In the continuity of the company, the acquisition and maintenance of customers play an important role.
The functions of the sales department have expanded to include product planning, pricing, distribution activities, promotion and even advertising. Marketing and sales may seem to be synonymous, but they are not, because sales is an integral part of marketing activities, but not the only one.
The sales department executes only a part of the company’s marketing program.
For the company, making a product is, to a certain extent, easy, the hard part is selling it. Hence, the importance of the salesperson, who becomes a key element in representing your company to customers and to society.
Therefore, if salespeople have a decisive importance for the success of the marketing action, it is obvious to emphasize the need for an adequate structure, organization and management of sales.
The integration of marketing in the company requires a continuous interrelation of the actions that make it up, which implies the coordination of sales management in the marketing department.
The starting point of a strategic planning consists in clearly defining which business the company is in and which it wants to be in; after having decided on this fundamental aspect, the objectives to be achieved and the strategy to achieve them are formulated.
However, in order to formulate objectives and strategies, it is necessary for the company to take into account the internal reality (internal analysis), in order to know if it has the resources and adequate means to materialize its strategy and achieve its objectives.
The company’s strategic planning is the process of setting objectives to be achieved, through the articulation of tactics and strategies to obtain competitive advantages at a clearly determined level.
The planning process is made up of a series of consecutive steps and must be characterized by the consistency and firmness of each of its phases, that is, by the elimination of any doubtful points in it.
The planning process needs to be directed as soon as possible by a guideline, defined in fact by the objectives and goals that have been set.
In order to define goals and objectives, data collection is an indispensable element required by management.