In the article “Selling into Micromarkets” Goyal, Hancock and Hatami (2012) present a new advanced approach to the determination of the sales growth potential based on the analysis of the big data. Defining the micromarkets may help to form the better sales teams and allocate the resources more efficiently and effectively. At the same time, this approach is not easy to apply, because it is very demanding in terms of the analytical capabilities and organizational factors.
Firstly, it is difficult to divide a geographical market into the micromarkets according to the economic opportunities. A lot of factors need to be analyzed and the companies will need to hire experts who will be able to carry out advanced market analysis on the regular basis. In order to implement the new sales growth strategies, the company will need to invest a lot of resources into the training of the personnel that is involved in marketing and sales.
Secondly, coordination of the marketing and sales teams represents another organizational challenge. Permanent redirection of the sales teams from the low potential growth areas to the areas with higher potential requires clear guidelines and reward models so that the staff could understand the purpose of the company’s micromarket approach. In addition, the sales teams should have the possibility to contribute to the determination of the micromarkets if they see that the big data analysis failed to take into account some drivers of growth.
Finally, allocation of the resources may result in the underperforming of the profitable markets and excessive spending in the low-profit markets. In order to reduce the risk of ineffective spending, the companies should have the possibility to make quick changes into the business activities and redistribute the resources. Therefore there should be constant collaboration between different departments and connection with all micro-markets.
In conclusion, the micromarket strategy may help to increase the sales and optimize the work of the sales teams. Nevertheless, there are a large number of organizational issues that can be only resolved if the employees have strong analytical skills and the decision-making practices remain flexible. Nowadays the companies use the big data analysis to gain the competitive advantage and the micromarket approach may provide the companies with much data about the customers and the market conditions. Therefore the overall activity of the companies may significantly improve.
Works Cited
Gayal, M., Hancock,M., Hatami, H. Selling into Micromarkets. Harvard Business Review.
July–August 2012. Web. 16 February 2016
