Participants build skills in message packaging and delivery for both spoken and written communication: Voice mail, presentations, one-on-one conversations, and, e-mail, memos and reports. Skills are built in managing communication anxiety, facilitating team communications and assessing communication style. Coaching to enhance performance and facility in business/social networking are enhanced.

This course is designed for managers or team leaders seeking to maximize their resources to achieve optimal results for organizations and their customers. This course is intended for MBA students considering a career involving sales/customer management or for students that seek to gain insights into sales and customer relationships needed to produce top results.

Utilizing current practices, processes and proven in-market techniques, students are shown how to create and maintain a customer sales team capable of achieving excellent results with the internal as well as external customer. Emphasis will be placed on Team Leadership Skills, Profiling and Prioritizing Customers, Managing Team Performance, Developing Business Plans, and Partnerships and Relationships internally and externally.

Personal ethics and credibility are explored as important components for leading business development.

Offered Winter Quarters, Monday evenings. The key to the development of superior customer sales strategy is detailed intelligence. This course investigates sources of customer data, the state of data management technology and the contribution that current and accurate customer information can makein changing sales strategy. Students gain an appreciation of data leveraging, or the use of customer insight to produce winning selling strategies. Students work with the technical tools of selling, including on demand segmentation and research systems from the ACNielsen Company, the Saleforce.com CRM system and a variety of on demand CRM applications. Upon completion of this course, students have acquired significant skill in using technology to resolve sales cases.

A revolution in Sales Management is occurring. Sales management is beginning to realize that the sales process as practiced in the last 3 decades is no longer relevant:

• Cold calling is highly ineffective
• Traditional Sales forecasting no longer is sufficient for today’s business environment
• The sales cycle has changed remarkably
• Presentation is no longer the focus of professional selling
• Traditional Marketing and Sales Roles no longer apply
• To measure and coach sales performance requires technological support.

Technology, a new focus on sales operations, and a new era of competition have permanently changed the practice of sales management. In this course students will gain an appreciation for sales operations, new sales technologies and the need to coach and train sales people better. In this course students will develop new sales management skills by participating in a term long, interactive simulation requiring them to manage a sales region for a major medical technology company. Students in this class will address sales challenges utilizing salesforce.com, The Callidus Cloud Coaching Suite, Terralign’s territory management technology and Cutting Edge Technology’s Connect Recruiting Program. Students completing this course will learn that technology is proving the means to transform sales management into the precise science of Sales Management 2.0.

This course focuses on category management strategy and will provide students with an opportunity to solve actual category management problems for retailers like Walgreen’s, 7-Eleven, Roundy’s and Staples. Students will work on solutions to real category problems in these retail environments to support companies such as Wrigley, Red Bull, and Pepsi. Our students will have the opportunity to learn for mentors form both retail and manufacturing partners. During the term students will learn via lecture and a comprehensive case study.

In this course students will learn to master the following technologies: Nielsen Answers Retail, Spaceman, and Spectra. They will also be exposed to IRI technologies and other space management systems. Students successfully completing this course will be properly prepared for careers in category management and also for sales assignments in consumer packaged goods companies.

The goal of every business strategy is to create profitable customers by delivering superior value. The way in which that strategy is monetized in the implementation process is critical to the success of the venture. The key focus of the course will be the development of useful processes and metrics through the marketing and selling activities to deliver customer and corporate value which will allow managers to monitor and measure individual corporate performance. Student learning will be assessed by a combination of class participation, weekly assignments, examinations, and team performance on final written proposals and presentations. Prerequisites: MKT 555 is a prerequisite for this class.

In today's hyper-competitive business environment, firms find it increasingly difficult to generate sustainable revenue growth. This course uses an organic-growth, marketing-based, customer-driven approach for developing sustainable year-on-year revenue growth. Linkages are created between existing benefits-based customer segmentation strategies, changing customer needs, the choice of a firm's or a business unit's product/service-line positioning strategy, its chosen business model, and finally its performance. Topics covered include: - Outcomes-based segmentation - Price-performance curves - Market-leader positioning approaches - Business model visualization and representation - Dynamic positioning, product-line and business unit adaptation - Value migration and threats to sustainability By the end of the course, students will know how to detect signals of change in customer needs and adapt their business models resulting in sustainability. This is a case-based course with a project deliverable due at the end of the course. Prerequisites: MKT 555 is a prerequisite for this class.