Steve recently was interviewed on Sales Rep Radio on the topic of Success at the Executive Level. To listen to the interview, go to www.sellxl.com and click on the Sales Rep Radio Link at the bottom of the Home Page.

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Steve is Available To Deliver Presentations at Sales Meetings and Conferences

Steve has spoken at a number of key sales events during 2006. He is available to speak at your sales meetings and conferences that are typically scheduled early in the new year.

Go to his website – www.sellxl.com - and click on “Speaking Engagement” link on the Home Page.

There are video clips on the website of Steve delivering a presentation on Selling at the Executive Level.

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Effectively Assessing Sales Opportunities – New Article

Click on the attached link to access a new article written by Steve on the subject of Opportunity Management.

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Sales Opportunity Snapshot – Our New One-Day Opportunity Management Workshop

Click on this link to see the next generation in Opportunity Management that has already been embraced by major clients around the world.

Find out why Steve Tafaro, Vice President of Sales for Cybershift, uses Sales Opportunity Snapshot (SOS) to drive their sales process.

According to Steve, “SOS contains an intuitive, easy-to-use desktop tool that has enabled our salespeople to more effectively manage a complex sale and influence the decision process. Since implementing SOS, we have been able to compress the time-to-closure and increase our sales win-rate, resulting in a significant improvement in sales productivity.”

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Steve Named to Advisory Board

Steve was recently named to the Advisory Board of ES Research Group, a company led by Dave Stein – a published author in the sales training space. His recent book How Winners Sell is a best seller several times over!

ESR is a business advisory firm that helps clients evaluate, select, implement and measure sales performance improvement programs. See their website at www.esresearch.com

Click on the following link for a recent article by Dave Stein.

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Book Review:

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation

Published in 2005

This book represents one of the best, recent books on developing corporate strategies. In Blue Ocean Strategy, the authors challenge companies to break out of the red ocean of bloody competition by creating uncontested market space that then makes the competition irrelevant.

The idea is to have you create new markets, where none previously existed. The authors cite Cirque du Soleil as a prime example of a classical blue ocean success. By redefining the purpose of nearly every element of the old circus model, Cirque du Soleil was able to achieve in less than 20 years what it took Ringling Brothers over 100 years to achieve in terms of worldwide revenues.

From the author’s perspective, to fundamentally shift the canvas of an industry, you must begin by reorienting your strategic focus from competitors to alternatives and from customers to non-customers. Then the challenge is to re-evaluate the premises that form your industry’s assumptions and re-shape your company’s business model. According to the authors, the strategic profile with high blue ocean potential has three complementary qualities; namely, focus, divergence and a compelling tagline.

They contrast their blue ocean strategies with those created for the red ocean. Red ocean strategies are predicated and focused on finite markets. Kim and Mauborgne say that you should examine the strategies of your key competitors and determine their limitations – this will enable you to create your company’s blue ocean strategy.

Another example cited is Curves, the women-only health club chain. According to the authors, the creators of Curves first examined the health-club environment and decided to focus on a niche that wasn’t being satisfied by then existing health clubs. Their value innovation (a new term coined by the authors) is a women-only health club that offers a half-hour exercise program, low price memberships and ease-of-use and access. According to the authors, in 2005, Curves was opening a new location every four hours somewhere in the world!

The authors suggest four logical questions to ask before you develop and implement a blue ocean strategy, as follows:

1. Why should people buy your product or service offering? (Does it have “exceptional utility”?)
2. Is it priced fairly so as to appeal to a vast audience?
3. Can you create and deliver it at an attractive cost that enables you to earn a profit?
4. Are there any impediments to discourage the market from accepting your product or service offering?

The major lesson learned is that companies that are not your customers today will often provide you with far more insight into how to create your company’s blue ocean strategy than your existing customers – because your current customers may be very satisfied with your existing offerings!

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