Achieving a Strategic Sales Focus Contemporary Issues and Future Challenges

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.

Kenneth Le Meunier-FitzHugh is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing and he obtained is PhD from the Warwick Business School, University of Warwick in Marketing and Strategic Management. He is particularly interested in marketing strategy, sales strategy, and sales and marketing collaboration. He also has 20 years experience in sales and senior management. In 2008 he received the Marvin Jolson award for the best contribution to selling and sales management practice by the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management and has two best papers awards from the American Marketing Association. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook on Strategic Sales and Sales Management with Professor David Cravens and Professor Nigel Piercy. Tony Douglas is a lecturer, coach and mentor in sales & marketing, international strategy and business development. As Director Edinburgh Institute (SALES) & Senior Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University, he delivers workshops to business executives/ international business students on selling, enterprise and strategy in the UK, Holland, Germany, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He is Chair, Institute of Sales and Marketing Management (Scotland). He is a Fellow of the Institute of Sales & Marketing Management, a Senior Teaching Fellow of the HEA, and UK representative of the Global Sales and Science Institute. He has held a number of senior positions within Tesco PLC, Boots the Chemist and Kinnerton Company Ltd.