Customer Reviews

Value Acceleration: The Secrets to Building an Unbeatable Competitive Advantage

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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This book opens your eyes to what companies need to do to be competitive in the highly competitive economy in which we exist. It provides breakthrough thinking in how to leverage marketing and sales activities. I highly recommend it to anyone responsible for managing marketing or sales within a company, or anyone who aspires to do so.

Steve Waterhouse

Consultant & Author of "The Team Selling Solution"

Value Acceleration is a break through book! It applies the process improvement tools that great companies like IBM, Toyota, Intuit are using to overpower their competitors. However the book does not get bound up in terminology. It is also well researched, written and attributed. The footnotes are bang on. My lesson learned was the clear delineation of the importance of Marketing as a strategic interface between Product Development and Sales. This book is a major step toward successful implementation of Six Sigma and Lean Thinking to result in an end-to-end Product Development- Marketing- Sales process. The book makes it clear that this will be key to good companies being able to continue to seize market opportunities. The Prologue as a fable is extremely well done and grips the reader. A must buy for all businesses!

This book is a must-read for anyone who has struggled with joining marketing and sales process. Imagine if you had a model that when implemented successfully empowered all sales and marketing activity for the long-term competitive advantage. This book provides just that. If there is one book I would recommend for both CMOs and sales professionals to read this year, this book is it. The authors not only provide real-world examples but actionable steps at every turn for a company to successfully reduce all the bottlenecks that often occur in marketing/sales process. Stellar case examples include Samsung, Motorola, Ford and others. Lean thinking has finally been introduced and applied to marketing/sales process! Bravo!

Prakash Aswani

President

BioSystem Solutions, Inc.

As a development engineer between design and production, I could not put down this book. The first part of the book I kept saying "This is my life" when Mitchell and Ralph described what is left wanting in Marketing and Sales. Have you ever spent months (and millions) developing a product that fails to sell even the prototypes? Well in a prior life with a start-up company we spent 90 million and 3 years on a product that sold 1 prototype. At our burn rate we estimated that that was about ˝ a days worth of pay...

Where was the market? This is an extreme example, however, manufacturing engineers and management can all list off horror stories of products that miss their mark and cause extreme frustration (and cost).

As people who have gone through all the quality improvement methodologies and really have our new product design and introduction process down to a science, design and manufacturing engineers and managers understand the value in a predictable process. Why not apply this thinking to Marketing and Sales? What if instead of marketing or selling we have a new manufacturing plant that it's only output is satisfied customers? In this factory there is a flexible but predictable (and measurable) process to create these satisfied customers.

Crack open this book and discover how to apply TOC, Lean, and Continuous Improvement to the gooey area in your company. Use what you understand already on your factory floor and extend that knowledge to `accelerate' the `value' from your company.

If you're interested in lean process, how to successfully link marketing and sales activity for an amazing outcome then this is the book for you. The chapter on "Eliminating Your Wasted Effort" is worth the whole price of the book. For every corporate CMO, CEO, VP of Sales - this book is a must read.

It's not often when a book comes along and hits the often disparate marketing and sales models right in the face. Value Acceleration does just that. It gives you an actionable plan to truly ensure long-term advantages over your competition. The authors cite Peter Drucker and his quote, "Marketing is the company and all else are costs" and reveals how a company can have a firm and competitive marketing/sales process model in place. I particularly liked the authors' focus and understanding that indeed "marketing is the one thing that can't be outsourced."

If you're ready to have a real breakthrough in sales and marketing - this is the only book you'll need to read this year.

Rebecca Morgan, CSP, CMC

Author of "Calming Upset Customers," and "Professional Selling: Practical Secrets for Successful Sales"

This fairly short book (164 pages) give us something we haven't seen in quite a while: A brand new, groundbreaking idea. Until now, almost every book or article on marketing was really about advertising or some form of promotion. We've wasted a lot of energy during the last 20 years trying to get genuine marketing improvements in our businesses from this very shallow well. This book points out that marketing is 1) really the only non-outsourceable thing that our firms do, and 2) the only thing we don't currently understand very well. It next corrects that lack of understanding with a clear, complete model of marketing--one that connects with most of the other functions of our companies. This book then introduces us to the ways that we can manage this critical function with already well-understood tools. It is a whole new way to look at not just marketing but our entire business. I predict that the ideas presented in this book will be the next big thing in management.

The reason that the book is fairly short is that it does not follow the same mindless formula that every business book published in the last 25 years seems to have. That is, it does not take 300 pages to explain what can be explained in half that, and it does not endlessly repeat the same things over and over, in slightly different but completely transparent ways. In other words, it respects our intelligence and our time. I wish there were more like it.

If you follow the focus in this book, and encourage the upper management and key players in your company to use it, you will be a nimble, effective marketing machine. I hope my competition never hears about this book.

This book provides a clear rationale and perspective regarding the key issue confronting all organizations today, and that is the effective use of their marketing and sales resources. The authors make effective use of providing an effective context and examples. It is a straight forward and understandable approach to leveraging resources that account for some 30 to 50 percent of corporate costs. A must read for C level executives and all marketing and sales executives.