December 2009              return to newsletter contents page

New from NAW Institute: Sharpening Your Competitive Edge

The NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence is pleased to announce its newest book, Sharpening Your Competitive Edge: How to Strengthen Your Distribution Sales Team for Top Results. To order this book, go to the link http://www.naw.org/sharpencompetedge1 or call 202.872.0885. Quantity discounts apply when ordering two or more copies.

This book shows distribution sales executives how to build a stronger, strategic selling organization as well as how to lead their sales team to more proactive selling efforts that can increase competitive advantage and, ultimately, sales and profitability. This book will show distributors a low-risk path to

bring change and improvement to a sales organization. This is not a book on how to fix a broken sales organization; instead, it shows how to take an already strong distribution sales team and make it even better.

Sharpening Your Competitive Edge is written for experienced distribution sales professionals, the managers who lead them, and the executives who direct them. In it, Author Jim Pancero offers an in-depth discussion and evaluation of the seven strategic questions that can help distribution executives lead their sales teams to success as well as how to identify and fix potential gaps in a sales team’s strategic selling skills and processes. Real-world distribution examples are also included throughout the book.

The seven strategic questions that can sharpen a distributor’s competitive edge are:

1. Does Everyone Know Who Your Best Customers Are?

2. How Many Messages Are You Taking to Your Markets?

3. How Many “Hellarewe Birds” Are on Your Sales Team?

4. Are You Functioning as a Family or a Bunch of Distribution Orphans?

5. Are You Leading a Distribution SWAT Team or a Crew of Mountain Men and Women?

6. Are Your Distribution Sales Reps Suffering from Car Dealer Syndrome?

7. So, What Do You Plan to Do Next?