Aligning Marketing and Sales - Dubai

Personal Benefits
The concepts and techniques taught in the Program will enable you to develop marketing plans that drive profitable growth through designing, communicating, and delivering customer value.

• Create strategically aligned marketing plans that will drive profitable growth
• Gain a better understanding of how all the elements of marketing come together to produce effective marketing strategies and plans
• Strengthen your linkages to other functional areas
• Learn how to generate and use important insights into your customer’s buying behaviour
• Integrate current marketing tools and techniques into your marketing plan
• Learn how to gain organization-wide buy-in to your marketing plan
• Network with marketing professionals from a variety of industries

Benefits to Your Organization
Bringing new marketing concepts and practices into your organization will have a profoundly positive impact on your organization’s performance.

• Increase the level of strategic alignment across functional areas
• Create marketing strategies and plans that drive profitable growth for the organization
• Identify and respond to changing market trends
• Ensure that infrastructure and culture support your marketing strategy
• Evaluate alternative ways to meaningfully differentiate yourself from your competition
• Build brand equity to decrease the risk of commoditization
• Align marketing and sales for enhanced performance

back to top

This program is for individuals who have been in a management role for five years or more and want examine innovative marketing approaches that can create customer value and drive sustainable and profitable growth.

back to top

The Marketing Program is Built Around Four Themes:

1) Aligning Marketing with the Business Strategy
Ensuring alignment with the overall business strategy is critical to gaining organizational support and to successfully developing and implementing practical marketing plans.

• Deciding which strategic platform is right for you (be the best, be the lowest priced, or be the most focused)
• Understanding the profit drivers of each of the alternative strategic platforms, and the most common errors companies make in managing those drivers
• Selecting and targeting your most profitable customers
• Articulating your value proposition and identifying your customer’s compelling reason to buy
• Assessing alternative ways to meaningfully differentiate yourself from the competition
• Determining if infrastructure and culture can support your marketing strategy
• Determining the role of alliances and partnerships in developing the “total solution”

2) Understanding the Key Concepts of Marketing
The Program will provide you with a breadth of marketing concepts and frameworks, and the ability to choose which are most appropriate for your business situation.

• Using segmentation to characterize customers and gain maximum insight into their behaviour and preferences
• Understanding the different types of buyers (price, convenience, relationship, value)
• Gaining insights into your competitor’s products, technologies, and strategies
• Developing a positioning statement that identifies a target market and the basis of your competitive advantage
• Building brand equity to decrease the risk of commoditization
• Evaluating and optimizing your product line
• Understanding how pricing, promotion, and distribution policies must be revised to accommodate different market conditions
• Recognizing and reacting to the natural changes in market characteristics and competitive behaviours that occur over the life of a product or service

3) Building an Effective Sales Strategy

An effective sales strategy is the cornerstone of a high-performance sales organization. The successful integration of the sales strategy into the corporate strategy is a critical first step. The Program provides valuable insights into the following:

• Developing and implementing an effective sales planning process at all levels – strategic, market, territory, and account
• Integrating sales strategy into the corporate strategy
• Aligning marketing and sales strategies
• Developing targeting, positioning, and benefit statements
• Understanding the make-or-break issues for your organization
• Identifying your most important customers
• Using best practices and cutting-edge sales tools to ensure the successful execution of your sales strategy
• Understanding and capitalizing on the strengths and weaknesses of customers, distributors, and competitors

4) Creating Value for Your Customer

In today’s competitive environment, customers are looking for suppliers who can add value. Servicing customers has become more complicated than ever. The Program will provide you with the tools to create real value for your customers.

• Understanding customer buying behaviour and how to use consultative, transactional, and enterprise selling
• Effectively managing high-leverage customer interactions
• Creating a “customer first” mindset throughout the organization and sales team
• Adding value to create customer intimacy and long-term loyalty
• Meeting the needs of your customers by creating and shaping value-added services
• Achieving and maintaining superior levels of customer service

back to top

Outstanding Session Leaders

Dr. John Pliniussen | Associate Professor of Marketing

Queen's University, Kingston, OntarioJohn Pliniussen is an authority on innovation, sales management and e-marketing. He has worked or consulted for several Fortune 100 companies, some of Canada’s fastest growing SMEs, many federal and provincial ministries, and numerous agencies and NPOs. He has published numerous books and articles. He was Director of Strategy for cgkTechnologies Inc., a Program Director with Shad International, and until recently, Chairman of Bayway Community Investment Corporation.

Session Leaders are subject to change.