XLRI dean pens biz guide

From The Telegraph

XLRI dean pens biz guide

Pingal Venugopal Jamshedpur, Sept. 22: To have a better understanding of the Indian market, B-school students need more books written by Indian authors. Keeping this in mind, Pingali Venugopal, the dean (academics) of XLRI, finished his fourth book Sales and Distribution: An Indian Perspective. The book will be released by Sage Publication on September 24. In the book, Venugopal dealt with marketing strategies like customer centric approach in the Indian market. India has become a lucrative market for many multinational companies but there are some unique characteristics of the market, which throws up variety of challenges. The book offers guidance how to cope with these challenges. Sales and Distribution: An Indian Perspective highlights behavioural transactions which helps in completing a sale and also deals with the service orientation required for selling products. “Although there are many books for management students available in the market, a greater percentage of them are by foreign authors. The marketing scenario varies from country to country. Unlike European and other foreign countries, the market in India is different and thus needs a separate study. The rising need of Indian authors motivated me to start writing on my subject,” said Venugopal. Venugopal is a postgraduate from IIM, Ahmedabad, and is a professor of marketing at XLRI since 1994. He is the visiting lecturer at IIM Ahmedabad, Calcutta and Lucknow and in American University of Armenia. The other three books by Venugopal are Marketing Channel Management: A Customer Centric Approach, Managing Your Sales Force: A Motivational Approach and State of the Indian Farmer: A Millenium Study. “It often happens that students read marketing strategies by foreign authors but face problems while executing those plans here. Not only in marketing but books should be written by Indian authors because with so much interest of the other countries in India now, I think there will be a growing demand for it also,” he said. The book costs Rs 495.