Decision Support and Business Intelligence Systems 9th Edition Ch1&2 Exercise

Selling to consumers or other businesses, developing an effective sales strategy is the first step to persuading customers to part with their money. In particular, we need to identify which customers to focus the efforts on, the sales methods that will be use to reach them and how we will price the product or service.

Increase the frequency of purchases by your customers. No matter how poor your current product or service, you must have some customers or clients. One key strategic dimension that you should be thinking about is how to augment and reposition your product in order to sell more to this group.

(b) diversified its product portfolio; extend target customers and meet the variable needs of customers.

In addition to market share, an offensive strategy could be designed to obtain key customers, high margin market segments, or high loyalty market segments. There are four fundamental principles

Recommendation – To improve revenues and margins, the company will have to increase the revenue contribution of every product category. I recommend that the company go into its customer requirements and see if it can cross sell product items, so that it can get more revenue from each customer. This will ensure that the company is able to offer competitive prices to customers and grow its business using its existing customers.

These enhancements will assist in decreasing losses and help create a more profitable business model, which will be necessary to re-enter the markets previously exited and re-gain consumer confidence.

It is needed to analyze customer behavior and preference data. To generate the necessary data and understand customers’ preferences, Harrah’s had to mine the data.

After identifying the sales targets, the strategies, tactics and actions to achieve them can be worked on. Gluck (2014), mentions that to identify underlying strategies and increase sales, a business can break into a new market segment by adapting an existing product or boosting the average sale per customer by using add-on sales or upselling premium features. When developing the sales strategies, the market segment, customers' motivations and expectations, and the capacity to meet customers' expectations should be considered.

The other important change to bring the company into profitability is to change the product ratios and focus on the more financially rewarding items.

Customer demand and product preference should be focused on to produce more of what the customer wants and to allow for stock reduction.

A company needs to create a series of programs to differentiate their product from those from its competitors and to appropriately price the product to achieve the maximum demand, in order to set up the dynamics of its competitive strategy (David, 2007). The competitive strategy of a company is also expected to offer better products or services to its customers, at a reasonable cost. Due to the mass influence of the external environmental on the customers’ preference, it is vital for the company to develop an available competitive strategy to be able to solve a series of problems, and ultimately to improve the company’s performance. Those problems include: how to differentiate its products or service from competitors, how to create market segments to maximize demands, and how to offer a wider range of products or services to better meet the customers’ needs at more acceptable costs (David, 2007).

“Marketing strategies can have a broad impact on the business in terms of instilling a marketing orientation among all those in the firm: the way of thinking or philosophy of the whole organization. However, marketing strategies can alternatively be seen as dealing only with the development of competitive advantages directly associated with the marketing function such as customer loyalty and distribution channel control. In the latter case, the domain is sometimes even further restricted by sole attention to the various element of the marketing mix rather than the more general issues of customer and channel relationships. There are two key

1. Create a strategy to leverage the knowledge base of the practice against the value of knowledge within the developing ACOs.

Another way of marketing strategies was to increase the communication with its target customers; it has maintained accessibility to customers through:

In the book Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, Michael Hammer and James Champy discuss a concept that he originated known as “reengineering”. The process of reengineering involves coming up with new ideas, specifically processes, which are technologically advanced and extremely effective in completing corporate work. Companies must think ahead so that they will not only succeed today, but also set the rules for future business. A critical part of reengineering involves ignoring the current procedures and structures that have been set by a company and replacing them with more efficient processes. In creating these new processes, companies must focus on the needs and wants of consumers. This will ensure customer satisfaction, which is a key part of maintaining a competitive advantage in today’s world.