Is Retailing Becoming an Oligopoly?

Certain retail industries such as groceries, cars, cellphones and airlines to name a few have always been oligopolies, but more and more additional retail product categories are leaving the world of pure competition, and entering the world of oligopoly.

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Building High Quality Pricing Systems

These systems typically flow into order management systems and are sometimes built on top of them, or contained within them but often they are stand-alone and talk to the order management system through some standard interface (API). The industry term is CPQ (Configure-Price-Quote), also called pricing or quoting engines.

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Top Salespeople Are NOT Magical Creatures

Neil Rackham, Reed Holden, Andy Zoltners, Prabha Sinha, and many others have all repeatedly found that good salespeople are methodical. They use an approach towards sales that drive prospects through a process.  The process starts with discovery, goes through a learning phase and needs understanding stage, then a proposal that solidifies the tradeoffs, and finally closing.

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