Market Sales Potential

Market sales potential is a quantitative approximation of effective demand. Specifically, market sales potential is the maximum level of sales that might be available to all organizations serving a defined market in a specific time period given 1) the marketing mix activities and effort of all organizations, and 2) a set of environmental conditions. As this definition indicates, market sales potential is not a fixed amount. Rather, it is a function of a number of factors, some of which are controllable and others not controllable by organizations. For example, controllable marketing-mix activities and marketing related expenditures of organizations can influence market sales potential. On the other hand, consumer disposable income, government regulations, and other social, economic, and political conditions are not controllable by organizations, but do affect market sales potential. These uncontrollable factors are particularly relevant in estimating market sales potential in developing countries.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Human Resource Strategies

Human resource strategies are functional strategies, like any other—financial, information, marketing, procurement. Any functional planning effort follows a pattern complete with its variations. In many companies, long-term functional planning (for human resources, finance, information systems, technology, etc) is a mandated element of the long range business planning process.

Human resources strategies are different, however, in that they are inter-twined with all other strategies’ management of people is not a distinct function but the means by which all business strategies are implemented. If anything, human resources planning ought to be an integral part of all other strategy formulation. Where it is separate, it needs to be closely aligned..

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Best Practices of Microsoft

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has credited his best practices or new rules of how to function in the new digital business infrastructure. They can be applied in other businesses. The rules include:

1. Insist that communications flow through email
2. Study sales data online to share insights easily
3. Shift knowledge workers into high level thinking
4. Use digital tools to create virtual teams
5. Convert every paper process to  digital process
6. Use digital tools to eliminate single-task jobs
7. Create a digital feedback loop
8. Use digital systems to route customer complaints immediately
9. Use digital communication to redefine boundaries
10. Transform every business process into just-in-time delivery
11. Use digital delivery to eliminate middlemen
12. Use digital tools to help customers solve problems for themselves.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Market Orientation

The market orientation of the company towards the functioning of the channel members would determine the extent to which the company would get support from the channel members. In a highly competitive situation, the companies should, therefore, plan whether to be more ‘pull oriented’ or more ‘push oriented.’ This will determine the relative importance that the company will assign to advertising and channel promotion.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Behavior and Organizational Strategies

A competency model can be an effective way of communicating to the workforce the values of the senior management and what people should focus on their own behavior. For example, a competency-based appraisal system helps to distinguish individuals with the characteristics that are required to build and maintain an organization’s values (teamwork, respect for individual innovation or initiative) from those who do not exhibit the behaviors that will support these values. In this way competency models can translate general messages about needed strategy and culture change into specifics. There are two principles that can be followed:

• Focus on the superior performers without making an assumption.
• Focus on what they do to perform the given role.

Following are various developed models that are used as a basis for selection, training, promotion and other issues related to human resources:

• Job Competence Assessment Method—this is developed using interviews and observations of outstanding and average performers to determine the competencies that differentiate between them in critical incidents.
• Modified Job Competence Assessment Method—this also identifies such behavioral differences, but to reduce costs, interviewees provide a written account of critical incidents.
• Generic Model Overlay Methods—organizations purchase an off-the-shelf generic competency model for a specific role or function.
• Customized Generic Model Methods—organizations use a tentative list of competencies that are identified internally to aid in their selection of a generic model and then validate it with the input of outstanding and average performers.
• Flexible Job Competency Model Methods—this seeks to identify the competencies that will be required to perform effectively under different conditions in the future.
• Systems Method—this demand reflecting on not only what exemplary performers  do now, or what they do overall, but also behaviors that may be important in the future.
• Accelerated Competency Systems Method—this places the focus on the competencies that specifically support the production of output, such as an organization’s products, services or information.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Strategic Marketing & Budgeting

A phase in the strategic marketing management process is budgeting. A budget is a formal, quantitative  expression of an organization’s planning and strategy initiatives expressed in financial terms. A well-prepared budget meshes and balances an organization’s financial, production, and marketing resources so that overall organizational goals or objectives are attained.

An organization’s master budget consists of two parts: 1) an operating budget, and 2) a financial budget. The operating budget focuses on an organization’s income statement. Since the operating budget projects future revenue and expenses, it is sometimes referred to as a pro forma income statement or profit plan. The financial budget focuses on the effect that the operating budget and other initiatives (such as capital expenditures) will have on the organization’s cash position.

In addition to the operating and financial budget, many organizations prepare supplemental special budgets, such as an advertising and sales budget, and related reports tied to the master budget. Budgeting is more than an accounting function. It is an essential element of strategic marketing management.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Capabilities of a Firm

A firm can offer lower cost or more differentiated products than its competitors if it has capabilities that are not easy to imitate. A firm’s ability to exploit an innovation, thus, is a function of the extent to which it owns scarce, difficult to imitate capabilities that are central to its value chain.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Profits from Competences

A firm’s ability to profit from its competences is a function of how core the competences are, and the extent to which competitors can quickly acquire such competences. The profits come from the low cost or differentiated products that the firm can make as a result of having the inimitable core competences. If a competence is non-core and inimitability is high, then one may not be able to make profits from it, all else being equal. If it is non-core but inimitable, the firm may be able to make some negligible profits, from it. If however the competence is core but easily imitated, the firm can make some profits, but these will only be temporary as competitors will have time to imitate. If the acceptance is core and inimitable, then the firm can make long-term profits.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

An Organizational Challenge

An organizational challenge that has taken on renewed importance relates to ethics and social responsibility. An individual’s ethics are his or her beliefs about what is right and wrong or good and bad. Social responsibility is the organization’s obligation to protect and/or contribute to the social environment in which it functions. Thus, while the two concepts are related, they are also distinct from each other.

Both ethics and social responsibility have taken on new significance in recent years. Scandals in organizations have made the headlines around the world. From the social responsibility, increasing attention has been focused on pollution and business’s obligation to help clean up our environment, business contributions to social causes, and so forth.

Leadership, organization culture, and group norms—all important organizational behavior concepts—are relevant in managing these processes. And because employees know the organizational culture so well that they know they would be expected to respond.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Commitment to Action

Understanding the marketing concept is one thing; following through with the commitment to make tough decisions is quite another. Many companies stumble badly here. Companies with a superior marketing effort, on the other hand, repeatedly demonstrate their commitment to follow the marketing concept by their willingness to require cooperation from all functions, to invest for long-term goals, and to face up to deficiencies in product, price, or service.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.