Absolutely Wonderful! | Channel Advantage, The | Lawrence Friedman, Tim Furey

Practical and Tactical | Channel Advantage, The | Lawrence Friedman, Tim Furey

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	• Channel Advantage, The Lawrence Friedman, Tim Furey Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999 - 228 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Best book on channels, period.

I honestly don't know how this book could have been better - I learned so much from that I can put to immediate use in building a reseller channel. There are a few other books out there on channels but this one is understood by everyone in the field to be the bible of channel strategy.

Absolutely Wonderful!

Friedman goes right to it. Use the Internet! Don't just use one channel! Multiple channels reach multiple consumers! More customers means more sales! More Sales means more revenue! I'm not entirely convinced Friedman should have said profit--I think the recent stock market problems proves that revenue and profit are two different things. Or not, depending on your auditor.

I used this with Michael Levine's Guerrilla PR: Wired for one reason. Friedman knows how to use the Internet, but Levine's book also has plenty of useful stuff. Why limit yourself?

I think what separates this from other multiple channel advocates is Friedman's unabashed enthusiasm. It's rather contagious, and I found myself smiling more and more. It's nice to smile when reading a business book.

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Practical and Tactical

Today it is just as important to put effort and creativity into how you go to market as into what you bring to market. Each sales channel has its own strengths and its own limitations. For example, sales forces can handle complex transactions and provide a high quality of customer service, but they're expensive. On the other hand, the internet is very inexpensive, but you will be limited to the sale of simple, low-cost products. The trick is to have a variety of sales channels appropriate to the products, to reach the most diverse group of customers and deliver the right product at the lowest cost. The authors have provided three steps to building a world-class sales channel system.

1. Know which channels you should be using.
2. Know how to build those channels into world-class performers.
3. Manage them together as an integrated go-to-market system.

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A "Power Tool" for Channel Managers

The Channel Advantage is one of the first books I read on Channel Program Development. I keep it on my desk and refer to it often.
The first time you read this book you'll be introduced to Friedman's and Furey's arguments for viewing the channel as "the" competitive advantage for a sales organization, something more powerful than the brand strategies being cooked up in the marketing departments. For an organization invested heavily in one channel strategy, the authors use a comparison/contrast method to demonstrate the relative merits of different channel strategies: direct sales, VAR sales, telemarketing, and Internet. Without arguing for one strategy over another, the authors will open your eyes to aspects of a strategy you haven't considered. For instance, until reading The Channel Advantage, I've been negative on the Internet strategy, but these guys will show you how to make it work without completely undercutting your sales force.
The second time you read this book, you will refer to p.187 for the chart illustrating Channel Mix and Integration. It visually illustrates a plan for creating the right combination of your channel strategy through alignment of your sales process. It makes the powerful argument that each channel strategy can be used at different times in the sales process, to help move it along and shorten it. The Channel Advantage is a "power tool" that helps you analyze how to invest your limited resources in a "portfolio" of channels and to measure your performance. Read Part One and Part Two one time through, but keep referring to Part Three.
The writing in Channel Advantage is academic, but there's a lot of red meat here. Strongly recommend for the experienced Channel Manager or the Sales Manager who wants to learn more about how channels can add to his/her performance.

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A book for effective design and execution

Very interesting book for those of you who really need a comprehensive, thorough, and easy to implement strategy regarding distribution channels. It changed my previous perception about channels as a consequence, and create a new perspective about channels as a source of new business and new alternatives of go to market. In addition, it gives an almost prescriptive list of to-do things in order to create a channel model, and to measure its impact.

'The Channel Advantage' deals with one topic, and deals with it comprehensively and rigorously: how to construct a sales channel system that will yield world-class sales performance and durable competitive advantage. This book helps readers move decisively away from the notion of channel strategy as a sideline to the core business. Building a channel advantage is the core business today, and this is an essential text and reference for all serious marketing and sales professionals and students.

Channel innovation is separating market winners from market losers, and not just in leading-edge technology industries. In a business world where industry players are selling practically the same products at essentially the same prices at about the same cost, the only real source of sustainable competitive advantage is the sales channel: how you sell, not what you sell. Selling becomes a question of how to connect products with customers via the best mix of sales channels: the sales force, value-added partners, distributors, retail stores, telemarketing, and the Internet.

In short, how companies sell has become as important as what they sell. 'The Channel Advantage' explains how leading companies develop strategies that integrate e-commerce, telemarketing, sales forces, and distributors to achieve superior sales performance and sustainable competitive advantage.

Timothy R. Furey is chairman, CEO and co-founder of Oxford Associates, a privately held consulting firm specializing in sales and market strategy, e-commerce channel integration and market research, based in Bethesda, Maryland. Oxford has achieved an annual growth of more than forty percent since its creation in 1991 and was named one of America's 500 fastest growing private companies by Inc. Magazine in 1997.

Furey, a pioneer in the use of hybrid sales and marketing strategies for blue chip companies, works extensively with senior management leadership teams to develop and implement go-to-market growth strategies. His clients include IBM, American Express, Marriott, Xerox, Fidelity Investments, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Johnson & Johnson. Under his leadership, Oxford Associates has developed leading-edge strategies, business processes and systems for deploying and integrating multi-channel sales and marketing systems. They work to align products with the right customers via an appropriate mix of the Internet, telesales, distributors, value-added partners, and traditional sales force channels.

Mr. Furey is the co-author of THE CHANNEL ADVANTAGE (Butterworth-Heinemann, August 31, 1999), which is endorsed by the CEOs of America Online, Lotus Development, Ocean Spray, and Xerox. Mr. Furey also serves on the Board of Directors of Alpha Industries (Nasdaq:AHAA), a leading semiconductor manufacturer for wireless telephone applications.

Previously, Mr. Furey worked with Boston Consulting Group, Strategic Planning Associates, Kaiser Associates and the Marketing Science Institute. He earned a BA in Economics, cum laude, from Harvard University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Lawrence G. Friedman is an internationally recognized channel strategy consultant whose clients have included companies such as Lotus, AT&T, Canon, Compaq Digital Equipment, Microsoft and Bell Atlantic. He also held executive level positions at Andersen Consulting and Huthwaite, Inc., the sales research firm that developed the SPIN Selling Model.

In 1996, Friedman, with Neil Rackham and Richard Ruff, co-authored the best-seller, GETTING PARTNERING RIGHT (McGraw-Hill). He is on the review board of the Journal of Selling and Major Account Management, which published his article, Multiple Channel Sales Strategy, in the April, 1999 issue.

His firm, The Sales Strategy Institute, works with clients to identify and evaluate new go-to-market opportunities and conducts in-depth channel strategy workshops and seminars. Mr. Friedman is a frequent guest speaker and lecturer on sales and channel strategy throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.

Mr. Friedman earned an MA from the University of Chicago.

The first rigorous and definitive guide looking at the whole field of channel strategy
Shows you how to evaluate new channels
Uses real life case studies illustrating cutting edge channel management

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