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Managing Relationship Assets
(Powerful Ideas/White Papers)
... over the last two decades: in a rapidly changing industry, firms need to keep a close eye on critical business relationships. The industries vary-manufacturing, financial services, health care and many ...
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How to Recover Strategic Account Relationships
(Powerful Ideas/White Papers)
... firms that, if they decided to move elsewhere, would create gnashing of teeth, moaning, and suicidal thoughts on the executive levels. I’d like to offer a ten-step approach to recovering those account ...
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Ed Gregor
(About Us/S4 Consultants)
... an experienced practice leader skilled in product and market development in bringing materials, new concepts and technologies to market on behalf of client firms. Relationships included companies having ...
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Outsourcing: A Business Relationship Management Challenge
(Powerful Ideas/White Papers)
... relationships between suppliers and their most critical customers. Because in writing about outsourcing it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two firms in outsourcing, we will be calling ...
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Is the Relationship Healthy?
(Insights/Company-to-Company)
... useful and important in business-to-business markets. Because b2b firms have fewer total customers than retailers. It would seem that it is easier to monitor the health of a given account relationship. ...
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What the Customer Wants You to Know
(Powerful Ideas/Book Reviews)
... Charam does make one excellent suggestion, although I doubt many firms will take him up on it. He says that in order to truly understand why the value account plan is different, the executive sales ...
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A Sense of Urgency
(Powerful Ideas/Book Reviews)
... John Kotter, author of a number of organizational change books, argues in A Sense of Urgency that, given the speed at which business is changing, firms need to be continually changing just to survive. ...
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The Most Effective SAMPs We Know
(Insights/Company-to-Company)
... value to their customers that in return deliver superior value back to them. Defining these two-sided values requires that firms know—or be willing to learn—what they do not know about their strategic ...
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Ted Levitt On Marketing
(Powerful Ideas/Book Reviews)
... the beginning of modern marketing. In it, Levitt says that after firms succeed, they then fail because they define their industry too narrowly and refuse to look beyond past success to their own obsolescence. ...
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The Art of Innovation
(Powerful Ideas/Book Reviews)
... a culture of innovation. He criticizes many of the "creative" product development approaches many firms use. As he says, "(W)e believe you have to go beyond putting yourself in your customer's shoes. Indeed, ...
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The Alchemy of Growth
(Powerful Ideas/Book Reviews)
... way to sustain growth over time. What's best about the book is the clarity of the thesis and the book's organization, as well as the many examples of well-known high-growth firms recreating themselves-Gillette, ...
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What Clients Love: A Field Guide to Growing Your Business
(Powerful Ideas/Book Reviews)
... Beckwith feels that people learn best when they are told a story. Beckwith argues that firms should nail down the stories they are going to tell about themselves and practice telling them-until everyone ...
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The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age
(Powerful Ideas/Book Reviews)
... fewer CSRs who have the experience to truly help customers outside the scripts. The end result, then, is that firms are spending more on call center systems solutions that offer less to both customers ...
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Grow To Be Great: Breaking the Downsizing Cycle
(Powerful Ideas/Book Reviews)
... book was published in 1995, in those blissful days when the market hovered in the stratosphere, Enron was a great investment, and the largest accounting firms were seen as sacrosanct. The book's thesis ...
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Business Market Management: Understanding, Creating, and Delivering Value
(Powerful Ideas/Book Reviews)
... $80). Narus and Anderson have been studying business-to-business marketing for the last 15 years, and what you have here is 400 pages of how excellent firms understand, market, and deliver value to their ...
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Why Have a Voice-of-the-Customer Program?
(Powerful Ideas/White Papers)
Why Have a Voice-of-the-Customer Program? by Kim Wilson, S4 Consulting In supplier firms, where does critical knowledge about a strategic customer reside? In the Account Manager’s head? Does the firm ...
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Unleashing the Power of Business Relationships
(Powerful Ideas/White Papers)
... Without support systems, computer or otherwise, it may be impossible for managers to leverage the talents of employees around the world. The key point is that firms do not seek to block relationship building, ...
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Aligning A Firm to Unleash Strategic Customer Relationships
(Powerful Ideas/White Papers)
... 3. Structural Changes Traditionally, firms define organizational and relationship alignment as a structural issue, so they change reporting relationships and redesign processes to improve performance. ...
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Practical Approach
(About Us/Testimonials)
Practical Approach "Most of my experience has been with two kinds of vendors: research firms and technical consultants. The research companies gather intelligence on industry products, sales and service, ...
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Value & Trusted Business Advisors
(About Us/Testimonials)
Value & Trusted Business Advisors "We've learned a lot from S4. They've brought a lot of value. Their approach is different from most other consulting firms. We worked with them as "trusted business ...