article thumbnail

Making Sense of Speed, Agility and Innovation

Leading Blog

Maneuver, on the other hand, seeks to identify and win valuable but unoccupied markets, segments or channels, or, if attacking a competitor is required, discovering vulnerabilities that can be exploited at the least possible cost. Jeffrey Phillips and Alex Verjovsky are the authors of Outmaneuver: OutThink, don’t OutSpend.

Agility 150
article thumbnail

Why Sales and Marketing Don’t Get Along

Harvard Business Review

Sales-marketing tension can stem from differences in marketers’ and sellers’ perspectives. Marketers think in terms of aggregate customer segments; sellers think in terms of individual customers. Marketers design strategies; sellers implement tactics. Marketing tasks. Joint Sales/Marketing tasks.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Use Your Sales Force’s Competitive Intelligence Wisely

Harvard Business Review

Companies with poor information about competitors are stuck being reactive, lurching from defensive tactic to defensive tactic as new products appear, seemingly out of nowhere. From Data to Action An HBR Insight Center.

article thumbnail

What Creativity in Marketing Looks Like Today

Harvard Business Review

Marketers are adopting the business practices of entrepreneurs such as lean startup and agile development. For its background check solution, Checkr wasn’t getting the results it wanted from traditional sales and marketing tactics as it expanded into new market segments.

article thumbnail

Are You Hurting Your Own Cause?

Harvard Business Review

He developed a plan to reach a growing market segment, which he billed to his colleagues as "obviously compelling" and the only way to save the company from a "dying past."

article thumbnail

Cure Your Company's Allergy to Change

Harvard Business Review

So it appointed leaders to run market segments with profit and loss responsibility, and put pressure on them to change the product mix and improve profitability. At Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, tactics such as daily huddles drove immediate wins and helped entrench a culture of empowerment.

article thumbnail

How a Fast-Growing Startup Built Its Sales Team for Long-Term Success

Harvard Business Review

It’s common for leaders of sales teams to focus almost exclusively on short-term tactics and current operations while failing to think and act in a way that supports the longer-term needs of their businesses — and it’s hard to fault them. forecast accuracy, messages to relevant market segments, and other categories.