瞄准目标销售法

一个成功的企业总是把服务作为促进销售的主要手段。只要心中时刻装着顾客，善于独创性地进行服务，就可以赢得更多的市场机会。假如你以为推销活动只是一种数字游戏，只决定于你拜访过的客户的多少，那你就大错特错了。在登门拜访客户的同时，你必须拿出同等的精力揣摩你的拜访对象的个性，以及考虑如何拜访、何时拜访更合适。只有这样你才能博得顾客的好感，唤起他们的消费欲望。     

美国银行业金融商品的差别化竞争战略--美国商业银行的业务改革与调整战略(三)

金融服务业的市场竞争主要是满足顾客的需要,为顾客提供满意的服务.顾客拥有的资产多少的不同,对将来预期需要的不同,都使得所需要的服务有所不同.这些不同构成了银行在市场竞争、特别是零售业务竞争中实施差别化战略的基础.本文着重介绍了90年代以来,在金融改革不断深入、市场形势不断变化的情况下,美国银行业通过加深对顾客金融消费特点的认识,注意根据依据顾客的金融消费特点,明确追求"能够比同业更低的价格来提供金融商品及服务"、"提供别人提供不了的商品"和"提供别人提供不了的服务及方便性"等差别化经营方式,以对我国商业银行的经营改革提供一些经验借鉴.     

使用FTP的主要风险以及如何克服这些风险

确保你的数据传输操作能够满足不断变化的业务要求并不是一件很容易的事情。至少，你必须长期不断地执行安全政策，进行审查跟踪，以证明符合规定、主动监控和管理数据传输操作，以及符合《服务级别协议》的要求并不断创新，因为你的业务需要不断变化。你的数据传输基础设施可能已经变成或正在变成你经营战略中的一个关键棋子。你的数据传输基础设施能够达到这种透明度并控制你去迎接这些挑战吗？     

涉入程度、时间压力与广告信息对银行潜在客户的说服力

本研究以顾客区隔与时间压力的观点来检视商业银行广告信息框架效果的说服力.本研究结果指出,当面对具有高涉入程度的银行潜在顾客,且广告中的优惠信息是具有时间性的情况下,正面框架的信息会比负面框架的信息更有说服力,然而,如果广告中的优惠信息并不具有时间性,对于这些高涉入程度的银行潜在顾客,负面框架的信息会比正面框架的信息更有说服力.相对地,不论是使用正面框架或是负面框架信息,也不论广告中的优惠信息是否具有时间性,都不会对那些涉入程度低的银行潜在客户产生说服力.     

涉入程度、时间压力与广告信息对银行潜在客户的说服力

本研究以顾客区隔与时间压力的观点来检视商业银行广告信息框架效果的说服力。本研究结果指出，当面对具有高涉入程度的银行潜在顾客，且广告中的优惠信息是具有时间性的情况下，正面框架的信息会比负面框架的信息更有说服力，然而，如果广告中的优惠信息并不具有时间性，对于这些高涉入程度的银行潜在顾客，负面框架的信息会比正面框架的信息更有说服力。相对地，不论是使用正面框架或是负面框架信息，也不论广告中的优惠信息是否具有时间性，都不会对那些涉入程度低的银行潜在客户产生说服力。     

使用FTP的主要风险

一、确保数据传输基础设施与经营战略保持同步 确保你的数据传输操作能够满足不断变化的业务要求并不容易。至少，你必须长期不断地执行安全政策，进行审查跟踪，以证明符合规定、主动监控和管理数据传输操作，以及符合《服务级别协议》的要求并不断创新，因为你的业务需要不断变化。你的数据传输基础设施可能已经变成或正在变成你经营战略中的一个关键棋子。你的数据传输基础设施能够达到这种透明度并支持你去迎接这些挑战吗？     

缓解客户焦躁情绪的几点思考

笔者日前在营业网点对排队问题进行了体验,发现容易让客户产生焦躁情绪的行为主要有:柜面人员在办理业务过程中与其他柜员说笑(虽然有时候是在交流业务),长时间接打电话(尽管是业务电话),内部无关人员在柜台内逗留,复杂业务处理需时较长未与客户沟通等等。这些行为的出现极易引起客户焦躁情绪的不断加剧,进而产生服务负面事件。笔者认为,银行员工应尽量避免做出容易引发客户误会的举动,并对客户给予更多的关注。     

来自专科医生的日常叮嘱

<正>你是否会在马路边晨跑?你是否认为煲汤时间越久越好?你是否和家人共用一管牙膏?你是否会边看电视边吃饭?殊不知,这些生活中习以为常的行为却可能给你的健康埋下不良隐患。良好的生活习惯是预防一切疾病的基础,日常生活中你需要戒掉哪些陋习?本期《金融生活圈》就来和大家分享一下各科医生的日常生活建议与“医嘱”。呼吸科医生建议:不要在马路边锻炼身体     

如何成为优秀的市场营销专家(五)——积极有效的聆听

<正> 和询问一起使用的另外一种技巧就是要有效的聆听。提问题是为了发掘需要,而聆听则可帮助你识别有哪些地方是可用“利益”去满足的。 有几种情况会干扰业务代表的有效聆听,这些情况通常分为四类(1)环境因素,例如嘈杂的声音或干扰。(2)讲     

浅谈我国城市化进程中的问题及对策

城市化是一个渐进的过程,也是我国逐步走向现代化的必由之路。我国在城市化过程中积累一些问题,涉及到经济、政治、社会、环境等诸多方面。在大力发展经济,推进城市化进程的基础上妥善解决这些问题,需要在诸多方面一起下手,以组合拳的方式减缓或消除城市化进程中出现的种种负面作用。     

How right should the customer be?

If your salespeople aren't sure who their boss is--the district manager? the regional manager? the customer?--it could be a sign that your company's sales force controls are working at cross-purposes and that your sales function is in trouble. Sales force controls are the policies and practices that govern the way you train, supervise, motivate, and evaluate your sales staff. They include the types of compensation you offer your people and the criteria your sales managers use to evaluate the reps' performance. These controls let salespeople know which trade-offs the company would prefer them to make when the inevitable conflicts arise between what they want to do (spend lots of time and money to get a sale) and what they actually can do (use limited resources and still get the sale). When sales force controls aren't aligned--when, say, the system simultaneously encourages reps to be entrepreneurial but also to file detailed call reports and check in frequently with their bosses--individuals become discouraged and unproductive, and they eventually leave the company. The authors' research suggests there are significant differences between the control systems of companies that encourage salespeople to put the customer first-outcome control (OC) systems--and those that encourage reps to put their managers first--behavior control (BC) systems. In this article, they list the characteristics of OC and BC systems, describe the potential fallout from conflicts within these systems, and explain how you can tell which control system is appropriate for your firm. In most cases, the right choice will be a consistent system somewhere in the middle of the OC-BC continuum.     

Curveball strategies to fool the competition

In this follow-on piece to his article "Hardball: Five Killer Strategies for Trouncing the Competition" (HBR April 2004), George Stalk of the Boston Consulting Group offers another approach for prevailing over rivals. Strategic hardball is about playing rough and tough with competitors; strategic curveball is about outfoxing them. It involves getting rivals to do something dumb that they otherwise wouldn't (that is, swing at a pitch that appears to be in the strike zone but isn't) or not do something smart that they otherwise would (that is, fail to swing at a pitch that's in the strike zone but appears not to be). Stalk describes four types of curveball: Draw your rival out of the profit zone. Lure competitors into disadvantageous areas--for example, by competing for, but intentionally failing to win, the business of less profitable customers. Borrow techniques from unexpected places. Using the hardball tactic of plagiarizing good ideas, put rivals off balance by importing techniques from other industries--for example, employing the retailer's hard sell in the stodgy world of retail financial services. Disguise how you attain your success. Veil your methods by achieving an advantage through unlikely means--for example, generating product sales through your service operations. Let rivals misinterpret the reasons for your success. Allow them to act on conventional but incomplete explanations for your success--for example, squeezing costs rather than aggressively utilizing assets. The author provides extended examples of these curveball strategies in action, at companies such as the industrial-cleaning chemical supplier Ecolab and the Australian airline Jetstar.     

Vital truths about managing your costs

Four truths apply to every business situation: 1. It is essential to be a lower cost supplier. 2. To stay competitive, inflation-adjusted costs of producing and supplying products and services must trend downward. 3. The true cost and profit pictures for each product/market segment must always be known, and traditional accounting practices must not obscure them. 4. A business must concentrate as much on cash flow and balance-sheet strengths as it does on profits. In order to ascertain exactly what your costs are, you must carefully isolate and assign various costs to specific products, accounts, or markets. Managers often do this badly, working on the basis of "average" costs. This ignores important differences among products and the fact that different products, different markets, and different customers incur different overhead costs. Most manufacturing companies' most important expense categories are R&D, sales, and general and administrative costs, but surprisingly, they generally don't get the attention they should. Neither do two crucial ratios-gross margin and the percent of assets employed per dollar of sales. Gross margins should usually not be less than 40%, and for most manufacturing companies, assets should not be over 60% of annual sales. Wrong deviation from these ratios will undermine profit targets. Once your costs are known and clearly assigned to product lines, markets, and key customers, they should be widely shared in the organization so that everyone will feel committed to cost management and know when deviations occur.     

Instructional case: Blue Ridge Revisited—Integrating ABC and OROS Quick® software

Blue Ridge Manufacturing Company produces customized towels for the US sports market. Recently, competitive pressures motivated the company to institute an activity-based costing (ABC) system for allocating manufacturing support costs to its major product lines. Management is pleased with the manufacturing cost information that the ABC system is providing and is beginning to use the ABC data to drive process improvements. To secure additional gains, management is now interested in conducting a customer profitability analysis. Currently, the company allocates its Selling, General, and Administrative (SG&A) costs to products and/or customers on the basis of sales volume (units). The question posed to you, in your role as a member of a team of managerial accountants, is whether the SG&A costs can be more accurately assigned to customer groups (“large,” “medium,” and “small,” as determined by sales volume). To this end, you have been asked to build and interpret the results of an ABC model that assigns SG&A costs to each of these three customer groups. Blue Ridge has recently implemented a new software system that includes an ABC module (called OROS Quick®), which you will use to build your cost assignment model and to respond to a number of managerial questions based on the cost analysis you perform.     

Innovation versus complexity: what is too much of a good thing?

What's the number of product or service offerings that would optimize both your revenues and your profits? For most firms, it's considerably lower than the number they offer today. The fact is, companies have strong incentives to be overly innovative in new product development. But continual launches of new products and line extensions add complexity throughout a company's operations, and as the costs of managing that complexity multiply, margins shrink. To maximize profit potential, a company needs to identify its innovation fulcrum, the point at which an additional offering destroys more value than it creates. The usual antidotes to complexity miss their mark because they treat the problem on the factory floor rather than at its source: in the product line. Mark Gottfredson and Keith Aspinall of Bain & Company present an approach that goes beyond the typical Six Sigma or lean-operations program to root out complexity hidden in the value chain. The first step is to ask, What would our company look like if it made and sold only a single product or service? In other words, you identify your company's equivalent of Henry Ford's one-size-fits-all Model T-for Starbucks, it might be a medium-size cup of coffee; for a bank, a simple checking account-and then determine the cost of producing that baseline offering. Next, you add variety back into the business system, product by product, and carefully forecast the resulting impact on sales as well as the cost implications across the value chain. When the analysis shows the costs beginning to overwhelm the added revenues, you've found your innovation fulcrum. By deconstructing their companies to a zero-complexity baseline, managers can break through organizational resistance and deeply entrenched ways of thinking to find the right balance between innovation and complexity.     

Understanding "people" people

Nearly all areas of business--not just sales and human resources--call for interpersonal savvy. Relational know-how comprises a greater variety of aptitudes than many executives think. Some people can "talk a dog off a meat truck," as the saying goes. Others are great at resolving interpersonal conflicts. Some have a knack for translating high-level concepts for the masses. And others thrive when they're managing a team. Since people do their best work when it most closely matches their interests, the authors contend, managers can increase productivity by taking into account employees' relational interests and skills when making personnel choices and project assignments. After analyzing psychological tests of more than 7,000 business professionals, the authors have identified four dimensions of relational work: influence, interpersonal facilitation, relational creativity, and team leadership. This article explains each one and offers practical advice to managers--how to build a well-balanced team, for instance, and how to gauge the relational skills of potential employees during interviews. To determine whether a job candidate excels in, say, relational creativity, ask her to describe her favorite advertising campaign, slogan, or image and tell you why she finds it to be so effective. Understanding these four dimensions will help you get optimal performance from your employees, appropriately reward their work, and assist them in setting career goals. It will also help you make better choices when it comes to your own career development. To get started, try the authors' free online assessment tool, which will measure both your orientation toward relational work in general and your interest level in each of its four dimensions.     

How to pitch a brilliant idea

Coming up with creative ideas is easy; selling them to strangers is hard. Entrepreneurs, sales executives, and marketing managers often go to great lengths to demonstrate how their new concepts are practical and profitable--only to be rejected by corporate decision makers who don't seem to understand the value of the ideas. Why does this happen? Having studied Hollywood executives who assess screenplay pitches, the author says the person on the receiving end--the "catcher"--tends to gauge the pitcher's creativity as well as the proposal itself. An impression of the pitcher's ability to come up with workable ideas can quickly and permanently overshadow the catcher's feelings about an idea's worth. To determine whether these observations apply to business settings beyond Hollywood, the author attended product design, marketing, and venture-capital pitch sessions and conducted interviews with executives responsible for judging new ideas. The results in those environments were similar to her observations in Hollywood, she says. Catchers subconsciously categorize successful pitchers as showrunners (smooth and professional), artists (quirky and unpolished), or neophytes (inexperienced and naive). The research also reveals that catchers tend to respond well when they believe they are participating in an idea's development. As Oscar-winning writer, director, and producer Oliver Stone puts it, screen-writers pitching an idea should "pull back and project what he needs onto your idea in order to make the story whole for him." To become a successful pitcher, portray yourself as one of the three creative types and engage your catchers in the creative process. By finding ways to give your catchers a chance to shine, you sell yourself as a likable collaborator.     

Leveraging the psychology of the salesperson. A conversation with psychologist and anthropologist G. Clotaire Rapaille

We have to admire salespeople's resilience in the face of endless rejection, their certainty that things will work out in the end. At the same time, we're repelled by what their job can do to them. (Think Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross, dramatic portraits of hollowness and moral capitulation.) Just what type of person goes into sales, and how do salespeople cope with their jobs? For insight into these questions, HBR approached G. Clotaire Rapaille, a psychologist, anthropologist, and marketing guru who researches the impact of culture on business and markets. In particular, he studies archetypes--the underlying patterns in psychology that illuminate the human condition--and shows organizations how to use those patterns to sharpen their sales and marketing efforts. He points out, for instance, that a keen understanding of the Great Mother archetype has helped Procter & Gamble achieve great success with Pantene hair products. By promoting nutrition--and reminding consumers that hair must be nurtured--the Pantene brand appeals to the maternal instinct. Rapaille says that salespeople have their own archetype: They are Happy Losers who relish rejection and actually seek out jobs that provide opportunities to be turned down. That, of course, has implications for how they should be managed. Rapaille's research shows that the leading motivator in sales is not money; it's the thrill of the chase. "Hold huge company meetings where you give a salesperson the gold medal of rejection," he advises. "Jonathan sold 500,000 computers last month, but he was rejected 5 million times! It may sound ludicrous, but this is the way to get fire in the belly of your sales force--particularly in America, where beating the odds is highly prized".     

Gemini Communications: A case applying revenue recognition standards

Gemini Communications (Gemini) is a case study on revenue recognition criteria. You will take on the role of an audit manager for the public accounting firm that audits Gemini. Your client, Gemini, is a US company that recently expanded operations into China through the acquisition of Apollo Man. Gemini prepares its financial statements in accordance with US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP) while Apollo Man prepares its financial statements in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS GAAP). Your assignment is to research, compare and contrast the technical criteria for revenue recognition under US GAAP, IFRS GAAP, and the proposed revenue standard. You will apply the various criteria to an Apollo Man sales transaction to determine the timing and amount of revenue Apollo Man should recognize. The case is designed to develop your research and written communication skills.     

The customer has escaped

Every company makes choices about the channels it will use to go to market. Traditionally, the decision to sell through a discount superstore or a pricey boutique, for instance, was guided by customer demographics. A company would identify a target segment of buyers and go with the channel that could deliver them. It was a fair assumption that certain customer types were held captive by certain channels--if not from cradle to grave, then at least from initial consideration to purchase. The problem, the authors say, is that today's customers have become unfettered. As their channel options have proliferated, they've come to recognize that different channels serve their needs better at different points in the buying process. The result is "value poaching." For example, certain channels hope to use higher margin sales to cover the cost of providing expensive high-touch services. Potential customers use these channels to do research, then leap to a cheaper channel when it's time to buy. Customers now hunt for bargains more aggressively; they've become more sophisticated about how companies market to them; and they are better equipped with information and technology to make advantageous decisions. What does this mean for your go-to-market strategy? The authors urge companies to make a fundamental shift in mind-set toward designing for buyer behaviors, not customer segments. A company should design pathways across channels to help its customers get what they need at each stage of the buying process--through one channel or another. Customers are not mindful of channel boundaries--and you shouldn't be either. Instead, they are mindful of the value of individual components in your channels--and you should be, too.