Marketing Plan

A marketing plan embodies the strategic marketing management process. It is a formal written document that describes the context and scope of an organization’s marketing effort to achieve defined goals or objectives within a specific future time period. A formal written marketing plan represents a distillation of and the attention and interrelated analytical processes. It is the tangible result of an intellectual effort.

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.

Product-line Costs

Costs in the managed category can be changed up or down by management decisions. As a general rule, they are far more variable than they should be as a business expands and more fixed than they should be during periods of contraction.

 Once there is agreement on these cost categories and definitions, the next step is getting help from the accounting department to determine how the costs incurred in each of these categories should be divided and assigned to specific product businesses. This is always easier said than done. Many accountants are reluctant to divide fixed costs into the categories or to shared costs to specific product areas. Because it is impossible to do this with the precision accounting professionals normally use to develop traditional financial statements, there is a natural aversion to shifting numbers in an imprecise manner. However, there is simply no way to develop net profit statements for each product-line business, or to see clearly how costs behave with volume changes unless the total lump of fixed costs is split into the “bedrock,” semi-fixed, and step categories and assigned to these business units. And  net profit picture for a product/market business can’t be developed unless shared costs, often representing a large percentage of total operating costs and often the root cost disadvantage problems, are broken down and assigned to various business units.

 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.

Termination of Employees

Most employees are hired for an indefinite period. If no length of employment is agreed upon, employment is “at will.” This means that an employer can discharge such an employee at any time for any reason or without giving any reason. Unions generally negotiate a change in this rule for the employees they represent. Most union contracts contain a clause that permits discharge only for good cause.

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.

Listening

Listening to the other’s point of view starts during pre-selling. Don’t switch off when you’re through talking, Listen. Understand. If you don’t understand, ask questions until you do. Then you can do a better selling job because you know more than you did when you started.

Listening is one of the best times to pick up sales points and disagreement between otherwise agreeable allies. Listen to the words and to the tone. You will be able to tell who is leading whom. You can’t learn without listening, and the more you know, the better your chance of obtaining your goal.

Don’t let your mind wander or focus on objections, and don’t spend your pre-selling time trying to develop responses instead of concentrating on what has been said.

Listen, listen, listen. There is no substitute for listening, especially during the pre-sell period

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 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.

Best Practices of Winning Companies

Winning companies realize the strategic value of building successful partnerships. While all companies experience periods of highs, lows, and transitions in their respective performance and in stock prices, truly successful companies build lasting partnerships that sustain and provide long term value to all partners, employees, and shareholders.

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.

Sentence Making

Words are like building blocks—we can put them together in all sorts of different ways in order to make many different kinds of sentences. When we write, it is very important to make complete sentences. It is a common goof  to write incomplete sentences—also called sentence fragments.

Punctuation marks do the same thing for a sentence that road signs o for a highway. Punctuation marks tell the reader when to speed up, when to slow down, when to stop, and what to expect up the road.

The ultimate separator is the period. It says, “Stop here.”  Question marls and exclamation marks are usually periods with special missions. The comma is then most common separator. It says “slow down.” Without commas we wouldn’t know when to pause. There are five other separators: colons, semicolons, parentheses, dashes, and brackets.

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.

Contracts between Employers and Employees

If an employee has contract to be employed for a certain firm for a specified period of time, and the employer breaches the contract by dismissing the employee, damages recoverable would generally be the unpaid salary at the time of dismissal. Some courts allow the employee to collect wages up to the period of time at which a new job is found, as long as the employee “mitigates damages” by actively seeking employment. On the other hand, if the employee walks out without cause, then the employer may recover the cost of replacing the employee. This would include any additional salary that must be paid to the new employee which is greater than the previous employee’s salary.

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.

Routines

Routines take the same route to work each day, to see the same familiar faces and tasks waiting when we get there, and to collapse into the same easy chair after the day is done. Although routines in themselves are harmless, the inertia they cultivate can interfere with our ability to cope with new stresses. Unless we actively fight back, there is a natural human tendency to divide our lives into two discrete periods: our learning years and our earning years. The former period ends, many think, when the later begins.

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.

Pro Forma Income Statement

Because marketing managers are accountable for the profit impact of their actions, they must translate their strategies and tactics into pro forma, or projected, income statements. A pro forma income statement displays projected revenues, budgeted expenses, and estimated net profit for an organization, product, or service during a specific planning period, usually a year. Pro forma income statements include a sales forecast and a listing of variable and fixed costs that can be programmed or committed.

Pro forma income statements can be prepared in different ways and reflect varying levels of specificity. They have a typical layout consisting of six major categories or line items:

1. Sales—forecasted unit volume times unit selling price
2. Cost of goods sold—costs incurred in buying or producing products and services. Generally speaking, these costs are constant per unit within certain volume ranges and vary with total unit volume.
3. Gross margin (sometimes called gross profit)—represents the remainder after cost of goods sold has been subtracted from sales.
4. Marketing expenses—generally programmed expenses budgeted to produce sales. Advertising expenses are typically fixed. Sales expenses can be fixed, such as a salesperson’s salary, or variable, such as sales commissions. Freight or delivery expenses are typically constant per unit and vary with total unit volume.
5. General and administrative expenses—generally, committed fixed costs for the planning period, which cannot be avoided if the organization is to operate. These costs are frequently called overhead.
6. Net income before (income) taxes (often called net profit before taxes—the remainder after all costs have been subtracted from sales.

A pro forma income statement reflects a marketing manager’s expectations (sales) given criterion inputs (costs). This means that a manager must think specifically about customer response to strategies and tactics and focus attention on the organization’s financial objectives of profitability and growth when preparing a pro forma income statement.

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.