Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Inspiration – part of the outcome of reinventing the traditional sales organisation should 
be to renew the ability of those who manage key external relationships with customers 
to inspire and provide broader leadership within the business.
● 
Influence – a test of whether the strategic sales organisation is taken seriously is the 
degree to which it exerts influence over the company’s strategic agenda and the key 
strategic decisions that are made.
● 
Integrity – there has never been a time when scrutiny of the ethical and responsible 
behaviour of companies was greater, and when the cost of being judged unethical or 
irresponsible was higher. Managing relationships with customers, partners and suppliers 
with integrity is a huge challenge, but not one that can be ignored. Increasingly, major 
customers cannot do business with people whom they cannot trust, or whose poor cor-
porate reputations carry a danger of contamination by association. This may be among 
the highest priorities in new types of buyer–seller relationship (Galea, 2006).

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CHAPTER 14 STRATEGIC CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT AND THE STRATEGIC SALES ORGANISATION
● 
International – the globalisation of markets, the emergence of global customers and 
the spread of international competition mandates an international perspective on how 
we manage customer relationships in domestic and overseas markets. We expand on 
this fuller agenda in more detail and with operational tools elsewhere ( Piercy and Lane, 
2009a ).
14.4 
Strategic customer management tasks 
The transformation of the traditional sales organisation into a strategic force that should 
feature centrally in the analysis that underpins strategic choices by marketing executives, 
may be achieved by moves towards at least some of the characteristics of the strategic sales 
organisation. However, the larger goal we pursue is a strategic customer management per-
spective, which may be achieved through the strategising of sales processes and structures. 
The key distinguishing features of a strategic customer management (SCM) approach are 
summarised and developed further in the sections that follow. The domain for strategic 
customer management is described in Figure 14.9 .
14.4.1 Alignment of sales processes with strategy 
At one level, the SCM mandate is concerned with the issue of marketing strategy imple-
mentation. To many business-to-business customers, the salesperson who visits is the sup-
plier company, and has far more impact on customer perceptions of the supplier than 
promotional and other communications approaches. The interface between the customer 
and the supplier managed by the salesforce has long been recognised as a major source of 
implementation failures. We consider implementation issues in Chapter 16 , but particular 
problems relating to the sales/marketing strategy interface that are frequently encountered 
include: 
● 
Marketing strategies that aim to build strong competitive positions through superior 
customer relationships fall foul of sales organisations where salespeople are rewarded by 
volume-based commission paid for sales transactions – traditional evaluation-and-reward