This year we are offering 8 Roundtables for CEOs focused on various topics/industries.
Still to come in 2011:
Food Series
September 13, September 27, October 12
- Sales VP and Sales Force
- Dealing with brokers
- Dealing with chains: Slotting, getting shelf space, special promotional prices, manufacturer charge-backs, sampling.
- Trends at key chains
- Foodservice trends
- Product and ingredients trends
- Data sources (IRI, SPINS, [UNFI’s] ClearVue, brokers, Whole Foods portal
- In-house vs. outsourced manufacturing
- Ingredients sourcing and cost
- Quality
- Packaging
- Positioning to be acquired
The Sales VP
November 15
- The first sales VP is a special case
- Hiring someone to do what you already know works
- Hiring someone to figure out what you have not been able to figure out
- Pros and cons of search firms
- Getting the most from a Sales VP
- Sales VP role in different selling models:
- Direct sales force
- Distributors
- Reps
- Piggyback on someone else’s sales force
- Telephone
- International
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Recent Roundtables for CEOs:
Selling Your Company Series: 2 Events
- Being ready for the offer you didn’t seek
- Using intermediaries
- Strategic buyers
- Financial buyers
- Keeping a secret
- Telling customers, lenders, employees
Running Your Project-Oriented Business Series: 2 Events
Sales and Marketing
- Should I concentrate on one or two vertical markets, or be more diverse?
- How can I get traction in a vertical market?
- What works in getting sales leads from “partners”? What doesn’t work?
- Successful estimating—horror stories and how to avoid them
- When is fixed price the way to go? When is time and materials pricing safer?
- How can I turn scope creep into follow-on business opportunities?
Delivery and Internal Operations
- How important is career path to the people I recruit and retain? Should I think about it more?
- How can we get delivery people to care about the quality of delivery, client satisfaction,
profitability, and the follow-on sale? - What makes for a good hand-off from sales to delivery, and a good kick-off of work?
- How can I create a 40-, 50-, 60-, or 70-hour “culture,” how do I select among these, and what to do about people who work a lot more or fewer hours?
- How do project managers learn to be “revenue-aware”?
- Should I think of intellectual property as an important asset, or a sideshow?
- What are the keys to identifying follow-on work and selling it?
