Author Archives: gschirr
Global Innovation Tournament at RU
Check out the 10 winning videos! http://servicecocreation.com/
Your in-house anthropologists
Uncovering Latent Needs Hamel and Prahalahad and others have pointed out the need for companies to uncover unarticulated customer needs. These needs may be called latent, tacit, sticky, contextual, or simply unarticulated needs. They may not be articulated because the client … Continue reading
Listen to your salespeople!
Salespeople are “boundary-spanners” in an organization. They may spend more time with customers then with co-workers and have divided loyalties to their customers and firm. Since they see customers — in their setting or context — they have a view … Continue reading
Career Portfolio, not Path
I am enjoying my third career (#3) as a marketing professor, researching innovation and sales of service. I was a financial futures and bond salesperson and sales manager in career #1. For career #2 I was head of sales and marketing … Continue reading
A Real Value Proposition
“Value proposition” is one of the leading buzz words of sales. We all want to sell value… Unfortunately many value propositions sound as real as corporate mission statements — or beauty contestants who all want world peace. Why can’t a … Continue reading
Call Center Selling
Selling services out of a call center — and managing such sales — has to be one of the most difficult sales roles. To make the effort even more difficult many of the sales are cross-cultural and have the handicap … Continue reading
Online networking
(I had the opportunity to attend the 2009 NCSM and PSE conference in Norfolk this past weekend. I will have multiple postings related to the conference the next couple weeks.) Mary Shoemaker gave an overview of research on online social … Continue reading
Looking for Cinderella?
March Madness: Take a look at Radford University One of the delights of every NCAA tournament is the little or little-known school that makes its way into the “sweet sixteen” or even the final eight. Even if I weren’t a … Continue reading
Adaptive selling: adjusting to customer styles
“Morphing” online In my professional sales class I present the social styles approach that creates four categories of prospect styles (driver, analytical, amiable and expressive) from two scales, assertiveness and responsiveness (Merrill and Reid 1981). The social styles matrix approch provide … Continue reading
You are always selling service
Salesperson as product benefit In my other blog (on service innovation) I posted an article about Rolls Royce’s experience in selling service rather than product today. Rolls Royce now sells “hours of thrust” instead of aircraft engines. This example is part … Continue reading
