If a great salesperson can sell an air conditioner to an Eskimo, Joy Mangano can sell clothes hangers to a nudist colony. Mangano is a home improvement megasaleswoman on the Home Shopping Network, and her technique, along with other top sales folks on the channel, were recently...
Leaders must sell. Maybe not widgets, but ideas. Maybe not extended warranties, but top priorities. Maybe not service contracts, but competitive context. If leaders can't sell their organization on a vision, they will fail. So what can executives learn about selling from the sales staff don the...
American Girl stores aren't just about selling dolls. Instead, the dolls are part of a stage play that creates an experience for young girls and their mothers with dads in tow that is so compelling you happily plunk down hundreds of dollars to remember and memorialize it. ...
The middle market is that great area where customers on the low end of the income scale aspire to shop, and where high-end spenders fear to fall. Think Sears, T.J. Maxx, and Applebee's as prototype mid-market players. Harvard Business School marketing professor John Quelch thinks the middle...
So we all agree -- Barack Obama can deliver the rhetorical goods like few other politicians. Would you like to be able to command a room and deliver a presentation as well as the presidential candidate? What role does charisma play? In a Harvard...
Incoming eBay CEO John Donahoe is taking the mega online auctioneer in the absolute wrong direction with his recent moves to "muffle" buyer ratings, raise fees on small sellers while offering discounts to power vendors, and emphasizing fixed-price products at eBay Express, says Harvard Online blogger John Sviokla. What...
My headline suggests prediction markets aren't ready, but actually they can be very effective ways to guesstimate outcomes on everything from new product sales to the weekend box office for the newest Johnny Depp flick. No, the problem is with how companies use them. Culturally, most companies...
You've likely heard of the Customer Lifetime Value calculation, or CLV. Run your actual and projected costs in attracting and keeping a customer over a fixed time period and compare those expenses to the sales said customer is expected to produce. The result is a number called Net Present Value....
