Marketing Plan To Launch The New Bespoke Essay

Sales Plan

A sales plan can be understood as a strategy which sets out targets and tactics for the business by identifying the steps to be taken in order to ensure targets are met (Annan, 2017). A sales plan is helpful in many ways:

• Helps to define sales target for the business
• Helps to find the sales strategies suitable for the target market.
• Helps in identifying sales tactics to achieve the target
• Helps in motivating the team
• Reviewing the goals periodically and re-strategize the existing sales strategy(Chernev, 2015)

Hence, it can be said that Sales plan is a comprehensive document which lays out the SMART goals, specifies the target audience and the obstacles in the road to success. It can be seen like a normal business plan which specifically focuses on the sales strategy in an exhaustive manner (Malaval, Benaroya & Aflalo, 2014) Sales plan is a document which lays out the plan for the achievement of the business goals. Typically a sales plan includes the following:

• Target Customers- Market segmentation is the process of dividing a broader market into smaller segments, further these segments can be used to target individually after creating a positioning strategy for the company(Charan, Barton & Carey, 2015)
• Revenue Targets
• Strategies & Tactics
• Pricing and Promotions
• Deadlines
• Team Structure
• Resources
• Market Condition

Product

Housing.com is a web based portal in the real estate ecosystem. At Housing people for residential property with the intention of renting, buying and selling. Housing.com lists the properties on its portal. Thus the product in Housing is residential properties.

Sales Plan for Housing

Sales Support

Sales support can be understood as variety of function sales representative focus in order to actually close the sales deal (Johnston & Marshall, 2016) this can be done by the sales professional, associates, third party people. Sales support function at housing are:

• Lead Generation- Housing verifies 100% leads it sends out to its customers. Leads are driven through its online portal.
• Product training- Apart from selling inventory (Properties) the company also provides a variety of product to help the builders increase the site visits on their property. Thus the sales representative has to be given the product training. At the same time housing offers different lead packages to its customers, all this forms a part of their product training
• Customer services- Housing is a customer centric company and thus pays close attention to all needs of the customers and at times change its sales strategy to better fit the need of the customers.
• Market communication- This is done through traditional and contemporary channels of marketing the company use in order to convey message to the consumers and also create a brand image.

Territory allocation

A sales territory can be understood as the customer group or the geographical area company wants to target. This can be defined in terms of specific regions, sales volume, and historical data and so on. In case of housing, the territories are divided according to the geographical location. All the territories are assigned a unique name for easy analysis while reviewing the sales territory (Lei, Laporte, Liu & Zhang, 2015). Number of sales executive is assigned on the basis of lead flow and the number of upcoming property or number of inventory unsold

Targets

Target is the parameters which measure the success of the sales strategy or are a yardstick to measure the success of the company. Targets are set after doing a lot of market study, understanding the prevailing condition, estimating the market size, analysing the competition forces, analysing the cost centres to achieve the sales number and so on. At housing all these factors are used for calculating the targets. The targets are set for every quarter and not annually. Housing uses rather simpler formulae in calculating the Target for the organization. The formulae used are:

• Last year sales * (Percentage increase in the real estate market) = New Target.
• The target is den divided as 30% for the 1^st and 2^nd quarter, and 20% for the remaining two quarters.

Sales Strategy/ Tactics

Sales strategy is the sequence of steps or the strategies a company employs in order to achieve the number of sales. Sales strategy is flexible in nature and can be mould according to the varying condition of the market or after review of the current sales strategy. Housing being an online real estate portal, it primarily uses online channels as a part of its sales strategy. The strategy used by Housing is:

Calendar and Measurement

At housing.com, the practice is set to review the target every quarter. Quarterly review is done by the senior management team and other major stakeholders. Apart from that a monthly review meeting is conducted throughout the year amongst the sales professionals, the Area managers, regional managers and the key account managers. The exercise is done to see how the set strategy is doing in the market, and what are the numbers achieved. A new market strategy is created after these meetings and a new plan is also created, if need be after the review meetings. Measurement of the set targets and goals is done by the help of Google analytics.

References

Annan, J. A. (2017). A marketing plan to launch the new bespoke collection by Heel the World, to increase sales and brand awareness.

Charan, R., Barton, D., & Carey, D. (2015). People Before Strategy. Harvard Business Review.

Chernev, A. (2015). The marketing plan handbook. Cerebellum Press.

Johnston, M. W., & Marshall, G. W. (2016). Sales force management: Leadership, innovation, technology. Routledge.

Lei, H., Laporte, G., Liu, Y., & Zhang, T. (2015). Dynamic design of sales territories. Computers & Operations Research, 56, 84-92.

Malaval, P., B?naroya, C., & Aflalo, J. (2014). Marketing and Sales Action Plan. In Aerospace Marketing Management (pp. 157-170). Springer, Cham.