The Channel Advantage

'The Channel Advantage' deals with one topic, and deals with it comprehensively and rigorously: how to construct a sales channel system that will yield world-class sales performance and durable competitive advantage. This book helps readers move decisively away from the notion of channel strategy as a sideline to the core business. Building a channel advantage is the core business today, and this is an essential text and reference for all serious marketing and sales professionals and students. Channel innovation is separating market winners from market losers, and not just in leading-edge technology industries. In a business world where industry players are selling practically the same products at essentially the same prices at about the same cost, the only real source of sustainable competitive advantage is the sales channel: how you sell, not what you sell. Selling becomes a question of how to connect products with customers via the best mix of sales channels: the sales force, value-added partners, distributors, retail stores, telemarketing, and the Internet. In short, how companies sell has become as important as what they sell. 'The Channel Advantage' explains how leading companies develop strategies that integrate e-commerce, telemarketing, sales forces, and distributors to achieve superior sales performance and sustainable competitive advantage. Timothy R. Furey is chairman, CEO and co-founder of Oxford Associates, a privately held consulting firm specializing in sales and market strategy, e-commerce channel integration and market research, based in Bethesda, Maryland. Oxford has achieved an annual growth of more than forty percent since its creation in 1991 and was named one of America's 500 fastest growing private companies by Inc. Magazine in 1997. Furey, a pioneer in the use of hybrid sales and marketing strategies for blue chip companies, works extensively with senior management leadership teams to develop and implement go-to-market growth strategies. His clients include IBM, American Express, Marriott, Xerox, Fidelity Investments, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Johnson & Johnson. Under his leadership, Oxford Associates has developed leading-edge strategies, business processes and systems for deploying and integrating multi-channel sales and marketing systems. They work to align products with the right customers via an appropriate mix of the Internet, telesales, distributors, value-added partners, and traditional sales force channels. Mr. Furey is the co-author of THE CHANNEL ADVANTAGE (Butterworth-Heinemann, August 31, 1999), which is endorsed by the CEOs of America Online, Lotus Development, Ocean Spray, and Xerox. Mr. Furey also serves on the Board of Directors of Alpha Industries (Nasdaq:AHAA), a leading semiconductor manufacturer for wireless telephone applications. Previously, Mr. Furey worked with Boston Consulting Group, Strategic Planning Associates, Kaiser Associates and the Marketing Science Institute. He earned a BA in Economics, cum laude, from Harvard University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Lawrence G. Friedman is an internationally recognized channel strategy consultant whose clients have included companies such as Lotus, AT&T, Canon, Compaq Digital Equipment, Microsoft and Bell Atlantic. He also held executive level positions at Andersen Consulting and Huthwaite, Inc., the sales research firm that developed the SPIN Selling Model. In 1996, Friedman, with Neil Rackham and Richard Ruff, co-authored the best-seller, GETTING PARTNERING RIGHT (McGraw-Hill). He is on the review board of the Journal of Selling and Major Account Management, which published his article, Multiple Channel Sales Strategy, in the April, 1999 issue. His firm, The Sales Strategy Institute, works with clients to identify and evaluate new go-to-market opportunities and conducts in-depth channel strategy workshops and seminars. Mr. Friedman is a frequent guest speaker and lecturer on sales and channel strategy throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Mr. Friedman earned an MA from the University of Chicago.

'The Channel Advantage' deals with one topic, and deals with it comprehensively and rigorously: how to construct a sales channel system that will yield world-class sales performance and durable competitive advantage. This book helps readers move decisivel.

Are you at risk of being trapped in an uncompetitive business? Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now. In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single dominant idea—that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Once the premise on which all strategies were built, this idea is increasingly irrelevant. Now, Columbia Business School professor and globally recognized strategy expert Rita Gunther McGrath argues that it’s time to go beyond the very concept of sustainable competitive advantage. Instead, organizations need to forge a new path to winning: capturing opportunities fast, exploiting them decisively, and moving on even before they are exhausted. She shows how to do this with a new set of practices based on the notion of transient competitive advantage. This book serves as a new playbook for strategy, one based on updated assumptions about how the world works, and shows how some of the world’s most successful companies use this method to compete and win today. Filled with compelling examples from “growth outlier” firms such as Fujifilm, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Infosys, Yahoo! Japan, and Atmos Energy, The End of Competitive Advantage is your guide to renewed success and profitable growth in an economy increasingly defined by transient advantage.

Omni-Channel Retail and the Supply Chain The days of going to the local department store to buy a television, view the options available, and make a purchase now seem "quaint." The emergence of the internet, smartphones, social media, and other technologies has opened a world of new options for consumers (and businesses) to review, research, and buy online with an ever-increasing array of delivery options. The emergence of e-commerce has resulted in what is commonly known today as "omni-channel" marketing, in which customers engage with companies in a variety of ways, including in a physical store or online via websites and mobile apps. This process puts the supply chain "front and center," as consumers are increasingly demanding and browsing, buying, and returning goods through various channels, not just the traditional "brick and mortar" way. To accomplish this with high levels of service while remaining profitable requires real-time visibility of inventory across the supply chain and a single view of consumers as they continuously move from one channel to another. While this is a boon to consumers, it has made the already complex global supply chain even more challenging to manage. On top of that, the 2020 Covid19 pandemic has accelerated this omni-channel retail trend, as consumers need even more ways to order and additional options for last-mile delivery, such as curbside pickup. Covid19 has exposed a lack of flexibility and readiness, resulting in shortages of everything from toilet paper and meats to personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators. It has been a real-life example of the "bullwhip effect," where variability at the consumer end of the supply chain results in increased variability as one goes upstream towards distributors, manufacturers, and suppliers. This results in shortages, misallocations, and increased costs. No longer can a manufacturer, distributor, or retailer of consumer products just "fill the pipeline" and wait for orders to come in. Now, they must anticipate various purchases and delivery items, while at the same time minimizing costs. To do this is no easy task, requiring a Lean, agile, and responsive supply chain. Until now, there was no existing "playbook" for organizations to navigate their way through this new world. This book describes the impact of omni-channel marketing on the supply chain and logistics functions, and is intended to help management meet the needs of not only today’s ever-changing world but to anticipate what may be required in the future to achieve superior customer service, profitability, and a competitive advantage.

The winner of the UK's Business Book of the Year Award for 2021, this is a groundbreaking exposé of the myths behind startup success and a blueprint for harnessing the things that really matter. What is the difference between a startup that makes it, and one that crashes and burns? Behind every story of success is an unfair advantage. But an Unfair Advantage is not just about your parents' wealth or who you know: anyone can have one. An Unfair Advantage is the element that gives you an edge over your competition. This groundbreaking book shows how to identify your own Unfair Advantages and apply them to any project. Drawing on over two decades of hands-on experience, Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba offer a unique framework for assessing your external circumstances in addition to your internal strengths. Hard work and grit aren't enough, so they explore the importance of money, intelligence, location, education, expertise, status, and luck in the journey to success. From starting your company, to gaining traction, raising funds, and growth hacking, The Unfair Advantage helps you look at yourself and find the ingredients you didn't realize you already had, to succeed in the cut-throat world of business.

Most new media will fail upon release. The Lean Media framework gives creators an edge. As noted by Automattic's head of design and inclusion John Maeda, "Lamont has successfully taken concepts from the Lean Startup movement and applied them to media production projects."

A book for everyone who does business with China or in China. The history-making development of the Chinese economy has entered a new phase. China is moving aggressively from a strategy of imitation to one of innovation. Driven both by domestic needs and by global ambition, China is establishing itself at the forefront of technological innovation. Western businesses need to prepare for a tidal wave of innovation from China that is about to hit Western markets, and Chinese businesses need to understand the critical importance of innovation in their future. Experts George Yip and Bruce McKern explain this epic transformation and propose strategies for both Western and Chinese companies. This book is for everyone who does business with China or in China, or is interested in the development of the world's fastest-growing economy. Western CEOs can learn from Chinese companies and can create an effective innovation process in China, for China and the world. Chinese CEOs can benefit from understanding the strategies of their peers as they strive to enter foreign markets. And all Western businesses should prepare for disruption from their new competitors. Yip and McKern provide case studies of successful firms, outline ten ways in which the managerial and innovative capabilities of these firms differ from those of Western firms, and describe how multinationals doing business in China can become part of the Chinese ecosystem of new knowledge and technology. Yip and McKern argue that these innovation capabilities will be the basis for creating world-class products and services to meet the challenges of a new era of global competition.