniques for years, generating billions of dollars a year in new revenues.

Now you can apply these proven techniques to say less and sell more with fast results today.

The ever evolving World Wide Web provides more opportunities and challenges than ever before. Understanding marketing concepts and new and emerging methods for this digital landscape is the key to online success.Transdisciplinary Marketing Concepts and Emergent Methods for Virtual Environments provides a broad and comprehensive international coverage of subjects, issues, and current trends relating to all areas of online marketing. Emphasis is highly placed on research articles, case studies, and book reviews that seek to connect theory with application, identifying best practices in online marketing. In this respect, this book links both theoretical and practical approaches of online marketing to make a proactive contribution to the field perfect for researchers, practitioners, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and educators.

Finally, a book about sales that is not a how to. That's not to say that the book does not contain tips on how to succeed. There are lots of those and, in this case, realistically written and by someone whose success is unquestionable. But this book is different. It's a whole new way of looking at sales, as a profession. Question..Lee, why did you decide to write this book? Answer...For me, after all the years in the business of selling or, as I call it, peddling, it was time to ask the question..Why is it that one of the world's highest paid professions never seems to get the respect it deserves? Those of us who have had the courage to fight the battle (and, it is a definite battle) and have succeeded, live in the best neighborhoods, drive the nicest cars and send our children to the best schools. Yet, the doctors, lawyers, bank presidents who are our neighbors, seem to dismiss what we have done and look down their professional noses at us. To me, it was time to examine this phenomena and try and put some humorous light on it. Question.You say humorous light. Is it a funny book. Answer...Sales is a fun job if you keep it in its proper perspective. even I laugh at no matter how many times I have ready them. Question.Finally, Lee, What about the title? What do donuts have to do with sales? Answer...It all has to do with perception; the perception of whom a salesman is and who should be entitled to call himself or herself a salesman or salesperson. Bottom line, I resent the clerk at the local convenience store claiming that she (or he) SOLD two dozen glazed donuts that morning. And so, the title of the book This book is going to help those who have the talent and, yes, above all else, the courage to go out and make their living, to build their careers as sales professionals. At the same time, it is going to narrow the field by illustrating clearly why those of you who think sales is easy, are dead wrong.

There is no doubt that the pace of business has accelerated--products go from concept to release faster than ever, business partnerships and alliances are established (and dissolved) more quickly, competitors react more swiftly to any tilt in the playing field. Whether your business is microprocessors or airplane manufacturing, it will live or die by the degree to which you can anticipate demand for your products and services. In Getting It Right the First Time, John Katsaros and Peter Christy argue that the most successful businesses will be those that accurately predict market conditions--especially the market changes that will occur within the crucial 18-to-36-month innovation window. Or, to paraphrase hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky: "skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it is." Showcasing dozens of colorful examples of lucrative successes and missed opportunities (from high-tech to financial services to medical devices), the authors present a detailed plan for how you and your company can learn to: identify your top customers in advance of entering the market, successfully position your company and its products to those customers, and catch emerging trends before your competitors do. Eschewing traditional market research techniques--such as focus groups, polls, and surveys-- Katsaros and Christy demonstrate how "expert interviews" with potential early adopters can help identify your "killer app"--the function that customers most value--and avoid costly trial-and-error. In a viciously competitive world where your company may have only one chance to score big, Getting It Right the First Time provides essential guidance for entrepreneurs, marketers, product developers, and business strategists, and offers new insight into the dynamics of innovation.

Walle surveys the qualitative social sciences and humanities for instances where by design or accident they have had important things to say on the theory and practice of marketing and consumer research. He sees them as alternatives to the scientific method and quantitative analysis -- complements but not surrogates. He describes examples of humanistic analysis that readers without special grounding in the humanities can grasp, a discussion of specific humanistic methods and how they relate to marketing research and management, a view of the intellectual roots that show scholars what these tools can accomplish (and their limitations as well), ending with a provocative appendix that distinguishes humanistic empiricism from other systems of thought and defines clearly its usefulness in marketing. Written in an entertaining, informal style, Walle's book is thought provoking, robust, and filled with insights that will give marketing and consumer researchers an unusual view of new strategies and techniques to do even the most familiar tasks better.

Walle reminds the reader that the humanities and qualitative social sciences offer a diverse and conflicting array of theories and methods, but he insists that their specific methods must not be embraced outside an appropriate context. Although marketers might prefer universally applicable methods that can be routinely plugged into any problem at hand, humanistic methods must be applied with an unusually subtle awareness of what they can and can not accomplish. He also shows how they are not merely analytical techniques, but embody a wide array of substantive knowledge as well, knowledge that must and can be recognized and considered. In his review and critique of the existing marketing research literature he shows that without guidance from the substantive thought derived from the humanities and qualitative social sciences, marketers can become trapped in counterproductive analysis and make significant errors in judgment. Well illustrated with stories, anecdotes, and his own research in the fields he is writing about, Walle's book is as useful as it is entertaining.

This book explores the basic traits of inter-organizational networks, examining the interplay between structure, dynamics, and performance from a governance perspective. The book assumes a novel theoretical angle based on the interpretation of networks as multiple systems, and advances the theory in the realm of network effectiveness and failure. Composed of two parts, theoretical and empirical, The Network Organization clarifies the literature on networks, offering a systematic review, and provides a new perspective on their integration with other streams of research focusing on under-studied issues such as agency, micro-dynamics, and network effectiveness. The second part proposes the analysis of the tourism destination of Venice, with a specific focus on the network between the Venice Film Festival, the hospitality system, and the local institutions. By exploring the pervasion of networks in modern social and economic life, this book will be valuable to students, researchers, practitioners and policy-makers.

How can we engage in a market relationship when the quality of the goods we want to acquire is unknown, invisible, or uncertain? For market exchange to be possible, purchasers and suppliers of goods must be able to assess the quality of a product in relation to other products. Only by recognizing qualities and perceiving quality differences can purchasers make non-random choices, and price differences between goods be justified. "Quality" is not a natural given, but the outcome of a social process in which products become seen as possessing certain traits, and occupying a specific position in relation to other products in the product space. While we normally take the quality of goods for granted, quality at a closer look is the outcome of a highly complex process of construction involving producers, consumers, and market intermediaries engaged in judgment, evaluation, categorization, and measurement. The authors in this volume investigate the processes through which the quality of goods is established. They also investigate how product qualities are contested and how they change over time. The empirical cases discussed cover a broad range of markets in which quality is especially difficult to assess. The cases include: halal food, funeral markets, wine, labor, school choice, financial products, antiques, and counterfeit goods. The book contributes to the sociology of markets. At the same time it connects to the larger issue of the constitution of social order through cognitive processes of classification.