Tqm for Sales and Marketing Management (The Mcgraw-Hill Total Quality Management Series) [Hardcover]

James W. Cortada (Author)

Book Description

Series: The Mcgraw-Hill Total Quality Management Series | Publication Date: March 1993

With quality management practices firmly embedded in their manufacturing operations, cutting-edge companies are looking to get the total job done, across all departments, including sales and marketing. Authored by a leading member of IBM Rochester's 1991 Baldrige-winning quality effort, this nontechnical guide presents all the issues, answers, and concrete working examples needed to apply TQM to any firm's sales and marketing process. This work shows marketing and sales pros how to jump start their drive toward a quality-oriented, market-driven sales environment. It crisply explains how Deming's tenets and the Baldrige's criteria for continuous improvement apply to the entire sales and marketing process, and defines strategic considerations for building a sales culture receptive to TQM. Throughout, its strong focus on justifying costs, exploiting new information technology, and fostering participative management, employee empowerment, teams, and self-direction shows readers how to manage their sales personnel in today's quality world.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Mcgraw-Hill; First Printing edition (March 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0070237522
• ISBN-13: 978-0070237520
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,299,784 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was trained as an historian with a Ph.D. in modern history, but have spent nearly 40 years at IBM in sales and consulting and am the author of a dozen books on European history and two dozen on the history of information technologies and another dozen on business management. My interests are largely around the role of information in moder societies: use, managemnt, and history. I am currently writing a global history of how computing spread around the world so fast and am publishing a book on how historians think with a lot of my experiences, called Hunting for History. I just did a book on the role of information as THE thing businesses do, make, and worry about, called Information and the Modern Corporation. It was a lot of fun to write and is intended for everyone.

Customer Reviews

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Marketing and Sales Revolution, May 14, 2001

By 

Craig L. Howe "The Pointed Pundit" (Darien, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tqm for Sales and Marketing Management (The Mcgraw-Hill Total Quality Management Series) (Hardcover)

Business is revolutionizing its approach to quality and, in return, is being rebolutionized.

Corporations, faced with cutthroat gloabal competition and shorter product life cycles, have been quick to embrace Total Quality Management (TQM) principles in their manufacturing processes. James W. Cortada argues in this well-written and easily understood book the coporation's customer focal points, sales and marketing departments, must play a lead role if the effort is to be successful.

Assuming the reader neither wants, nor needs, a primer on salesmanship or basic customer-oriented marketing, Cortada dispenses practical, realistic and sage advice for the executive attempting to implement a quality strategy within his marketing and sales departments.

If thre is a loud message in the book, it is change must begin immediately. The customers demand it and are willing to pay a premium for it. Balancing TQM marketing theory and tactical advice while avoiding long strings of war stories, the author guides the reader through and around many of the pitfalls leading to increased customer loyalty and repeat business -- the twin goals of any marketing organization.

Cortada suggests the quality journey begins by using the twin beacons of customer satisfaction and cycle-time reduction to look at four elements of the practitioner's sales and marketing effort -- measurements, organization, compensation and education. Although inwardly directed, they provide an opportunity to shake-down his or her quality drive before tackling the more difficult external issues.

No matter how well conceived, the author warns, the drive will be resisted. Initially, the measurements are a step to alter the behavior of your organization, he says, and will be replaced with others tied to the tactical concerns of customers. Organizational and compensation changes are required to realign resources with the new vision. Education lubricates these wheels of change.

Cortada suggest forming councils of customers and peers to trade experiences and to benchmark progress. Their support, he suggests, is vital during early stages when most employees have doubts and are insecure about what does not initially resemble old-fashioned salesmanship.

"They...," concludes Cortada, "provide sales management with a wonderful reaffirmation of what we have always known: that the customer is king and the king wants quality."