Factors Affecting Scheduling: Sales Pattern, Purchase Cycle, Product Availability, Competitive Activity, Marketing Task, Budget Constraints, Target Group

Sales Pattern

The sales pattern is a collection of data about the sale of a particular product or group of products in the business for a given period and displaying it graphically to understand it’s behavior. These sales patterns are used in retail businesses to identify whether the business goals are being met, the effect of price changes of a particular product impacts sales, sales response to advertising, etc.

Understanding the sales pattern in retail business always helps to correlate the sales variations with respect to the various events happening in and around the business every day. The continuous monitoring of the sales pattern would certainly help the retail business to foresee the upcoming risks and take precautions.

Purchase Cycle

The buying cycle, sometimes known as the marketing or sales cycle, is a patterned process consumers and business buyers go through when contemplating a purchase. Various labels and steps have been assigned to this process, though the basic elements are consistent across most diagrams and outlines. Understanding the pattern buyers go through in your industry is key to effective marketing and promotions.

Awareness

The first step in virtually all buying cycle depictions is awareness. This is the point at which a buyer recognizes that he needs something or the point at which he recognizes your product or service and views it as a possibility. Much of a company’s market research and promotions are geared to reach customers with brand messages at the point they first become aware of a need or in an effort to stimulate this reality. Billboards depicting restaurants, for instance, are often used to trigger hunger recognition.

Consideration

The next broad stage in the buying cycle is consideration. This is one of the most impacting stages in terms of your company’s status with a buyer. During this stage, the buyer formulates a consideration set and evaluates each option on factors important to him. A business buyer may consider the scalability of a software solution, for instance, in case his company wants to expand use over time. Your ability to convey benefits that coincide with target customer needs is crucial during this time. Advertising, public relations and sales efforts all contribute to this communication effort.

Purchase

The point of purchase is essentially crunch time in the buying cycle. This is the point at which a buyer has determined which product or service best matches his needs at the most affordable price. If your product, price and promotions have effectively wooed enough customers during the consideration process, you should be in good shape at crunch time. Capturing customer contact information to develop an ongoing relationship for future sales is important if you are the winner of the customer’s purchase decision.

After-Sale

While most buying cycle models include awareness, consideration and purchase stages, not all go beyond those three steps. Those that do depict after-sale buying activities as ranging anywhere from one to four additional steps. In general, after-sale buying cycle stages include application or use of the product, discussions on additional uses, advocacy of the brand or product with others and intention to repeat purchases. Follow-up support, inquiries and genuine customer care are keys during these stages. Customers assess their experiences, which impacts future buying and the positive or negative word of mouth they spread to others.

Product Availability

Product availability is an important supply chain performance measure and appears as a KPI in most companies. However, if the way of measuring it is sub-optimal, we would end up with a supply chain that underperforms on this measure.

Most companies define it at the point of invoicing. Do we have sufficient stocks to service the distributor orders (protect primary sales)? More progressive companies define it at the distributor level. Do our distributors have enough stocks to service the retailer orders (protect secondary sales)? The best definition is, of course, at the retail level where we protect consumer offtake, but the data is not comprehensive.

Availability is normally measured against the customer demand. If you are still measuring it against forecast, it’s a low hanging fruit to start measuring it against actual demand and improve it. A well-known pharma company was actually measuring availability to forecast as the prime measure and reporting a performance of 98%.

Meeting customer requirements is a basic mission of the firm. Business is not only about generating demand but also about fulfilling it. It seems logical, offhand, that firms should have complete stock 100% of the time.

Making products available entails costs, from the design, manufacture, storage, and delivery of an item. Firms are sensitive to investing in capacity or in keeping more inventories to anticipate unforeseen demand. On the other hand, firms are also conscious that product un-availability could mean lost sales and possibly lost opportunities, sometimes to the point that it can determine the long-term survival of the business. Unless one’s product has quality characteristics unmatched by others or has a monopoly in utility, impatient customers will switch to competing brands if their brand of first choice is not available.

Competitive Activity

Company facing a severe market competition will opt for more continuous advertisement through multiple media. The rule is, the more is the intensity of competition, the higher the frequency of advertisement will be.

Marketing Task

Many businesses see the task of marketing as generating leads for salespeople to follow-up. It’s a short-sighted view that is costing small businesses millions. Marketing is the whole process of taking your goods or services to market. It’s made up of many different disciplines, each with their own skills and expertise.

• Developing Marketing Strategies and Plans: The first task is to identify the organization long-run opportunities given its market experience and core competences.
• Capturing Marketing Insights: Marketers must closely monitor the marketing environment to continually asses market potential and forecast demand.
• Connecting with the Customers: The firm must determine how to best create value for its chosen target markets and develop strong, profitable, long-term relationship with customers.
• Building Strong Brands: Marketers need to understand how customers perceive their brands strengths and weakness.
• Shaping the Market Offerings: At the heart of the marketing program is the product, the firm tangible offering to the market, features, and packaging.
• Delivering Value: How can the firm deliver value to its target market? Channel activities are need to make the product offering accessible and available to customers.
• Communicating Value: Marketers must adequately communicate to the target market the value embodied by their products and services.
• Creating Successful Long-term Growth: The marketing strategy should take into account changing global opportunities and challenges.

Budget Constraints

It shows an ability of a company to spend for advertisement. The rule is, the more is the ability to spend, the more continuous the advertisement will be.

Target Group

A target market is a group of people with some shared characteristics that a company has identified as potential customers for its products. Identifying the target market informs the decision-making process as a company design, packages, and markets its product.

Target marketing involves breaking a market into segments and then concentrating your marketing efforts on one or a few key segments consisting of the customers whose needs and desires most closely match your product or service offerings. It can be the key to attracting new business, increasing sales, and making your business a success.

A target market may be broadly categorized by age range, location, income, and lifestyle. Many other demographics may be considered. Their stage of life, their hobbies, interests, and careers, all may be considered.

Demographic Segmentation

Demographic grouping is based on measurable statistics, such as:

• Gender
• Age
• Income level
• Marital status
• Education
• Race
• Religion

Geographic Segmentation

Geographic segmentation involves segmenting the market based on location. Home addresses are one example, but depending on the scope of your business, you could also use:

• Neighbourhood
• Postal or ZIP code
• Area code
• City
• Province or state
• Region
• Country (if your business is international)

Psychographic Segmentation

Psychographic segmentation divides the target market based on socioeconomic class or lifestyle preferences. The socioeconomic scale ranges from the affluent and highly educated at the top to the uneducated and unskilled at the bottom.