Do Your Best Practices Smoke the Competition – or Burn Opportunity?By F. Barry Lawrence, Ph.D.
Article Date: 02-01-2013
Copyright(C) 2013 Associated Equipment Distributors. All Rights Reserved.
The reason best practice launches go up in flames – and most do – is not because it wasn’t a true best practice. It’s because management didn’t tie it tightly to ROI, and also forgot to prepare the staff.
Many firms believe that competitive advantage comes from finding something the competition does not do and your customer values. The assumption is there is some "silver bullet" out there that will devastate the competition. The cold hard truth is that you don’t have to look further than your bookshelf to find these practices. Many authors (yours truly included) have described best practices like inventory stratification, customer stratification, pricing optimization, sales force deployment, and others in depth with many examples. The impact is impressive, in most cases unbelievable, so much so that consultants routinely understate the outcome to establish credibility.
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