Competitive Intelligence and the Sales Force

Joël Le Bon is a marketing professor at the Universityof Houston C.T. Bauer College of Business where he alsoserves as Director of Executive Education for the Sales ExcellenceInstitute. He received a Bachelor of Arts in ManagementScience, a Master of Science in Marketing andStrategy, and a PhD in Marketing from the University ofParis Dauphine. His research has received numerous awardsand distinctions and has been published in leading academicjournals. He is also the rst international professorawarded the AMA's Prentice Hall Solomon-Marshall-StuartTeaching Award for Innovative Excellence in MarketingEducation.

Because of their daily presence in the field and favored relationships with their customers, salespeople are the eyes and ears of their companies. In the new economic war, managers cannot take the chance of not being fully aware of the way they could be threatened by the competition. Yet, organizations face great difficulties to stimulate salespeople's collection and dissemination of competitive intelligence, and to manage market-based intelligence efficiently. This book aims to assist sales and marketing managers in facing such challenges while providing them with action-oriented answers to the following key questions: What kind of information salespeople should collect from the field and how to transform such information into intelligence? How to improve salespeople's competitive intelligence collection and exploitation skills? How to enhance the sales force's commitment to competitive intelligence activities? How to manage and distill market-based intelligence throughout the organization and maintain market leadership? And, how to approach the ethical aspects of competitive intelligence and remain protected against competitors' competitive intelligence activities? By leveraging the latest research, practitioners' interviews, companies' best practices, along with practical tools and guidelines, this book help organizations achieve their market-orientation strategy and maintain a sustainable competitive edge.