Understanding Basics of Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service

Understanding Basics of Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service – sales | marketing | customer service

Understanding Basics of Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service

When you’re preparing supply chain for your organization, you may run across the term demand chain. The demand chain includes three important functions that get customers to buy from you, marketing, sales, and customer service.

Marketing is about generating awareness and interest in your products. This could involve educating people about your product, and creating an emotional attachment to your brand.

Sales is about convincing a customer that they need your product and getting them to buy it. And customer service makes sure the product works the way it’s supposed to, so your customers are happy and will buy more in the future.

Marketing, sales, and customer service need to work together in order to generate the demand for your supply chain. Predicting how much demand there’ll be is called forecasting or demand planning. And raising or lowering prices can help you change or shape the demand for your products. Now, supply chains are designed to fill demand, but the link between the demand chain and the supply chain is one of the hardest challenges for many companies to handle.

The sales folks might miss out on sales if their supply chain can’t keep up with the demand. But the supply chain team might find themselves with too much inventory if the sales team misses their target. So these teams need to be aligned. And one way to improve their coordination is with an integrated business planning process called sales and operations planning S&OP basically involves making sure that sales and marketing are setting realistic demand targets and then communicating openly with the supply chain about capacity and constraints. What makes supply chain management so important is that we’re fulfilling the demand from customers who buy our products.

And as supply chain professionals we need to work closely with sales, marketing, and customer service to keep supply aligned with demand, while making sure we keep products flowing through the supply chain.