The essential tool kit to achieve breakthrough sales performance improvements.Numbers don’t lie: 40 percent of all salespeople miss their targets each year. How can sales managers ensure their teams are doing everything possible? The key lies in benchmarking, which is not new for finance or manufacturing but rarely gets applied to sales. Making the Number will teach executives to embrace data-driven decision making and rely less on gut instinct.Comparing a sales force to th...

In the first edition of this landmark book, business loyalty guru Fred Reichheld revealed the question most critical to your company’s future: Would you recommend us to a friend?” By asking customers this question, you identify detractors, who sully your firm’s reputation and readily switch to competitors, and promoters, who generate good profits and true, sustainable growth.You also generate a vital metric: your Net Promoter Score. Since the book was first publi...

The Balanced Scorecard translates a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The four perspectives of the scorecard--financial measures, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth--offer a balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between outcomes desired and performance drivers of those outcomes, and between hard objective measures and softer, more subjective measures. In the first part, Kaplan and Norton ...

Digitization of business interactions and processes is advancing full bore. But in many organizations, returns from IT investments are flatlining, even as technology spending has skyrocketed.These challenges call for new levels of IT savvy: the ability of all managers-IT or non-IT-to transform their company's technology assets into operational efficiencies that boost margins. Companies with IT-savvy managers are 20 percent more profitable than their competitors.In IT Savvy,...

In a world of stiffening competition, business strategy is more crucial than ever. Yet most organizations struggle in this area--not with formulating strategy but with executing it, or putting their strategy into action. Owing to execution failures, companies realize just a fraction of the financial performance promised in their strategic plans.It doesn't have to be that way, maintain Robert Kaplan and David Norton in The Execution Premium. Building on their breakthrough w...

Most companies have massive amounts of data at their disposal, yet fail to utilize it in any meaningful way. But a powerful new business tool - analytics - is enabling many firms to aggressively leverage their data in key business decisions and processes, with impressive results.In their previous book, Competing on Analytics, Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris showed how pioneering firms were building their entire strategies around their analytical capabilities. Rather tha...

How do you keep your customers coming back-and get them to bring others?If you need the best practices and ideas for making your customers loyal and profitable--but don't have time to find them--this book is for you. Here are nine inspiring and useful perspectives, all in one place.This collection of HBR articles will help you:- Turn angry customers into loyal advocates- Get more people to recommend you- Boost customer satisfaction by satisfying your...

Bestselling author of Million Dollar Consulting shares the secrets of writing winning proposalsIntended for consultants, speakers, and other professional services providers, Million Dollar Consulting® Proposals ends forever the time-consuming and often frustrating process of writing a consulting proposal. It begins with the basics—defining these proposals and why they are necessary—and coaches you through the entire proposal process. In this book,...

Three experts in Human Resources introduce a measurement system that convincingly showcases how HR impacts business performance.Drawing from the authors' ongoing study of nearly 3,000 firms, this book describes a seven-step process for embedding HR systems within the firm's overall strategy—what the authors describe as an HR Scorecard—and measuring its activities in terms that line managers and CEOs will find compelling. Analyzing how each element of the HR system ...

The vastly increased level of competitive intensity faced by corporations and the increased costs of selling have radically changed the nature of the traditional selling process. Key or "strategic" accounts have now become a company's most important asset, in some cases supplying in excess of 80 percent of a firm's revenues. Here, in one powerful volume, key account management expert Noel Capon provides the most comprehensive treatment of key account management and plannin...

Sell and Market Like a Pro!In this new edition of his classic book, Rain Making, Ford Harding reveals step by step how--even if you've never sold a product in your life--you can become a top performer in your organization. Filled with easy-to-use strategies, checklists, tables, and guides, this book shows you how to:Write articles for professional publicationsMake cold calls like a sales proNetwork to buil...

Using Fitz-enz’s proprietary analytic model, you will be equipped to measure and evaluate past and current returns and apply the information to make predictions about the future value of human capital investments.In his landmark book, The ROI of Human Capital, Jac Fitz-enz presented a system of powerful metrics for quantifying the contributions of individual employees to a company’s bottom line. Now, in The New HR Analytics, he reveals how human r...