In Your Sales Management Guru's Guide series sales management expert Ken Thoreson teaches sales leaders the essentials for leading and developing high-performance sales teams.

In this book you'll gain skills and techniques for creating sales compensation plans that will take you r sales team to the next level. This book is literally jammed with hundreds of proven ideas that address every aspect of sales compensation planning. As a bonus you also get professional planning tools including: Compensation Plan Assessment Tool, Senior Account Executive Job, Description and Commission Plan Tool, Compensation Committee Tools, Examples of Compensation Agreements You'll Learn: The Five Steps to Building High-performance Sales Compensation PlansHow to Determine Sales Compensation MetricsHow to Choose the Right Sales Compensation Plan for Your SituationHow to Incorporate Incentive Plans into Your Compensation ProgramHow to Leverage Sales Compensation to Drive PerformanceAnd much more . . .

"If you're a crazy-busy sales manager and constantly worried about reaching your revenue goals, follow Ken Thoreson's savvy advice to create a high-performance sales organization." - Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

"Ken Thoreson's books should be required reading for anyone who leads sales teams." - Jeb Blount, author of People Buy You and People Follow You

A modern, completely updated guide to effective event marketing

As the events market becomes increasingly saturated, it is essential for a successful event professional to understand the use of strategic marketing plans. Events are everywhere--in the U.S. alone, there are more than 2,500 music festivals a year, for example, while the UK hosts over 70 different beer festivals each year. In such a crowded market, how can the event planner ensure that his or her event stands out? Marketing expert Chris Preston has the answers in this second edition of "Event Marketing." From the basics of promoting an event to the use of events as marketing strategies themselves, Preston provides straightforward advice and information on all the latest event marketing techniques. The book begins with sections on what "event marketing" really means, and how the field has evolved throughout time. Preston then explores event marketing strategies from both a conceptual and practical standpoint, and provides information on sponsorship and corporate branding. The book covers marketing for all types of events, including festivals, corporate and association events, and social functions, and a full chapter on digital event marketing covers all the latest e-marketing strategies. Case studies provide real-world examples of successful marketing efforts, while Discussion Questions for each chapter provide opportunities for further exploration of key concepts. As marketing becomes an increasingly important skill for event management professionals, this completely revised second edition of "Event Marketing" will be a must-have for working professionals, students, and aspiring event planners everywhere.

The importance of marketing in the Indian economy continues to grow day by day. With the rise in income of people in general, the overall demand for all types of goods has gone up. This has led to an increase in production of various types of consumer goods. The success or failure of a business now depends upon how effectively selling functions are performed. What is now needed is the intensive cultivation of sales to ensure proper utilisation of the productive capacities and to generate full employment. This needs accurate, factual information reasonably complete and timely, rather than hunches and guesswork, in making selling decisions. Hence, today sales and distribution has assumed an important place as an effective management tool for marketers. This book discusses the various Theories and Principles of sales and distribution in the context of Indian products and market, from a practical and result-oriented standpoint. It is designed to serve as a textbook for the Marketing students in Indian Universities and Management Institutes. Case methodology has now become a very popular technique for teaching the students how to handle business issues in various functional areas. For analysing various cases, the student would require the help of concepts, precepts, tools and techniques. In broader terms, case studies involve both problem diagnosing and then taking a decision in the light of various facts of cases. Therefore, case studies have been inserted in this book to give students an intimate insight into actual business situations. Although, primarily meant for the students, this book will, nonetheless, enable the practising managers to systematize and improve their selling skills.

Customer Service Excellence is a mini-training program in a book designed for customer service professionals, customer service representatives, sales people and business professionals. Customer Service Excellence combines self-study with realistic workplace activities to build advanced knowledge of customer service principles. In a selling situation this Learning Short-take(r) helps to uncover customer needs and sell the value of the produce on benefits rather than just price. In a customer service environment this Learning Short-take(r) helps to listen to the voice of the customer, responding to their stated needs and uncovering their unstated needs. The book includes free downloadable job aids and tools.

This book teaches a step-by-step selling process.

The author has combined his creative writing skills through simplistic and lucid descriptions developed through experience of over 15 years in teaching, and training.

The primary focus of this book is on building up a conceptual framework for developing marketing strategies for the corporate enterprise. The book offers an insight into each facet of the marketer's role in relationship to an organization. It highlights the knowledge, the skills and the competencies necessary for marketers to succeed in today's competitive world, and bridges the gap between the theory of marketing and the realities of the high-tech market.This new edition includes comprehensive coverage of the funda-mentals of marketing and a discussion on market-focused business strategy. It offers several case study scenarios that let students analyse decisions and practices of marketing wisdom. There is a series of chapter vignettes on contemporary issues in marketing. Chapter-end self-testing material includes a summary, numerous review questions and several discussion questions to help students understand the major concepts and tools of marketing.This book is primarily written for postgraduate students of Business Administration (MBA) for courses in Principles of Marketing/Marketing Management. This book can also be used to advantage by undergraduate students of Business Administration (BBA) for courses in marketing, and by students of engineering where an elective course on Marketing Management is prescribed.

Demonstrating how a university can, in a very practical and pragmatic way, be re-envisioned through a transdisciplinary informed frame, this book shows how through an open and collegiate spirit of inquiry the most pressing and multifaceted issue of contemporary societal (un)sustainability can be addressed and understood in a way that transcends narrow disciplinary work. It also provides a practical exemplar of how far more meaningful deliberation, understandings and options for action in relation to contemporary sustainability-related crises can emerge than could otherwise be achieved. Indeed it helps demonstrate how only through a transdisciplinary ethos and approach can real progress be achieved. The fact that this can be done in parallel to (or perhaps underneath) the day-to-day business of the university serves to highlight how even micro seed initiatives can further the process of breaking down silos and reuniting C.P. Snow's 'two cultures' after some four centuries of the relentless project of modernity. While much has been written and talked about with respect to both sustainability and transdisciplinarity, this book offers a pragmatic example which hopefully will signpost the ways others can, will and indeed must follow in our common quest for real progress.

This book will change the way you think about marketing forever. Following the success of international bestseller How Brands Grow: What Marketers Dont Know, How Brands Grow Part 2 takes readers further on a journey to smarter, evidence-based marketing. How Brands Grow Part 2 is about the fundamentals of buying behaviours and brand performance - fundamentals that provide a consistent roadmap for brand growth, and improved marketing productivity. This revised edition includes updates to all chapters and the addition of a new chapter, 'Getting Down to Business-to-Business Markets'.

Climate change represents the most important environmental challenge of our time. Organisations are responding by implementing governance processes and taking action to reduce their own emissions and the emissions from their supply chains and value chains. Yet very little is known about how these efforts contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions (if, indeed, they make any substantive contribution at all) or about how they might be harnessed to deliver more ambitious reductions in emissions. This book explains when and where particular forms of governance intervention - including internal governance processes and external governance pressures - are likely to impact climate change. From this analysis, it offers practical proposals on the climate policy frameworks that need to be in place to facilitate or accelerate changes in corporate behaviour. The book is truly global: it focuses on the world's 25 largest retailers (including Walmart, Tesco, Carrefour, Sears and Aldi) and is based on detailed interviews with senior managers from these corporations, and with key global and national NGOs, corporate responsibility experts, politicians and regulators. These interviews provide clear insights into how external governance pressures and actions (public opinion, regulation, incentives) interact with internal governance conditions (management systems and processes, corporate policies, board/CEO leadership) to change and shape corporate actions on climate change and, in turn, the climate change impacts of these corporations. This book can be used as a core reference for any courses dealing with corporate governance and business strategy, in particular those relating to climate change and to environmental management more generally. It is also of relevance to business practitioners, public policy makers, investors and NGOs interested in ensuring that companies play a constructive role in the transition to a low-carbon economy.

This book presents a very novel and strategic approach to Sales Management, an area that has suffered from a lack of sophistication in practice. This content-rich and thought-provoking book has a very unique positioning: It considers the sales performance of an organization at a very high, strategic level and offers specific guidance in managing not just a few direct reports but an entire organization's sales function. The book includes many useful tools and guidelines and is enhanced with numerous examples that help bring the concepts to life and make them very approachable for the trade market. A checklist-based scoring system that is utilized throughout the book allows readers to specifically evaluate their own company as well as to track its progress as concepts are applied over time. This work is an essential resource and thought-provoking read for ambitious Sales Managers, including CEO-level executives.

The semiotics discipline - a hybrid of communication science and anthropology - accounts for the deep cultural codes that structure communication and sociality, endow things with value, move us through constructed space, and moderate our encounters with change. Doing Semiotics shows readers how to leverage these codes to solve business problems, foster innovation, and create meaningful experiences for consumers. In addition to the key principles and methods of applied semiotics, it introduces the basics of branding, strategic decision-making, and cross-cultural marketing management. Through practical exercises, examples, extended team projects, and evaluation criteria, this book guides students through the application of learning to all phases of semiotics-based projects for communications, brand equity management, design strategy, new product development, and public policy management. In addition to tools for sorting data and mapping cultural dimensions of a market, it includes useful interview protocols for use in focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic studies, as well as expert case studies that will enable readers to apply semiotics to consumer research.

This book provides a clear practical introduction to shareholder value analysis for the marketing professional. It gives them the tools to develop the marketing strategies that will create the most value for business. For top management and CFOs the book explains how marketing generates shareholder value. It shows how top management should evaluate strategies and stimulate more effective and relevant marketing in their companies.

The original essence of the first edition has been maintained but obvious areas have been updated and revised, as well as, new areas such as technology have been addressed. The second edition of this book has been written by a ghost writer who has fully updated, enhanced and replaced statistics, case studies and other outdated content with the help of a select advisory panel, each of whom has acted as a subject expert, a guide and as part of a steering committee.

The highly prestigious panels of contributors include:

Jean-Claude Larreche - INSEAD

Veronica Wong - Aston Business School

John Quelch - Harvard Business School

Susan Hart - Strathclyde Graduate Business School (SGBS)

Michael Baker - Emeritus Professor SGBS

Tim Ambler - London Business School

Tony Cram - Ashridge

Table of Contents:

PART I

Principles of Value Creation

1 Marketing and Shareholder Value

2 The Shareholder Value Approach

3 The Marketing Value Driver

4 The Growth Imperative

PART II

Developing High-Value Strategies

5 Strategic Position Assessment

6 Value-Based Marketing Strategy

PART III

Implementing High-Value Strategies

7 Building Brands

8 Pricing for Value

9 Value-BasedCommunications

10 Value-Based Marketing in the Digital Age

***CIM (CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF MARKETING) BOOK OF THE MONTH MAY 2016*** Content marketing just got easier Content marketing is one of today's growing marketing trends following fast on the heels of social media. It is marketing through creating and sharing content that potential customers find relevant, useful and valuable in order to attract, engage, convert and retain them. It's a strategy that requires careful thought, clear objectives and goals, and a deep understanding of your audience. It requires you to reach out to them with well-planned and well-produced content - in all forms and formats, offline as well as online. In this book we take a joined-up look at content marketing, the key principles that underpin it, and what it takes to put it into practice in a consistent and fully formed way. And we provide a practical framework for planning it and executing it successfully - whatever the size of your business or your marketing team. Adopting a content marketing approach is certainly not a short term, quick win tactic. But the chances are it could make a big difference to the effectiveness of your marketing. - Sunday: Adopt a content marketing mindset - Monday: Understand the different types of content - Tuesday: Develop your content marketing strategy - Wednesday: Get started with content planning - Thursday: Create compelling content - Friday: Get ready to share - Saturday: Learn how to measure success

The Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing offers both basic and advanced treatments intended to serve academics, students, and marketing research professionals. The 42 chapters begin with a history of qualitative methods in marketing by Sidney Levy and continue with detailed discussions of current thought and practice in: * research paradigms such as grounded theory and semiotics * research contexts such as advertising and brands * data collection methods such as projectives and netnography * data analysis methods such as metaphoric and visual analyses * presentation topics such as videography and reflexivity * applications such as ZMET applied to Broadway plays and depth interviews with executives * special issues such as multi-sited ethnography and research on sensitive topics. Authors include leading scholars and practitioners from North America and Europe. They draw on a wealth of experience using well-established as well as emerging qualitative research methods. The result is a thorough, timely, and useful Handbook that will educate, inspire, and serve as standard reference for marketing academics and practitioners alike.

The newest, most successful strategies for landing the sale-based on the latest discoveries in neuroscience and consumer psychology BrainScripts for Sales Success explains consumer psychology to teach you how to personalize and enhance an approach and use basic, primal responses that are subtle but extremely effective. You'll learn how to use the powerful emotion of fear to convince stubborn prospects, make prospective customers successfully demonstrate the product inside their heads before they spend a penny to buy it, use speaking patterns that build desire for the product or service, and much more. "A masterpiece! This is one of those rare books that I wish wouldn't get published. This gem will become the new sales bible." Dr. Joe Vitale, author of Hypnotic Writing and There's A Customer Born Every Minute "Read it and sell more-it's just that simple." Roger Dawson, author of Secrets of Power Negotiating "Puts you light years ahead of your competition. Read it... before your competition does." Dr. Tony Alessandra, author The Platinum Rule for Sales Mastery"Gives you an almost unfair advantage-yet it's all perfectly legal!" Richard Bayan, author of Words That Sell "Take all of the text books ever written about persuasion, influence, marketing, and salesmanship. Strip away the nonsense. What do you get? BrainScripts. It's a mistake not to read this book." Mark Joyner, founder and CEO of Simpleology "Can you imagine the power in your sales presentation when you understand your prospects better than they know themselves?" Patricia Fripp, CSP, CPAE, Sales Presentation Skills Expert "It's like looking into a crystal ball of human behavior." Thomas A. Freese, author of Secrets of Question Based Selling"The material in BrainScripts is so powerful it should require a license for use." Art Sobczak, author of Smart Calling-Eliminate the Fear, Failure, and Rejection from Cold Calling "BrainScripts shows in detail how beliefs become established, how they affect behavior and, most importantly, how business owners can ethically tap into them to help their companies grow and prosper." Robert Dilts, Founder NLP University "BrainScripts gives you actual scripts to help get your sales message across without setting off your prospects' 'What's the catch?' alarm." Tom "Big Al" Schreiter, author of How To Get Instant Trust, Belief, Influence, and Rapport! "BrainScripts is the definitive advantage in sales strategy. Read it and win... or pray your competitors do not." MJ DeMarco, author of The Millionaire Fastlane "BrainScripts takes sales psychology to a new level. Drew's practical and easy-to-use tips will also take you to the next level." Kerry Johnson, MBA, Ph.D.;America's Sales Psychologist "BrainScripts brings you face-to-face with the prospect's intimate evaluation procedures so you can turn them into sales motivations and close the deal!" Rene Gnam, author of Rene Gnam's Direct Mail Workshop "Drew Eric Whitman has swung open the vault to generating buyers en mass. BrainScripts just might be the best investment of your business life and selling career." Spike Humer, author of The 10 Day Turnaround

Discover everything you need to know to improve your management skills, and understand key management and business theories with this unique graphic guide. Combining clear, jargon-free language and bold, eye-catching graphics, How Management Works is a definitive and user-friendly guide to all aspects of organizational management. Learn whether it is more e ffective to lead through influence or control? Is delegation the key to productivity and how do you deal with di fferent personalities? Drawing on the latest theories and practices - and packed with graphics and diagrams that demystify complex management concepts - this book explains everything you need to know to build your management skills and get the very best out of your team. It is essential reading if you are an established or aspiring manager, or are studying a course in business or management. Much more than a standard business-management or self-help book, How Management Works shows you what other titles only tell you, combining solid reference with no-nonsense advice. It is the perfect primer for anyone looking to start their own business, become a more effective leader, or simply learn more about the world of business and management.

A Groundbreaking Pricing Model for the New Business Landscape

"Why would any customer choose Brand X over Brand Y, regardless of price? In a word: Value."

When customers feel they are getting good value from your product or service, they are more than happy to pay more--which is good news for you and your business. Even in today's global market--with its aggressive competitors, low-cost commodities, savvy consumers, and intangible digital offerings--you can outsell and outperform the rest using "Value-Based Pricing." Done correctly, this method of pricing and selling helps you: Understand your customers' wants and needs Focus on what makes your company different Quantify your differences and build a value-based strategy Communicate your value directly to your customers

Now more than ever, it is essential for you to reexamine the reality of the value you offer customers--and this step-by-step program shows you how.

Developed by global consultants Harry Macdivitt and Mike Wilkinson, "Value-Based Pricing" identifies three basic elements of the Value Triad: revenue gain, cost reduction, and emotional contribution. By delivering these core values to your customers--through marketing, selling, negotiation, and pricing--you can expect an increase in profits, productivity, "and" consumer goodwill. These are the same value-based strategies used by major companies such as Philips, Alstom, Siemens, and Virgin Mobile. And when it comes to today's more intangible markets--such as consulting services or digital properties like e-books and music files--these value-based strategies are more important than ever.

So forget about your old pricing methods based on costs and competition. Once you know your own value--and how to communicate it to others--everybody profits.