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Business
Title: Targeted Tactics- Transforming Strategy into Measurable Results Author: William R Cobb Rating:  Good!
Publisher: Xlibris Web Page: www.Xlibris.com Reviewed by: Rod Clark | View Bio |
 
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In recent decades the need to constantly update a company’s marketing strategy has been considered vital in order for a company to survive and thrive. The building blocks of that strategy were marketing and sales master plans, generally conceived at the top and aimed downward at the marketplace. But in recent years, as a global economy has become increasingly diverse, complex, and ever changing—problems have often emerged in the EXECUTION of these grand strategies. Businesses have often stumbled in the gap between grand strategy and measureable results. This gap, between the plan and the performance is an arena well known to William R. ($Bill) Cobb, the author of the new book: TARGETED TACTICS. In fact Mr. Cobb has spent most of his professional life in middle management, or to quote the author: “in the middle ground within an enterprise where ‘the rubber meets the sky’ and ‘the rubber meets the road’ collide.” This is a book in which airy sales strategies are translated into on the ground tactics that produce real results. The book’s “targeted” customers (those likely to benefit) are mid-sized to large companies selling tangible products to commercial, retail and government customers. The approach may be over elaborate for a small business application, but many principles and concepts will still apply. The TARGETED TACTICS program presented offers a seven-phase marketing concept model, each phase in the sequence with a targeted imperative: Determine the market, decide the nature of the company’s business, identify the customer set, determine product and sales strategy, organize and apply the resources, monitor and measure results, evaluate and apply feedback. A concise and comprehensive section of the book is devoted to each phase. In addition to supplying the reader with the fruits of his considerable experience in each phase of the program, Mr. Cobb discourses on a wealth of useful subjects, including psychographics, proprietary sensitivities, the buying process for industrial customers, and challenges involved in securing local, state and federal government contracts. He goes into more detail than one normally finds in a compact handbook of this kind, giving tips on how to identify people who make purchasing decisions, how to set the timing of product releases, how to determine market and cost-based pricing, and how to tune and adapt product lines to the realities of an ever changing marketplace. Mr. Cobb also provides the reader with a series of web site URLs that have huge amounts of useful data and information on tap for businesses striving to transform their marketing and sales strategies into “targeted tactics.” The book is worth the price for these URLs and the footnotes alone. Although TARGETED TACTICS starts a bit slowly with a preface that is a bit cumbersome, the information mapping rapidly improves as the book progresses, offering many useful charts, graphics and flow models to illustrate various processes. Bill Cobb’s book fills a vacuum that is ignored in much business literature—detailing a dynamic and flexible process that can efficiently link and matches product lines with their appropriate customer sets, and enabling companies to get the maximum value out of their marketing and sales programs. Any mid-sized or larger company trying to move goods in today’s rapidly changing marketplace ought to have TARGETED TACTICS on its bookshelf. Vision and strategy are fine, but this is where the rubber meets the road.
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