Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

CHAPTER 14 STRATEGIC CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT AND THE STRATEGIC SALES ORGANISATION
companies are not alone in being criticised for their sales and marketing approaches – finan-
cial services, public utilities and social media are very much in the firing line. Banks in the 
UK were warned that they were failing to shed their aggressive, bonus-led sales culture, and 
the regulators continue to take a close interest (Arnold, 2014).
Sales and marketing activities are under intense scrutiny on a global basis. Aside from 
simple damage to corporate reputation and brand equity, the danger is that crises of these 
kinds reduce a company’s ability to implement its marketing strategy and undermine its 
competitive position. This underlines the strategic significance of the front-line of the 
business.
In this chapter, we first examine the factors that should encourage executives to re-
examine the salesforce as a strategic capability, and the marketplace demands that are 
reinforcing these efforts. Then, we examine the strategic sales organisation – the new forms 
of organising the front-line resources that impact on customer relationships and deliver 
superiority in customer value.
This brings us to the issue of ‘strategic customer management’. In the same way that 
companies have come to recognise the strategic aspects of operations management (for 
example, in total quality deployment, and business process reengineering initiatives), and 
in supply chain management (supplier relationship management approaches rather than 
simpler notions of transportation and warehousing), there is now an increasing priority for 
a strategic perspective on the management of customer relationships.
There are two aspects of strategic customer management. The first relates to the strategic 
management of the customer portfolio – making investment choices between different types 
of customer to deliver the goals of marketing strategy, but also to shape that strategy. The 
second aspect relates to the management of strategic customers – building relationships 
with the dominant customers in the company’s portfolio, some of which may be classified 
as strategic accounts and handled differently in a new type of partnership-based business 
model. These are important strategic decisions that impact directly on the profitability and 
risk profile of the company’s business. The structure we have adopted to cover these issues 
is illustrated in Figure 14.1.