The Channel Advantage

'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 ext