Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Figure 14.3 
Forces acting 
on the sales 
organisation
Marketing
strategy
Productivity
initiatives
Direct
channels
Customer
demands
Sales
organisation

---

397
THE STRATEGIC SALES ORGANISATION
One example of changing customer demands is the development of ‘social selling’ – the 
coming together of online, mobile and social media with personal selling in how custom-
ers make purchase decisions and how sellers are engaging customers and building stronger 
customer relationships. Customers have far more control over the sales process than in the 
past. The emergence of new technologies to create a new digital and social media age places 
emphasis on a strong, multi-skilled sales team able to integrate technology with selling. The 
requirement in a new digital buying environment is for sellers to build their sales processes 
around the new customer buying process. Effective salesforces are escalating their use of 
social media to engage customers throughout the buying process ( Giamanco and Gregoire, 
2012 ; Green, 2013 ). 
While the ways in which traditional sales organisations are likely to transform to meet 
these contrasting forces to reshape will vary considerably between different industrial and 
commercial sectors, one way of integrating the outcomes in general terms is in a model of 
the strategic sales organisation.
14.3 
The strategic sales organisation 
The importance of strategic customer relationships mandates a strategic response from 
sales and account management. The strategic sales organisation is an attempt to capture 
the range of changes that may transform the traditional sales organisation into a strategic 
force, impacting on the ability to implement marketing strategy, but also providing leader-
ship in the shaping of that strategy. 
Most attention given to the sales and account management area in the past has been 
largely concerned with tactical and operational issues, and has failed to adopt a stra-
tegic perspective on the management of customer relationships. Interestingly, similar 
comments would have applied in the operations and supply chain strategies prior to the 
revolutions in thinking and practice experienced by those disciplines in the 1990s and 
early 2000s. The sales and account management field is in the early stage of a similar 
and related revolution, characterised by a shift in approach from tactical to strategic. 
There can be little further doubt that, as Shapiro and his colleagues at Harvard asserted 
some time ago, once again: ‘Sales is a board room topic’ ( Shapiro et al ., 1998 ), and that 
the strategic sales organisation is positioned on the top management agenda in many 
organisations. 
However, the new processes and structures needed to enhance and sustain value delivery 
to customers through the sales organisation are likely to require careful evaluation and 
appraisal that extends to domains far beyond those traditionally associated with selling 
activities ( Ogbuchi and Sharma, 1999 ). To support this analysis and to provide a frame-
work for management action, we propose the framework shown in Figure 14.4 and identify 
several tools for practical application ( Piercy and Lane, 2009a ).
The framework suggests the following imperatives for management focus: 
● 
Involvement – placing the sales organisation in the centre of the business and marketing 
strategy debate in companies and aligning sales operations with strategic direction.
● 
Intelligence – building customer knowledge as a strategic resource critical both to strat-
egy formulation and to building added-value strategies with major customers.
● 
Integration – establishing cross-functional relationships necessary to lead the processes 
that define, develop and deliver superior value propositions to customers, and managing 
the interfaces between functions and business units impacting on service and value as 
they are perceived by customers.
● 
Internal marketing – using sales resources to ‘sell’ the customer across functional and 
divisional boundaries within the company and across organisational boundaries with