Over the past quarter of a century, Selling and Sales Management has proved itself to be the definitive text in this exciting and fast-paced subject area. This new edition comes fully updated with new case studies, using working businesses to connect sales theory to the practical implications of selling in a modern environment. It also contains the results from cutting-edge research that differentiates it from most of its competitors. The book continues to place emphasis on global aspects of selling and sales management. Topics covered include technological applications of selling and sales management, ethics of selling and sales management, systems selling and a comprehensive coverage of key account management. New to this edition New case studies and practical exercises. Fully updated coverage of strategic selling and partnering. Expanded coverage of ethical issues. Enhanced discussion of the role of social media in selling. Expanded coverage of the management of sales.

Sales are the lifeblood of the business world and therefore an area of fundamental importance for scholarly research. This concise book analyses current thoughts and emerging practices in sales management research. Organizations who are looking to increase revenues and add new customers to their portfolio will find it increasingly difficult to successfully do this without being aware of and adopting the appropriate, adaptive sales processes. Emergent themes such as agile sales management, digital selling, artificial intelligence, and trust will be discussed in the book that also embraces the importance of customer relationship management, and how salespeople are aligning their interactions with the marketing function. The text will review recent research to identify how to grow and organise the sales pipeline, manage hybrid sales teams, and the effects of new technologies on selling processes. These discussions will be helpful in highlighting issues and providing some solutions to practitioners who are operating in the new environments. This book will be invaluable to sales researchers as it summarises current knowledge about key sales and sales management topics and indicates possible future research directions.

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Marketing is pivotal in today's world. Used for determining and satisfying the needs of the customer, it stands at the interface between an organisation and its environment. Marketing provides customer and competitor information to the organisation, as well as creating awareness of the company's offering. As globalization creates increasing challenges to established marketing practices, marketing efforts need to reposition and adapt continuously to maintain an organisation's ability to reach potential customers. This Very Short Introduction provides a general overview of the function and importance of marketing to modern organisations. Kenneth Le Meunier-FitzHugh discusses how marketing remains central to creating competitive advantage, and why it needs to be forward looking and constantly reinventing itself in line with new developments in the marketplace, such as the growth of social media, and the importance of ethics and responsible marketing. He shows how this has led to the role of marketing expanding beyond advertising and promotion, encompassing a broader sense of customer relationship management. He also considers how marketers need to remain able to manage the marketing mix in response to their understanding of customer's purchasing habits. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This book demonstrates how corporate sales and marketing teams should operate collaboratively in a 21st Century organization to enhance performance in the marketplace. It discusses how and why conflict and /or separation has grown between these two groups, even though to the outside world they appear to be a single group. The book considers how collaboration between sales and marketing can impact positively on a company's competitive advantage, and what the senior management role should be in creating and facilitating the smooth running of their sales and marketing functions. The book also discusses the resourcing of sales and marketing, and how innovative processes can reduce conflict and promote closeness, as well as a review of the role of communication, formal and informal, in improving collaboration. Finally, the book explores how sales and marketing can become more competitive in the face of a dynamic and borderless market, and where lead generation is less important than building long-term relationships with customers. The book has an action-oriented perspective throughout, providing the reader with checklists and diagnostics as the basis for evaluating their own companies and identifying directions for improvement. As the book develops its theme, key points will be reinforced with company examples.

The main aim of this book is to consider how the sales function informs business strategy. Although there are a number of books available that address how to manage the sales team tactically, this text addresses how sales can help organizations to become more customer oriented. Many organizations are facing escalating costs and a growth in customer power, which makes it necessary to allocate resources more strategically. The sales function can provide critical customer and market knowledge to help inform both innovation and marketing. Sales are responsible for building customer knowledge, networking both internally and externally to help create additional customer value, as well as the more traditional role of managing customer relationships and selling. The text considers how sales organizations are responding to increasing competition, more demanding customers and a more complex selling environment. We identify many of the challenges facing organisations today and offers discussions of some of the possible solutions. This book considers the changing nature of sales and how activities can be aligned within the organization, as well as marketing sensing, creating customer focus and the role of sales leadership. The text will include illustrations (short case studies) provided by a range of successful organizations operating in a number of industries. Sales and senior management play an important role in ensuring that the sales teams' activities are aligned to business strategy and in creating an environment to allow salespeople to be more successful in developing new business opportunities and building long-term profitable business relationships. One of the objectives of this book is to consider how conventional thinking has changed in the last five years and integrate it with examples from sales practice to provide a more complete picture of the role of sales within the modern organization.

The Oxford Handbook of Strategic Sales and Sales Management is an unrivalled overview by leading academics in the field of sales and marketing management. Sales theory is experiencing a renaissance driven by a number of factors, including building profitable relationships, creating/delivering brand value, strategic customer management, sales and marketing relationships, global selling, and the change from transactional to customer relationship marketing. Escalating sales and selling costs require organisations to be more focused on results and highlight the shifting of resources from marketing to sales. Further the growth in customer power now requires a strategic sales response, and not just a tactical one. The positioning of sales within the organisation, the sales function and sales management are all discussed. The Handbook is not a general sales management text about managing a sales force, but will fill a gap in the existing literature through consolidating the current academic research in the sales area. The Handbook is structured around four key topics. The first section explores the strategic positioning of the sales function within the modern organisation. The second considers sales management and recent developments. The third section examines the sales relationship with the customer and highlights how sales is responding to the modern environment. Finally, the fourth section reviews the internal composition of sales within the organisation. The Handbook will provide a comprehensive introduction to the latest research in sales management, and is suitable for academics, professionals, and those taking professional qualifications in sales and marketing.