Market Coverage
Once we have completed the market segmentation course and understand the role of marketing, we have to start separating customers to establish market coverage strategies. We have already touched on this in the program on Tele-Selling. This approach will be the “deep dive” approach to establishing territories to assign to salesmen.
From our segmentation study, we will review the various approaches: machine ownership, customer relationship for parts, and customer relationship for service. We will then group the segments in a manner that leads to effective use of a Product Support salesman’s time in the field with the customers, or the In-Store sales force using the telephone. We will also touch on the role that the internet market coverage will play in both of them.
Territory assignments have to take into consideration the mileage expectation, the total travel time, the total number of machines, the total sales volumes for both parts and service, and historical relationships. This again will discuss the calculation of the potential for each customer based on the actual use of the machine, as well as the hours it works per year. All of this is used in the approach we cover in this program to establish market coverage – to establish a sales territory.