Total Market Domination: Ten Steps for Supercharging Your Sales and Marketing

If you are looking to stimulate your mind and seeking the inspiration to get you thinking about sales and marketing, then this is not the book for you!But do not turn the page yet, because this volume may still have something to offer. Professionals needing a practical, step‐by‐step guide for conducting sales and marketing evaluations may find this book useful.

The strength of this book is its focus on the author’s intention to provide practitioners with the tools necessary to develop best marketing and sales practice and thereby improve their ability to influence their customers’ purchase decisions. Doug Dayton has condensed his experiences with the Microsoft Corporation and as a consultant into a work that provides managers with a comprehensive guide for critically assessing their sales and marketing processes.

In ten chapters the author covers areas from understanding the key factors that drive customer purchase decisions, allocating and matching resources to meet objectives, developing a clear marketing story, leveraging selling efforts through marketing planning and communication technology, identifying and qualifying prospective customers, presenting the company in a professional manner, evaluating service and support models, to developing effective sales forecasts and marketing budgets. The final chapter deals with identifying and implementing best “Client‐Centered^TM Training” sales practices.

The steps required to perform these evaluations are included in each section. For example, the chapter on ensuring firms have effective programs in place to qualify prospective customers recommends companies adopt a “Client‐Centered^TM” selling methodology, although the details of this methodology are dealt with in another of the author’s publications. Managers are then instructed to evaluate: the sales team’s qualification process; product demonstrations; sales proposals; major account selling; selling strategies; territory plans; account plans; the annual review process; and sales calls plans. Another feature of the book is the extensive provision of worksheets designed to “help you define your business’s objectives, position your products in the market, and analyze your business operations” (p. xiii).

Continuing the example about qualifying prospective customers, the worksheets in this part ask questions such as:

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  Do you have sufficient cash reserves or cash flow from other business activities to finance a long selling cycle?

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  Can you provide a broad enough range of support services to service major accounts?

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  Has your market research convinced you that marketing your products and services into major accounts is the best use of your selling time?

In addition to this, the worksheets have illustrative examples provided from the author’s “Client‐Centered^TM Training” business. There is also promotion of the author’s business training programs, including a user‐friendly Web site.

There is much in this book with which qualified sales and marketing professionals will be familiar. Some practitioners, however, might not recognize that fundamental sales and marketing principles and practices form the foundations for most of the material. For instance, marketing strategists will appreciate the application of hierarchies of corporate objectives in the sections covering the allocation of company resources. Marketers will also be conversant with the concepts of segmentation, differentiation, target marketing and positioning. Other areas in which managers will recognize sales and marketing fundamentals include the categorization of pricing strategies into those such as penetration, customer demand, demand‐oriented, psychological, breakeven and marginal pricing. Call requirements and sales workload analysis techniques are covered. A job requirements checklist is also provided.

There are strengths and weaknesses for dealing with the fundamentals in a fairly cursory manner. For example, when covering competitive strategy a Porter‐type framework for understanding the structure of competition is used – cost leadership, differentiation, focus, entry and exit factors, threats of substitution, bargaining power of suppliers and buyers, and rivalry. Many practitioners will appreciate the subtleties of this approach, though for others such material may be foreign. The first group will also be conversant with the complexities in applying such a tool and with the potential problems or deficiencies of the Porter‐type approach. The second group will have limited understanding of the approach, probably not be aware of the complexities involved and, perhaps most importantly, are not provided with references to Porter’s work.

The focus of this book on assessing and managing the interface between selling and marketing processes means that much of the “human” aspect of managing is dealt with less adequately. The chapter on using computer and communication technologies was practical and detailed, taking the reader through the processes from documenting sales infrastructure, flowcharting the selling process, identifying sales infrastructure areas that should be automated, evaluating sales automation systems, to evaluating the costs and benefits of electronic commerce and the Internet. Perhaps because of the author’s cutting‐edge computer industry background, and because these sections dealt especially with one of his key objectives, that is, to “help you identify areas of your business that can benefit from new computer and communication technologies” (p. xiii), these are the sections I expect managers will find most helpful.

However, the human aspects surrounding these processes were covered with less insight. Managing motivation, as an example, was encapsulated as needing to be ethical, having appropriate compensation schemes and quotas, and providing recognition. This treatment, though highly focused on a few narrow criteria, gives little indication that managing motivation may be a much more complex managerial task than that described.

Essentially, those practitioners needing comprehensive checklists should find this book useful. If you are unfamiliar with the changes occurring in the information and computing industries, this work may be particularly useful. How easily the experiences and successes, essentially from one industry and one company, namely the Microsoft Corporation, can be translated to other contexts and companies is not self‐evident to my mind. Those employed in the information technology, electronics, or computing sectors should find the volume useful for the insights into some of the ways in which the Microsoft Corporation achieved market domination. Managers in mature markets, where the rate of change is less pronounced, or where products are not being introduced at an ever‐accelerating rate, may find this work less relevant. If you have graduate or postgraduate qualifications in sales or marketing, this book is probably not for you – already you will recognize the fundamentals and may prefer to read more conceptually challenging material. If you have not been formally introduced to sales or marketing you would appreciate the expedient way many of the core sales and marketing concepts are applied. However, if this whets your appetite to read further, you will be disappointed by the lack of citations.

Academics will find few, if any, new ideas here. Some might even be put off by the trademarking of core marketing concepts such as being client‐centered!Researchers may also be discouraged by the lack of hard data. But consider, before you turn this page … managing is about doing, and this book certainly provides marketers with a lot to do.