Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Figure 14.8 
Shaping factors for 
the strategic sales 
organisation
Strategic
sales
organisation
Inspiration
A leadership
role
Influence
Achieving
implementation
and change
International
Participate in
globalisation
Integrity
Ethical and
socially
responsible

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STRATEGIC CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT TASKS
systems often value highest sales activities that run counter to strategic goals of customer 
orientation and relationship building and favour short-term volume.
● 
Strategies are built around vertical markets and customer focus, but salespeople struggle 
to implement these approaches because they are organised into geographical areas or 
product divisions.
● 
Sales managers do not ‘buy in’ to marketing strategies, and cling to traditional leadership 
behaviours and performance management in controlling sales operations.
● 
Traditional conflicts of interests between marketing and sales executives (they are fre-
quently rewarded for different achievements and evaluated against different measures) 
spill over into lack of cooperation and coordination.
● 
Marketing strategies are developed in isolation from the customer and competitor 
insights provided by salespeople and account managers, and without any understand-
ing of the company’s sales capabilities compared to competitors.
● 
Salespeople and sales executives experience job ambiguity and conflict in attempting to 
implement strategies that fit poorly with the systems and structures in the sales organi-
sation, experiencing lower motivation and job satisfaction and perhaps higher levels of 
stress and burn-out (Hulbert et al., 2009).
Poor alignment of the realities of existing sales processes and structures and the intent 
of marketing strategy is likely to make effective implementation difficult to achieve. None-
theless, it must be recognised that changing issues such as evaluation-and-reward systems, 
leadership and control strategies and organisational structures in the salesforce is usually 
not a minor undertaking.