Summary |
Concurrent marketing is the first book to show why this competitive environment demands a new, more coordinated marketing effort “downstream” in which field sales and service take on increased strategic significance.
Concurrent marketing explains how companies can integrate the activities of these three groups and leverage functional expertise for competitive advantage. Grounded in the author’s four year study of firms in the computer, consumer goods, telecommunications, and medical products industries, this book shows how companies can realign their organizational structures, information systems, compensation policies, training programs, career paths, and account management practices to develop concurrent marketing capabilities.
Concurrent marketing questions much current management thinking in identifying ways that competitive firms need to be organized to build these capabilities. Cespedes addresses the importance of specialist expertise in cross-functional activities; the role and limits of incentives in achieving flexible coordination; the relationship between individual and organizational learning in managing change; the sales force as the fulcrum of marketing efforts; and the consequences of reengineering and team work initiatives that ignore these critical issues.
|
