Marketing Strategy for Small- to Medium-Sized Manufacturers

Book description

Does this sound familiar? You’ve tried to grow your business but have produced less-than-desired results. You’ve learned that your working capital, cash flow, financial ratios, and overall profitability are insufficient to afford the costs of needed sales, marketing, and promotional strategies typically called for to find and develop new customers, markets, and products. It’s very common that company executives do not follow generally accepted basic business practices such as knowing product costs and margins, obtaining strategically useful information about customers, conducting market research to identify prospective customers, and understanding competitors’ advantages and disadvantages needed to build effective growth strategies. Based on 21 case studies and 126 reviews of manufacturers’ sales and marketing practices, this book explains the common pitfalls so many companies experience, and it offers common sense, practicable, and affordable step-by-step “how to’s” for cost and profitability analyses on products and customers. It will help you find prospective new customers, conduct smart market research, and decipher and use competitor intelligence. It also provides guidelines for determining the best combination of sales coverage for inside/outside sales and independent reps and for estimating the cost to implement sales, marketing, promotional, and growth strategies.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half Title
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright Page
  5. Abstract
    1. Abstract
    2. Keywords
  6. Contents
  7. List of Tables
  8. List of Figures
  9. List of Graphs
  10. Acknowledgments
  11. Foreword
    1. Background and Acknowledgments
  12. Chapter 1 Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Increasing Sales and Profit
  13. Chapter 2 Getting Down to Basics
    1. Four Types of Manufacturers
    2. Customers, Products, and Markets (C-P-M™)—the Essential Components of Growth Strategy
    3. Step Two: Calculate the Company’s Profitability before Developing Sales, Marketing, and Growth Strategies
    4. Step Three: Assess Preliminary Strategic Options Based on Financial Trends
    5. Summary
  14. Chapter 3 Customer Analysis to Improve the Top and Bottom
    1. Finding New Customers by Using Data on Existing Customers
    2. Who Is the Customer?
    3. The Customer Database as a Strategic Asset
    4. Summary
  15. Chapter 4 Quotation Analysis to Improve Competitiveness
    1. Quotation Management—A Fundamental Tenet of B2B Industrial Marketing
    2. Low Hit Rates, High Hit Rates, and Pricing Problems are Canaries in the Mineshaft
    3. Quotation and Lost Order Analysis—The Market Link to Continuous Improvement, Gaining Competitive Advantage, and to Increasing Sales and Profit
    4. Inferring Market Potential from Quotations; a Source of New Business Without Incurring Additional Selling Costs
    5. Using Quote Production and Hit Rate to Strengthen Sales Management
    6. Summary
  16. Chapter 5 Using Customer Feedback to Inform Strategy
    1. The “3 fer” Is Not Consumer Research or Surveying
    2. Summary
  17. Chapter 6 Product Analysis and Product Management
    1. Evaluating Product Performance—Finding Winners and Losers
    2. Review of Product Management Practices
    3. Factors that Affect SMMs’ Ability to Develop Direct Costs
    4. “We Keep It in the Product Line Because It Absorbs Overhead”
    5. The Price Is Right
    6. Incremental—or Marginal Pricing—and Break-even Sales
    7. Product Mix and Sales Mix Affect Profit
    8. Target Margins
    9. Strategic Implications of Simple versus Complex Products
  18. Chapter 7 New Product Development
    1. Six Out of Seven New Products Fail
    2. The Babe’s “Swing and a Miss” and NPD
    3. Getting the Nest Ready for the Eggs—Making Sure the Product Is the “Right” One
    4. To Kill or Not to Kill—Effective Valuation Criteria
    5. Targeted Innovation Versus the Shotgun Approach (a.k.a. Putting the Cart in Front of the Horse)
    6. Sources of Ideas
  19. Chapter 8 Marketing Research and Competitor Information
    1. Simplifying Marketing Research and Competitor Intelligence
    2. Low Cost versus High Cost Market Research and Competitor Information—An Incremental and Sequential Approach
    3. Be Patient—Rome wasn’t Built in a Day
    4. It’s Okay to Chase Rabbits Down a Dry Hole
    5. Market Share of What?
    6. The Competitor Matrix—an Easy Way to Make Sense of Competitor Information
    7. Indirect Competitors—the Silent Killers
    8. The USP—Unique Selling Proposition
    9. Choosing and Prioritizing Markets
    10. Other Factors to Consider
    11. Summary
  20. Chapter 9 Crafting Goals, Objectives, and Strategies from the Bottom Up
    1. Making Sense of It All
    2. The Industrial Marketing Pyramid
    3. What to Accomplish—Practicable versus Desirable
    4. How to Do It—Four Basic Choices
    5. The “Quad Sheet”—A Simple Way to Monitor, Manage, and Evaluate Strategy Implementation
    6. The Chicken or the Egg?
    7. Summary
  21. Chapter 10 Sales Management
    1. Evaluating Sales Performance
    2. Four very Critical and Strategic Questions
    3. Building a Market-Based, Realistic Sales Forecast from C-P-M™, Marketing Research, Sales Coverage, and the Territory Plan
    4. How Are We Doing? Using Sales Reports and Goals and Objectives to Measure and Evaluate Performance in Implementing a Growth Plan
    5. Helping Reps and Independents Help You
    6. Summary
  22. Chapter 11 Advertising and Promotion
    1. Websites and Social Media
    2. Summary
  23. Chapter 12 Conclusion
    1. Two Success Factors
    2. Still Relevant
    3. Roy Bob
    4. Looking Forward
  24. Notes
    1. Chapter 9
    2. Chapter 11
    3. Chapter 12
  25. References
  26. Index
  27. Ad Page
  28. Back Cover

Product information

  • Title: Marketing Strategy for Small- to Medium-Sized Manufacturers
  • Author(s): Charles E. France
  • Release date: April 2013
  • Publisher(s): Business Expert Press
  • ISBN: 9781606496152