Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

CHAPTER 14 STRATEGIC CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT AND THE STRATEGIC SALES ORGANISATION
Introduction 
Many of those concerned with marketing strategy or competitive positioning pay relatively 
little attention to issues concerning the salesforce or strategic account management struc-
tures. The view has generally been that marketing executives and business planners make 
strategic decisions, create value through product and brand innovation and make strategic 
choices, while sales and account managers are really concerned only with the implementa-
tion of the plans created by the strategic decision makers. However, this over-simplified 
view of the world does not stand up to the scrutiny of managers who have to develop and 
implement strategy in the complex and highly competitive conditions that characterise most 
business-to-business situations. It is illustrative that a growing number of companies are 
making appointments such as ‘director of strategic customer management’ or ‘strategic 
customer manager’, or making other organisational changes to reflect new realities. Indeed, 
some firms have created a new senior executive position – ‘chief revenue officer’ or ‘chief 
customer officer’ – who oversees both sales and marketing functions. 
For example, Proctor & Gamble, under A.G. Lafley’s leadership, was transformed from 
the stodgy, slow-moving, inward-looking bureaucracy of the 1990s into a nimble, innova-
tive and aggressive competitor, beating the rest in the 2000s. A significant and enduring part 
of that transformation was the creation of customer business development (CBD) organisa-
tions at the front of the business. The goal of CBD was to transform the old, narrow idea of 
buyer–seller relationships with customers, into a multifunctional, collaborative approach 
designed to achieve mutual volume, profit and market share objectives. CBD teams work 
with customers to develop the customer’s plans and strategies to the advantage of both 
customer and P&G. CBD team members work collaboratively with experts from finance, 
management systems, customer service and brand management to develop and implement 
business strategies that deliver sustainable competitive advantage for P&G brands ( Piercy 
and Lane, 2009a ). 
The ability of organisations to achieve superiority in how they manage customer rela-
tionships to create value and to sustain profitable relationships is increasingly recognised as 
‘They are starting to get more and more comfort-
able with the notion of engaging with researchers 
outside of the confines of the US,’ he said, adding 
that for now, they were only employing people from 
allied countries. 
‘The reality is they are getting attacked every 
single day by sophisticated adversaries all over 
the world. Just because you’re in another country 
doesn’t necessarily mean you are a bad person.’ 
Synack is also winning new clients in Europe as 
companies fear being fined up to 4 per cent of global 
revenue under the new general data protection 
regulations coming in next year. Mark Kuhr, co-
founder and chief technology officer, said companies 
were rushing to improve their cyber security because 
the regulations will ‘drastically raise the prices for 
a breach’. 
The start-up will now work with Microsoft, 
Hewlett-Packard and Singtel’s sales organisations to 
sell the platform to their customers. Nagraj Kashyap, 
corpor ate vice-president at Microsoft Ventures, said 
the company admired the start-up’s ‘innovative, 
crowd-focused approach’. 
Source : from ‘Hacker-for-hire company Synack raises $21m’, Financial Times , 11/04/17 (Kuchler, H.).
Discussion questions
1 
What are the issues here?
2 
Why has Synack linked up with Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Singtel?

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INTRODUCTION
a core capability – but a capability that has often been ignored in the literature of marketing 
strategy (Piercy and Lane, 2009a). This chapter seeks to explain why the sales organisation 
and related strategic account management activities should form an important element 
for executives considering the development of marketing strategy – and how they define 
important implementation capabilities (see Chapter 16).
Indeed, many marketing strategy implementation failures can be explained by the poor 
alignment of strategy with sales capabilities. One problem is that many traditional market-
ing and sales approaches were not designed for complex, consultative and collaborative 
technology-based customer relationships where, for example, the ‘product’ is just as much 
being created jointly by buyer and seller as it is being ‘sold’. Sales capabilities provide a 
critical resource that differentiates suppliers from each other in the eyes of professional pur-
chasers. There have been calls to recognise sales as the key to business success and worthy 
of a ‘corner office’ (Delves Broughton, 2012).
For example, it is apparent that in many sectors, traditional sales models are obso-
lete as a result of growing customer sophistication. Indeed, in the pharmaceuticals busi-
ness, high sales pressure placed on doctors to prescribe new drugs has resulted in formal 
training courses in medical schools to teach future doctors how to resist sales pitches 
(Weintraub, 2008). This is symptomatic of the search by the pharmaceutical industry 
for new and better ways to get to market. Companies such as Pfizer, Wyeth, Novartis 
and GlaxoSmithKlein recognise that the era of ‘hard sell’ is over in their sector and are 
working to develop new, more appropriate, business models. Fundamental changes in 
the requirements of business customers mandate a strategic response from sellers that 
is more robust than simple acquiescence to demands for lower prices and higher service 
levels. The challenge is to reposition sales as a core part of a company’s competitiveness, 
where the sales organisation is closely integrated into a company’s business and market-
ing strategy (Stephens, 2003).
The pressure is on to achieve a better alignment between marketing strategy and sales 
and customer management capabilities. The idea of ‘marketing and sales fusion’ is gaining 
traction in many situations as a way of overcoming organisational separation and prob-
lems of coordination (Chartered Institute of Marketing, 2011). Certainly, better alignment 
between marketing and sales has become a priority for many companies (Act-On Soft-
ware, 2015). According to a study by Aberdeen Group in 2011, highly aligned organisations 
achieved a 32 per cent year-on-year revenue growth, while less aligned competitors saw a 
7 per cent decline in revenue (Aberdeen Group, 2011).
Of particular importance to strategic decision makers, the financial and reputational 
costs of some sales-related behaviours may be enormous, acting to undermine a company’s 
market positioning and destroy its strategic credibility. In 2014, leading drugs company 
GlaxoSmithKlein was fined £297 million by the Chinese authorities for paying incentives 
to doctors to prescribe the company’s drugs. The company quickly moved to stop paying 
its sales representatives volume-based commission and to stop paying doctors to speak on 
its behalf at medical conferences (Griffiths, 2014). The company was accused of systemic 
bribery over a sustained period of time (Anderlini et al., 2014). In some ways, the company 
was a scapegoat for a traditional sales approach in this market – a former salesman com-
ments, ‘I never met a doctor who refused a handout unless it was too little’ (Ward and 
Waldmeir, 2014). Nonetheless, GSK saw a 60 per cent collapse in sales in China resulting 
from the corruption probe (Griffiths, 2014).
The crisis in China follows fines for pharmaceutical companies in the United States 
related to their sales and marketing policies: GSK paid $3 billion to the Department of 
Justice to settle claims including ‘cash payments disguised as consulting fees, expensive 
meals, weekend boon-doggles and lavish entertainment’; Abbott paid $1.6 billion for ille-
gal marketing of a bipolar disorder drug; Johnson & Johnson paid $181 million to settle 
claims over marketing of an anti-psychotic drug, and the final bill could reach $2.2 billion 
(Andrew and Waldmeir, 2013). US estimates are that payments and gifts by pharmaceutical 
companies to physicians add up to $19 billion a year (Weintraub, 2007). Pharmaceutical 

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