Value Merchants: Demonstrating and Documenting Superior Value in Business Markets.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Bookshelf - Brief article - Book review

Value Merchants: Demonstrating and Documenting Superior Value in Business Markets. By James C. Anderson, Nirmalya Kumar and James A. Narus. Harvard Business School Press, 219 pages. $35.

Every management team reliant on a sales force would love to see the salespeople make the best possible sale, and not cut prices just to get the deal done or be viewed as a commodity supplier unable to leverage any superior value. But how to do that? Even if the sales force sees greater value for their products, they often end up matching the competition's price because they can't persuade the buyer to see that value. In the authors' view, they have become "value spendthrifts."

The authors--three business school professors from Northwestern University, London Business School and Wake Forest University--argue that businesses need to instill a process that makes its...