Planting Flowers, Pulling Weeds

the long version

Introduces a powerful, ten-step approach to forging strong, life-long relationships with any company's most valuable customers Two former Dell executives turned Fortune 500 consultants reveal the incredibly successfully, ten-step program they instituted at the world's number-one PC manufacturer for finding profitable customers, building and maintaining lasting relationships with them, and allocating resources based on their bottom-line value: the Direct Impact Growth System. Rubio and Laughlin use fascinating and instructive case studies based on their experiences at Dell, Xerox, Citibank, Mercedes Benz, Braun, and other top international firms to demonstrate the system in action and its phenomenal results. Janet Rubio (Austin, TX) led Dell's direct marketing and catalog programs and oversaw its 20 million dollar promotional budget. In 1998 she founded Direct Impact, a top national marketing agency specializing in helping companies accelerate and control growth. Patrick Laughlin (Austin, TX) left IBM, where he was the company's top-ranking salesman, to join Dell as a marketing manager. At Dell, he developed a range of sales programs and customer evaluation tools.