Push vs Pull : Have a Strategy & Campaign for Sales & Marketing
Casper Abraham
Still learning, while delivering, 30+ years of Technology Business Execution.
There are essentially 2 types of Marketing for Sales, whatever ways you may term them or use different words to describe them.
It's also based on 3 (or more) fundamental assumptions stated first ...
ASSUMPTION 1 - One understands' the difference between Marketing and Sales. When Marketing does its job, sales is easy. If there is no marketing sales is much harder to make happen.
ASSUMPTION 2 - One understands the economics of demand and supply. Depending on whether demand is high or supply is low AND whether demand is low and supply is high, volume and prices are affected. You can Google "Demand Supply Curve" to learn more about how this works. (PS : There are some links below for added inputs apart from your own Google Search)
ASSUMPTION 3 - There can be a significant difference between PRODUCTS & SERVICES. Usually products are finite. You can make only so many cars, ovens or toothpaste. The market demand can be only for so many cars, ovens or toothpaste. These are finite numbers. HOWEVER, services are different. You can put in more people, some people will finish a task in 1/5th of the time or 1/10th. you can increase logistics, deploy more vehicles at only a lower margin of the product cost. If you have a TV serial or Cine film (especially on digital) you can re-produce 10 x or 100 x number of copies and sell them quickly, easily and with almost NO additional cost. This factor affects volume vs price elasticity when it comes to most "services".
Given all the above we are back to our only 2 possible approaches, however you word them ...
1. PULL STRATEGY. This can also be called a reactive position. Spend on Marketing, branding, digital push, adwords, webinars, road-shows and HOPE the customer comes to you. You are assuming or know from research and other data that there is a DEMAND in the market. It can also be termed as "lagging in the market". There is competition, there are others in the price, volume exists, demand exists, you have the supplies and can and want to meet this demand either on price OR volume. Things are more known, stable, less risky. In manufacturing, make to order rather make to stock is a pull strategy. You wait for the in-coming order and then start production. You may not have capacity but are confident of creating it quickly to deliver.
2. PUSH STRATEGY. This can even be blue ocean. New products, new services, new geography, new demographics, different way of selling. Trying to get volume where none exists. Asking for a higher price. All these can be termed pro-active positions. You have to do something more, harder work, spend more, more effort, maybe research shows that there is a demand or a demand can be created. You are confident of building the supply chains. Whether on price and or on volume you are flexible. It can also be termed as "leading the market". In manufacturing, make to stock rather than make to order is a push strategy. You have already produced the stock. The goods have now got to be "pushed" sold. If you don't do it in time, you may have to sell at lower costs, liquidate, create space for further stock and so on. You have capacity and are producing to somewhere near this capacity.
Of course, you will have a hybrid of PUSH and PULL. However, for efficiency it has to be ONE or the OTHER. That's why you have "campaigns". You run a "budget-cost-expense" certain amount of cash/time/resources to achieve a "campaign objective". You could have PUSH campaigns and/or a PULL campaign. If you do not a management-accounted cost-managed campaign in place you will never understand what worked and did not worked.
There are SEVERAL models to manage or decide between the above 2 approaches depending on what you have OR trying to sell.
Keeping in minding BCG Matrix (Boston Consulting Group) matrix or product portfolio (Dog, Star, Cash-cow and Unknown) Google it! is a simple way of managing your portfolio.
A simple Quality Index that can be used even for services, is OEE (Overall Equipment Efficiency). OEE = Capacity x Output x Quality. A quick usable index is, if you are at 100% capacity, 90% output and 90% quality or balance between all of this, at 81% plus you can consider yourself as world class. Google this too.
My links ...
Sales Profit Marginal Profit
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If you need a cloud, software, platform to manage all this ....