#Business#Process

The commercial machinery is subjected today to high demands. Competition in certain markets is very aggressive and is trying to introduce itself searching in our weaknesses.

What we mean by commercial machinery? 

They are all resources that the company intends for pre - sales, sales and after - sales. The sale, and here we preferably refer to the industry world, has become more sophisticated so that it is every time more relevant everything around the "golden minute" a sales engineer needs for the client to accept the closing.

To make the "golden minute" effective the commercial machinery must be thoroughly greased during the "business process" to avoid weaknesses that can be exploited by competitors.

Let's see what we understand as "business process" to appreciate the complexity.

We assume that the company has gone through its Strategic Process and has clear Vision, Mission and Corporate Strategy. Within Corporate Strategy must have defined the Business Strategy which in turn we will divide into Marketing Strategy and Sales Strategy.

  

In turn, the Corporate Strategy should have incorporated the parameters and objectives of Vision (where we want to go?), a Strategic Plan in the medium term (usually five years) and an Annual Budget for the coming year. I recommend that the Budget also incorporates an Estimation (less detailed) for the following exercise after the Budget.

In this way the company through appropriate success indicators (KPI) and conveniently using the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) (Kaplan & Norton) have controlled the execution of the strategy in different periods.

Thus, the Annual Budget must contain the Business Strategy for the coming year (usually the budget is defined and approved in October and November for the following year) and in turn will have a Marketing Strategy along with a Sales Strategy defined in every detail.

Marketing Strategy must collect all support actions to achieve the objectives defined in the Sales Strategy. We will enter in more detail throughout our next’s publications.

The resulting Sales Strategy coming up from the Annual Budget, usually agreed between the Commercial and the General Management of the company, indicating in detail the actions that the commercial machinery have to rush so that together with the support actions defined in the Marketing Strategy, the objectives included in the Sales Strategy are reached. In this way the final result is compliant with the annual budget agreed by and for the company.

Sales Strategy included in the Budget will be divided in the Operative Sales Plan where all the numerical details will be collect (may include a Profit & Loss for the company) and a qualitative part which we call Strategic Sales Plan where all strategic moves will be detailed to carry out the Plan.

We will enter in more detail in our forthcoming publications about all these interesting aspects that highlight the challenge for the commercial machinery to become a selling machine!