Lead Generation Initiates Marketing Benefits

Lead generation and lead management is the core process for business  progress. Leads are the new sales prospects which materialize into business revenue. That is why lead management process is considered as one of the main role-player in deciding the pivotal marketing strategy of a business unit.

On the other hand sales and marketing plan goes hand in hand but there is a line of difference between these two subjects; sales plan focuses on immediate generation of revenue but marketing plans works somehow in different approach. Marketing plans pave the way for sales; right implementation of marketing plan keeps the sales flow rolling. Brand image promotion, sales campaigning, and media exposure are some of the popular plans of marketing strategies. Therefore the core aim of marketing and programs are sales support.

Lead generation process is greatly supported by marketing plans. Marketing plans about a service or product generates a kind of awareness about the same in between the consumers and thus the sales leads are generated. For example, when an insurance company launches their new insurance plan, the first step of marketing plan is to create awareness about the product and to collect the insurance leads from different sources. Therefore it is easy to understand that marketing process is a supportive process for lead generation of business. Same marketing policies are launched for collection of education leads.

Marketing plans are all about catering the branding of the company and canvassing about the product and service. Marketing process is not a one- time play but here the plans are implemented for sustenance of impressions which contributes in general awareness of the subject. On the other hand the viability of a product or service is authenticated in its post-sales period. If in after- sales phase a product gathers satisfactory penetration in market maintaining a certain level of customer satisfaction, in marketing terminology it is apprehended that the product has clicked in the market. The statistics which denotes its acceptability is determined by the frequency of lead generation against the subject.

There are different sources of lead generation. For example, web media has now become one of the main potential areas of lead generation; the leads which are generated from web media are called internet leads. Internet leads are wonderful source to know the target level of customers for a certain subject; mortgage leads, loan Modification leads are best sourced from web sources. Sales leads generated from other sources like trade shows, sales promos etc clearly shows the level of penetration level of the product. Analysis of leads is a wonderful process to recognize the potential consumer zone for a specific product. Accordingly new marketing plans can be launched for improving the penetration level.

Lead management is necessary process for all types of businesses. Similarly, analysis of business leads is a common factor and it is done at random as an integral process of business administration. For service oriented business, lead generation process is essentially related to sales force automation; on the other hand it is the deciding scale of marketing plans and polices for better sales drive and market penetration programs.

For any sort of leads like Mortgage Leads, Insurance Leads or Debt Settlement Leads, lead mail box can offer you the best solution.

Strategy Map Balanced Scorecard

The Strategy Map Mind-Map style Flowchart defines the Mission, Goals, Perspectives & Objectives which are then used to Drive the Balanced Scorecard to develop Individual Employee scorecard-based Business Plans. The software is extremely adaptable and allows additional layers to be inserted between the Objectives and Measures thereby ensuring that it can suit almost any planning style. The software can also be used for Asset Management and Project work. It also features a cross-referencing section called Drill-Down where you can check the validity of your business plan. XML Export and Import allow easy movement of business plans between users.

Industryplayer - Business Strategy Game

Industryplayer is the ultimate business strategy game. Many players from around the globe compete in real time for market share and profits. You start with a capital of 10 Million $ and are coached by an in-game tutorial. Become a market leader within one sector or the most profitable holding of all. Gold Version: Get more competitive! Business Graphs allow to plan and to control all business activities from a professional perspective: real time charts for market share, costs, EBIT, cash flow and many more key figures. A license analyser allows conveniently comparing profitability, market attractiveness and costing structures of a total 225 product licenses (raw materials, intermediate and consumer products). A Buying Agent fully manages your supply chain. Trust features: Get even more competitive! Players can form trusts in order to mutually benefit from trust synergies. Holdings that join a trust can specialise on specific sectors for reducing production costs and for getting discounts on staff and materials costs (up to 20% off). Coordination of strategic planning between trust member holdings provides considerable advantages. Accounting upgrade: Comprehensive accounting instruments, available any time, such as balance sheet, profit & loss statement, cash flow statement, material costs analysis and product calculation. This feature in particular makes Industryplayer 3.0 an innovative educational tool for teachers and trainers in classroom case studies or for any other players who want to learn how corporate accounting works. The accounting system comes with a data export interface to copy paste all game data into any other application.

the National School of Government in partnership with Strategy Unit

This document comprises a collection of quotes from people involved in the scenario building process in Guatemala after its 36-year civil war.  Its strength lies in its illustration that the process of scenario planning can be as useful, if not more useful, than the product in its capacity to bring rival factions into a common discussion of what they wish their shared future to look like.  

The World is Not Flat

In year 2005 and 2006, the book titled "The World is Flat" written by veteran journalist Milton Friedman was sold like hot cake in Vietnam. People rushed in like swarm of bees to book shops finding the book, and later was mass of recommendations and conferences on it for years. Author Milton Friedman writes a lot about mixed trends in modern world in which business/trade is the easiest to remark. This is not suprising as his book has been among the best sellers since the publication of The Lexus and the Olive tree before.

So, what goes beyond that fever? What's on earth more boring than sitting down and appraising just one personal viewpoint. Where's the critical thinking, where're sophisticated differences, where are you diverse brains? Nevertheless, the only thing we can see is the 'consensus' feedback--big clap. This drives us to the question "Is the World really flat?" After objective and thorough studies, we come up with the conclusion that "The world is forever spiky." Even if author Friedman renamed the book "This World is absolutely flat," my conclusion remains unchanged. Author gave in the book a lot of argument, image, and evidence in order to flatten this rough world of different cultures and understandings. We bet that the term "Flat" by Friedman is not like what most Vietnamese readers think. The reason is we are talking about one thing but standing on different philosophy, values, belief, and diverse language-behaviours. Let's check out prooves.

Professor Nancy Napier- Author of hundreds of article and researches, Ph.D at Boise State University, we mentioned above in this book, often borrows Friedman's words and develops her own ideas. Doctor Napier is a competent researcher with the best characteristics of a true scientist never says "The world is forever spiky" but her scientific work has proved the thing. In a trip to Boise city in April 2007, she gave me her two publications about research on creativity and one about knowledge transition in Vietnam (Napier, 2005:[30] and Napier, 2006:[31]). Those didn't encourage me to agree with Friedman, but helped me more insisted on my initial point. At material [32], page 220, we find scholar Richard Florida straightly opposed to the conclusion "Flat" by Friedman. Author Florida has provided readers with many researches and evidences that this World is infinitely Spiky.

This priky world is never absolutely smoothed out despite super modern technologies, let alone the use of just global information and investment orginated from different culture systems which have long penetrated into people's blood in different societies. Borrowing Forida's words, Prof. Napier stated that in terms of creativity and economic power, there are a limited numer of countries overwhelming the rest and rise up to be the summit in global system; the root of difference is huge. Evidences and trends prove that the summit is becoming higher and the sunken regions are little moving or even ebbing.

Another Brazilian author, Thomaz Wood also supports Florida. He developed more ideas regarding business management. According to Wood, leaders and CEOs in giant economies are on top, therefore they are about to approach newest technology, diverse capital sources; as a result, creative thinking is permanent... whereas at the same position, those in sunken world hardly reach out to what have just been said above.

We are not feeling that roughness intuitionally? Just because we are not looking into the problem, or not admitting it. In the context of Vietnam's business culture in 2007, we don't watch out to that difference, instead we accept it passively. In other cases, efforts to flatten the surface has quickly evaporated. To understand the problem, trace the next chapter: Culture.

The Five Forces model of M. Porter

The Five Forces model of M. Porter is an Outside-in business unit strategy tool that is used to make an analysis of the attractiveness (value) of an industry structure. The Competitive Forces analysis is made by the identification of 5 fundamental competitive forces:

1. Supplier Power: Here you assess how easy it is for suppliers to drive up prices. This is driven by the number of suppliers of each key input, the uniqueness of their product or service, their strength and control over you, the cost of switching from one to another, and so on. The fewer the supplier choices you have, and the more you need suppliers' help, the more powerful your suppliers are.

    * Where the switching costs are high e.g. Switching from one software supplier to another.
    * Power is high where the brand is powerful e.g. Cadillac, Pizza Hut, Microsoft.
    * There is a possibility of the supplier integrating forward e.g. Brewers buying bars.
    * Customers are fragmented (not in clusters) so that they have little bargaining power e.g. Gas/Petrol stations in remote places.

2. Buyer Power: Here you ask yourself how easy it is for buyers to drive prices down. Again, this is driven by the number of buyers, the importance of each individual buyer to your business, the cost to them of switching from your products and services to those of someone else, and so on. If you deal with few, powerful buyers, they are often able to dictate terms to you.

    * This is high where there a few, large players in a market e.g. the large grocery chains.
    * If there are a large number of undifferentiated, small suppliers e.g. small farming businesses supplying the large grocery chains.
    * The cost of switching between suppliers is low e.g. from one fleet supplier of trucks to another.

3. Competitive Rivalry: What is important here is the number and capability of your competitors – if you have many competitors, and they offer equally attractive products and services, then you’ll most likely have little power in the situation. If suppliers and buyers don’t get a good deal from you, they’ll go elsewhere. On the other hand, if no-one else can do what you do, then you can often have tremendous strength.

five forces.gifThis is most likely to be high where entry is likely; there is the threat of substitute products, and suppliers and buyers in the market attempt to control. This is why it is always seen in the center of the diagram.

4. Threat of Substitution: This is affected by the ability of your customers to find a different way of doing what you do – for example, if you supply a unique software product that automates an important process, people may substitute by doing the process manually or by outsourcing it. If substitution is easy and substitution is viable, then this weakens your power.

    * Where there is product-for-product substitution e.g. email for fax Where there is substitution of need e.g. better toothpaste reduces the need for dentists.
    * Where there is generic substitution (competing for the currency in your pocket) e.g. Video suppliers compete with travel companies.
    * We could always do without e.g. cigarettes.

5. Threat of New Entry: Power is also affected by the ability of people to enter your market. If it costs little in time or money to enter your market and compete effectively, if there are few economies of scale in place, or if you have little protection for your key technologies, then new competitors can quickly enter your market and weaken your position. If you have strong and durable barriers to entry, then you can preserve a favorable position and take fair advantage of it.

    * Economies of scale e.g. the benefits associated with bulk purchasing.
    * The high or low cost of entry e.g. how much will it cost for the latest technology?
    * Ease of access to distribution channels e.g. Do our competitors have the distribution channels sewn up?
    * Cost advantages not related to the size of the company e.g. personal contacts or knowledge that larger companies do not own or learning curve effects.
    * Will competitors retaliate?
    * Government action e.g. will new laws be introduced that will weaken our competitive position?
    * How important is differentiation? e.g. The Champagne brand cannot be copied. This desensitises the influence of the environment.

Strategy Management

Align IT Infrastructure and Applications with Strategic Business Objectives.

Disconnects between evolving business and IT architectures are costly. More than half of IT projects in progress either underserve or no longer comply with business objectives. This is especially true in companies when a new line of business is added, or a merger or consolidation occurs. Most organizations can spend up to 70% of current IT budgets just maintaining systems. Understanding discretionary and non-discretionary spending is critical to properly support the business drivers within your current IT budget. Anexinet's Strategy Management approach fulfills the most critical and often overlooked first step toward synchronizing an organization's business systems with business objectives. The purpose is to help align your IT investments with the business objectives they support.
12-Week Process

Ensure up to 36 months of IT relevance, value, and confidence. A comprehensive, highly structured, 12-week program administered by Anexinet's Strategy Management experts leads to a Systems Strategy Roadmap to remove uncertainty from your IT projects before committing additional software and technology services.

Strategy Management:

* Refocuses IT spending to address implications of evolving business requirements and planned change initiatives
* Aligns and prioritizes your enterprise project portfolio to accelerate support toward strategic business objectives
* Stipulates a clear business case for project initiatives and outcomes
* Helps IT and business unit managers to work in synergy toward common goals

Anexinet Strategy Management Approach

Systems Strategy Work Plan

Anexinet Strategy Management starts with a high-level Work Plan that provides a flexible and repeatable framework for achieving client objectives from both Business and IT perspectives. The Plan serves as the basis for IT applications rationale and roadmap development, and guides the Strategy Management initiative along three distinct paths:

    * IT Roadmap: Anexinet focuses on understanding the client's organization as a whole, then works with the client to develop a set of Business and IT Architectures, project plans with credible cost estimates, and migration plans that will deliver the highest degree of probability for aligning IT systems with business objectives.

    * Portfolio Recovery: Anexinet works with the client to assess, understand, and regain control or to close any languishing projects.

    * Spend Analysis: Anexinet works with the client to move non-discretionary IT spending to the discretionary-spending side of the client's balance sheet. The goal is to enable the client's IT spend to do more with less.

Conceive Stage

The Conceive stage is where the important work of creating a vision and developing a strategy is accomplished.

Checkered Flag

This is usually carried out by executive / senior management and as supported by more junior staff.

A typical set of deliverables or products from this stage are:

    * Corporate Vision
    * Mission Statement
    * Scenario Reviews
    * Corporate Strategy
    * Business Unit Strategies (if applicable)
    * Stakeholder Communique

Bulls EyeRemember, although we aren’t majoring on it here, you normally DO NEED a cogent vision and strategy in place prior to beginning to build a business architecture.  Otherwise, for what purpose and on whose authority are you going to be building it?

The business architecture is a ‘translation layer’ between corporate vision & strategy and execution, NOT something to be done for its own sake!

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Management Team

The operational structure of Belgacom is based on four pillars:

* The Enterprise Business Unit of Belgacom Group fulfills the ICT needs of national and international professional clients.
* Private clients are served in the Consumer Business Unit.
* The networks and the IT services are housed in a central unit: Service Delivery Engine.
* Staff & Support groups together all of the transversal functions which support the Group´s activities.

Seven Stages of Internet Marketing

Corporate strategy addresses the interrelationship between the various business units in a firm, including decisions about which units should be kept, sold, or augmented. Business-unit strategy focuses on how a particular unit in the company attacks a market to gain competitive advantage.

Stage Two: Framing the Market Opportunity

Stage two entails the analysis of market opportunities and an initial first pass of the business concept—that is, collecting sufficient online and offline data to establish the burden of proof of opportunity assessment.

Figure 6: Stages of Internet Marketing

Stage Three: Formulating the Marketing Strategy

Internet marketing strategy is based upon corporate, business-unit, and overall marketing strategies of the firm. The marketing strategy goals, resources, and sequencing of actions must be tightly aligned with the business-unit strategy. Finally, the overall marketing strategy comprises both offline and online marketing activities.

Stage Four: Designing the Customer Experience

Firms must understand the type of customer experience that needs to be delivered to meet the market opportunity. The experience should correlate with the firm’s positioning and marketing strategy. Thus, the design of the customer experience constitutes a bridge between the high-level marketing strategy (step three) and the marketing program tactics (step five).

Stage Five: Designing the Marketing Program

Stage five entails designing a particular combination of marketing actions (termed levers) to move target customers from awareness to commitment. The framework used to accomplish this task is the Marketspace Matrix. The Internet marketer has six classes of levers (e.g., pricing, community) that can be used to create target customer awareness, exploration, and commitment to the firm’s offering.

Stage Six: Crafting the Customer Interface

The Internet has shifted the locus of the exchange from the Marketplace (i.e., face-to-face interaction) to the Marketspace (i.e., screen-to-face interaction). The key difference is that the nature of the exchange relationship is now mediated by a technology interface. This interface can be a desktop PC, subnotebook, personal digital assistant, mobile phone, wireless applications protocol (WAP) device, or other Internet-enabled appliance.

Stage Seven: Evaluating the Marketing Program

This last stage involves the evaluation of the overall Internet marketing program. This includes a balanced focus on both customer and financial metrics. It emphasizes customer actions as well as financial metrics used to track the success of marketing programs.

Marketing Planning and Strategy

Marketing Planning and Strategy is designed for courses at the junior/senior-level in marketing strategy, business unit strategy analysis, strategic market planning, marketing planning, strategic marketing management and advanced marketing. It focuses on building the strategic skills necessary to compete in the global economy by using a variety of analytical frameworks to understand how companies formulate strategy, make strategic decisions, and how they implement strategy. This text focuses on marketing strategy from the viewpoint of the business unit and clearly distinguishes marketing strategy frommarketing management.

International strategy

A group as diverse as FirstRand cannot be replicated in any one country. Therefore we have a 'rifle shot' approach to international expansion. We are a "Rand Specialist" and we do not have a specific target for off-shore income which we wish to achieve. More importantly our off-shore strategy is driven at business unit level but prioritised and co-ordinated at the center. Any proposed off-shore expansion must have a strategic fit with the business unit's domestic strategy and the business unit expanding overseas must be able to demonstrate a substantial competitive advantage.

Business Essentials - Unit 7 Business Strategy

From insight to action.

Business Consulting
Business Strategy
Process Engineering

Our consulting services begin with a thorough understanding of the challenges you face — in the marketplace and within your organization. We bring expertise and objectivity to meet your goals at the corporate, business unit and product-line levels.

    * Business vision & strategy
    * Business plan review & development
    * Management facilitation & executive advisement
    * Change management and organizational transformation
    * Opportunity analysis & market assessment
    * Distribution & channel strategies
    * Client experience strategy
    * Client data analysis
    * Communications process & technology assessment

Branding & Marketing
Communications Strategy
User Experience

Connecting with your audiences — financial intermediaries, retail or institutional clients, other business partners and internal teams — requires understanding their values, expectations and behaviors. We develop integrated communications programs that address audience realities and help drive behavior.

    * Positioning & brand identity
    * Value proposition & messaging
    * Product launches
    * Campaigns & selling systems
    * Advertising
    * Client retention & relationship expansion
    * Brand architecture
    * Web 2.0 strategy & planning

Implementation Services
Creative Execution
Technology Consultation

We bring strategy and concepts to life through flawless execution of craft combined with a deep knowledge of the technology and resources needed.

    * Editorial & content management
    * Information architecture & design
    * Graphic design & brand standards
    * Web site & multimedia design
    * e-Engagement & one-to-one communications
    * Video production
    * On-demand transactional document design
    * User interface development & testing
    * System implementation & outsourcing
    * Print production management

Corporation Strategy

Too often businesses identify great ideas and tactical plans but are often dissatisfied with the level of understanding, engagement or implementation regarding those plans.

MPG identifies the key elements of your strategy, aligns it with the value proposition and your customer types and provides a clear base for communication to all stakeholders.

Using well-developed workshop techniques we engage management in an interactive process to develop a clear path for agreeing, communicating and implementing strategic themes.

Our ‘tangible’ deliverables include:

    * Corporate and Business Unit Strategy Wiring Charts
    * A Clear Statement of the Company’s Core Strategies
    * Corporate, Business Unit and Individual Scorecards
    * Corporate and Business Unit Action Plans

Our ‘intangible’ deliverables include, for stakeholders:

    * Clear Understanding of the Business Strategy
    * Engagement with Business Plan Imperatives
    * Understanding of Deliverables

Contact us and find out how Marble Path Group can help you drive your strategy through the alignment, communication and implementation of your strategic plan.