Sales, Marketing, and Continuous Improvement: Six Best Practices to Achieve Revenue Growth and Increase Customer Loyalty Hardcover - 1997

From the rear cover

Forget the old school approach to Sales and Marketing. Six winning practices puts these departments back on par with the rest of the modern business world, opening the door to higher profits.Based on interviews with individuals in more than 60 companies -- many of them winners of the prestigious Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award -- this resource for executives, managers, and consultants distills a range of new improvement techniques and technologies down to six proven practices. Stowell shows how to deploy these practices successfully in the sales and marketing departments often left untouched by a company's quality and continuous improvement efforts.

From the jacket flap

Although a variety of innovative quality and continuous improvement efforts have become standard in the manufacturing and operations sectors of competitive contemporary businesses, these practices and technologies often fail to take root in the sales and marketing departments.In this straightforward, example-filled guide, quality improvement expert Daniel M. Stowell reminds change agents that improvement processes cannot achieve their full potential if they do not encompass sales and marketing.Stowell studied the practices of companies whose organization-wide improvement efforts resulted in high customer loyalty and employee satisfaction, strong growth and profits, and increased shareholder wealth. He found that the most widely and successfully used approaches to continuous improvement encompass six basic practices.Sales, Marketing, and Continuous Improvement describes each winning practice in detail, explains how each applies to sales and marketing, and provides illuminating examples of how Texas Instruments, Federal Express, General Electric, Xerox, Motorola, and many other equally successful but less well known companies have applied the six practices to their organization. Also sharing real-world examples of failed or disappointing change efforts, author Stowell offers practical guidance for avoiding common pitfalls.Featuring an action plan for implementing the six practices, and for instilling a culture of continuous improvement, this is a one-of-a-kind, hand-on guide for executives, managers, and consultants who want to reap the benefits of quality and continuous improvement initiatives in their sales and marketing functions.