S&M Effectiveness

At this years Jacob Fleming "3rd Chemical Sales & Marketing Effectiveness”, I was honored to share the posium with Professor Dr. Kaj Storbacka of the Business University Nyenrode, the CEO of Dow Corning Xiameter Shelley Bausch, Ubald Kragten of DSM, Klaus Hoffmann of Dynea and Lionel Breuilly of Huntsman to focus on topics such as CRM systems, sales challenges in a globalized world, Asia/China.

Another current issue revolves around sales as a discipline that did not enjoy any major innovation investments as of late. Although sales professionals are oftentimes charged to be more adaptive they are hardly equipped to act up to the challenge. Spin selling and value selling were stressed as suitable responses to this situation.

As a major challenge Dr. Storbacka stressed the necessity of configurational fit to match, deploy and successfully execute various business models at one.

Asia, in particular China were mentioned in the discussion as incredibly local economies with major global impact. Western companies need to learn to act in such a local manner and grow into becoming an important part of this localized effort.

Innovation challenges need to invite more risk. The strategic intent should be driven by opportunities that present themselves through regulatory and legislative possibilities.

Finally questions regarding success in acquisitions were answered with "speed and execution" to be most crucial for success or failure.

The panel was excellently moderated by Phil Allen who was also a great chair for the entire conference.

In addition to my session on "Centralization of Market & Competitive Intelligence: Challenges, Obstacles, Path to Success" at the 2007 Competitive Intelligence European Summit am October 25, 2007 in Bad Nauheim, I will be a panelist expert speaker for the topic of Global Compettive Intelligence "Global Competitive Intelligence".

The panel discussion will be held October 26, 2007 11:45am, Carsten Gayer, GAYER CONSULTING will facilitate the event.

Details on Expert Talk Global CI:

Conducting Global CI projects can be a daunting task. Learn from Experts and colleagues best practices and aids to improve efficiency and quality of your international CI work.

Challenges and factors of success in respect of Global CI.

Multinational companies face a growing demand on global CI insights. International or even global CI projects - continuous or ad hoc – often bring up questions:

• Which sources are available, if global accessible databases and the Internet are reaching their limits?
• How to solve the problem of linguistical, cultural and temporal barriers at transnational field research (e. g. expert interviews)?
• How to control a complex global CI Project?
  What Tools exist to support global CI routine processes?
• (In which cases) is the use of external service providers and analysts advisable?
• Are everywhere the same sources and methods available, so that qualitative comparable, valid results are guaranteed?
• In how far it can be spoken about „Global CI“, or does CI not always (also) has to be local organized?

The discussion refers equally to CI-Users and CI-Professionals, by approaching lessons learnt from different points of view.

Discussion will be in English.

I would be thrilled to meet you there!