For the past few weeks we have laid out the case that stipulates that Sales & Marketing are not at war; yet for the match to be made in heaven, an integrated approach has to be adopted.
We at Superior Sales have identified this as a key differentiator and through our 40+ years (combined) in both Sales & Marketing have developed the ‘Superior Integrated Way’.
Critical to the success of your business is the ability to develop robust, powerful commercial strategies. Strategies that successfully grow the business and defend against risk, in ways that maximize your profitable revenue. The Superior Integrated Way is the framework that will help you make the key commercial choices, needed to develop these winning strategies.
In the same way that the Superior Integrated Way facilitates communication across markets, it also facilitates communication across different functions. Managing multiple brands, delivered via multiple channels across different regions requires the cooperation of many people in different functions, across the company. Each functional team plays an important role in developing and executing your commercial strategy.
With so many different teams it is no surprise that sometimes decisions made by one team do not always hand off cleanly to other teams. Portfolio decisions made by senior leaders do not always get carried through individual brand and channel strategies. Effectively translating the individual strategies into in-market activities can also be a challenge. The Superior Integrated Way will provide a variety of tools and templates that capture and hand off important decisions at each stage of the commercial strategy development.
The Category Strategy and Portfolio Roles capture decisions made in Portfolio Strategy. The framework ensures that the in market activities are developed to meet specific strategic objectives. At each stage of the commercial strategy development, teams can easily see what choices have been made & why.
Our business environment is constantly changing. New trends emerge, regulations change, competitors make new moves and we discover new and better ways to manage our business. If we want to win in our markets / channels we have to be flexible and adapt as these changes occur. The Superior Integrated Way is built with this challenge in mind. It is not a static framework but rather a flexible and living representation of today’s best practices.
The Superior Integrated Way captures our commercial philosophy and ways of working:
- Drives and defends the profitable growth by creating value for the consumer, the shopper and the customer
- Builds strong, relevant brand, pack and channel priorities that win in the local market
- Integrates commercial thinking across the business. It does this by linking choices made about ‘Where to Play’ in the market, with those made about ‘How to Win’ with brand and channel strategies and the execution of these both in and out of outlet
- Shows how to support decisions with an appropriate level of data & managerial experience given market complexity and competitor sophistication
To achieve the winning outcomes defined in your Corporate Strategy, we help you create great outputs (strategies and plans), and to do this we need to make good commercial choices. We have developed the Superior Integrated Way to assist you with this process.
Over the course of the next few weeks we are going to delve into how sales aligns to the requirements of Annual planning:
- Where to play?
- Opportunity Assessment
- Portfolio Strategy
- How to Win Strategy?
- Brand & Channel Strategy
- How to Win in Market
- Integrated Activity Planning
- Execution & Learning
At Superior Sales we build programmes leveraging all the core drivers of capability – organisation, people, process and culture, not just skills. Refer to our white paper at http://www.superiorsales.com.au/storytelling/whitepaper/
Our capability experts work extensively with companies to equip sales teams, and indeed the whole organisation, to deliver a better customer experience. Please get in touch at http://www.superiorsales.com.au/contact-us/
Happy Weekend!
Mark and Jamie
Love to know how you are disrupting your workplace, until next time!
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