Sales Territories in Sales Management

This essay sample on Sales Territories provides all necessary basic info on this matter, including the most common “for and against” arguments. Below are the introduction, body and conclusion parts of this essay.

What is a Sales Territory

A sales territory is defined as a definite section of customers for which a seller has a direct accountability. The core objective of this sales territory is achieving a systematic exposure of the market; it also enables the establishment of the accountability of the sales person.

It can also be used to assess performance of the company’s business; the sales territory is applied in most companies to advance the customer affairs and also to trim down the sales expenses and thus enhancing more benefits of the salesperson and the organisation at large through the sales of the products.

Though our is a highly technically driven company, with a market place being the 50 United States in which our company’s mission is to supply and sell its products to the consumers in the region, the company’s market has been realized to have dropped in the last few years, as a company’s Sales and Marketing Department we have decide to undertake a decision making process that is meant to define the actual tactics to be utilized in achieving our goals.

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For the sales management team to come up with a clear sales territory we should ensure that it involves a process known as a marketing mix, which carries four elements including; Product this is where the company’s aim will be to define the characteristics of its products that will enable the goods to meet the consumers needs, Price this is the decision on how the company should price its products, Promotion  this is a process  through which we should make our products known to our customers, and lastly the Place element which is the mechanism through which the goods of our company will be moved  from the company to the consumers.

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For our company to achieve recognition of the products through which our marketing opportunities have chances to increase, then we should be able  to have our target consumers, this is normally achieved depending on the following factors; the consumers desires and preferences for our products, geographical factors , location, gender and also age, these factors should be determined before we make a decision  on a particular market segmentation, which will later give our products a marketing opportunity.

This segmentation should match differences in the buying behavior of our customers under which, we should also consider the product competition in the market by stating plans on how our company is going to overcome the competitors strength, through which we should analyze the number of competitors, their size, location and their strengths and weaknesses in the market.[2]

For the sales territory to be successful our sales manager should come up with a marketing strategy which is usually defined as a pattern of activities that seek to achieve the objective of our company and adopt its scope, resources and operations to environmental changes, it is normally a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. A strategy distinguishes a course of action by its hypothesis that a certain future position offers an advantage of acquiring a gain. This pattern is normally presented in various categories which should be highly considered while creating the sales territories in our company, this include:

Trading Strategy

This is a predefined set of rules to be applied by, traders, investment firms and the fund managers use this strategy to help them make wiser investment decisions and eliminate the emotional aspect of trading. It wraps trading formulas into automated order and execution systems where all or part of the firms investment portfolio.

This strategy is governed by rules that do not deviate, based on anything other than marketing action; this strategy eliminates emotions bias because the systems operate within the parameters known by our company. There are two types of this trading strategy: the first one being the Static trading strategy-this is where our company only needs to trade at the beginning and at the end to ensure the payoff, the other type is the dynamic trading strategy which is normally applied between the start and the maturity of the derivative, here we need to trade more than once to ensure the payoff at maturity.[3]

Economic Strategy

This is typically directed to the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, this strategy  have been applied to fields that involve people making choices in a social context. This normally relies on the following collection of economic data which consists of measurable values of prices and changes in prices, for measurable commodities for example the cost of a particular commodity and how much of it is being used.

Formulation of models of economic relationships for example the relationship between the general level of prices and the general level of employment including the observable forms of economic activity  such as money, consumption, preferences, buying, selling and prices.

Marketing Strategy

The sales manager should also apply the marketing strategy which is a planning process that allows an organization to concentrate its resources on the greatest opportunities, so as to increase the sales of its products and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. It serves as the fundamental underpinning of marketing plans designed to reach an organizations marketing goals, policies and action tactics into a cohesive whole.

This strategy is presented in various types including: Strategies based on market dominance, under this form organizations are classified based on the market share or dominance of organization they are as follows, leader, challenger and follower. And the second is the Porter generic strategies this is a strategy on the dimensions of the strategic scope meaning the market penetration and strategic strength referring to the firms, sustainable competitive advantage such as cost leadership, product differentiation and market segmentation. The company sales management team should also consider the innovation strategy which normally deals with the firm’s rate of new product development and business model innovation. It should come up with a growth strategy which can be used to describe how the firm should grow.[4]

The other kind of strategies to be used is the digital strategy which is used to specify an organization’s visions, initiatives and processes in order to deploy its’ online assets including: websites, digital audio and video content, rich internet applications, community groups, banner advertisements in a manner that maximizes the business benefits they provide to the organization. This plan is normally presented in three ways:-identifying key opportunities or challenges in a business where online assets can provide a solution:-identifying the unmet needs and goals of the customers that align  with key business opportunities and lastly developing a vision on how the assets will fulfil the business and customer needs, goals, opportunities and challenges.

The other factor that should be considered for the company to have a good supply of its product is the Geostrategy this is the strategy concerned with geographic direction of state’s foreign policy, it describes a foreign policy thrust of state and does not deal with motivation or decision making processes, therefore, it is not motivated by any geographic or geopolitical factors. Under this strategy a state may project power to a location because of ideological reasons, interest groups or the wish of the leader. It is more often used in a global context denoting the consideration of global land sea distribution, distances and accessibility among other geographical factors.[5]

Grand Strategy

This is the strategy typically directed by the political leadership of a particular country with input from the most senior military officials. It is normally put at the level of movement and use of an entire state resource such as the general types of armaments to favour manufacturing and which international alliances best suit national goals. This strategy overlaps with foreign policies but focuses primarily on the military implications of policy. Because of its scope and the number of different people and groups involved this strategy is usually a matter of public record though the details of implementations are always concealed.

The place or the channel of distribution should also be considered, these are the activities to be used by our company to move its product from the production to consumption, innocent has to come across various channels of distribution to enable our products reach the targeted market this means that we should choose either to use the direct or the indirect channels that is it may be to the consumers directly or through wholesalers. We should consider the following in order to decide on the type of the distribution channel we are to use; we should know the market segment that the distributor is familiar with in which the distributor must be familiar with our company’s target markets. We should also know if our company policies, strategies and image match with that of the distributor, we should also check on the qualification of the distributor by establishing his experiences and deciding on how much training and support we should give the distributor.[6]

There are various types of channels that we can decide on which one to apply in the distribution of our products, this include: wholesalers, these are said to be buying goods in bulk from our company and selling them in smaller packages for resale by the retailers, they can also provide storage facilities for our products, wholesalers will offer our company a reduced physical contact cost between us the producers and our consumers.  The second channel that our company may use is the agents who are normally used in international markets; they may be used to widen the international market for our goods. We can also use retailers; who will have a strong personal relationship with our consumers.