Industry Sales, Marketing & Support Services

Successfully creating, nurturing and extending customer relationships is fundamental for business success. This relationship informs responsiveness and innovation in every other area of the business, as the link to demand, sales and the marketing and support functions behind it are a touchstone for revenue generating activities.

What makes marketing and sales activities effective and efficient varies enormously from sector to sector and even from business to business.  Factors include the value of the sale, complexity of the product, nature of the competition, channels to market and many others.  
The use of information technology in industry to support sales and marketing activities has historically been centred on particular tasks such as tracking an opportunity through the sales pipeline, managing marketing campaigns, or providing automation for specialised environments such as call centres.  For many companies, IT applications in these sales and marketing have been essentially separated from core ERP applications - or at best only poorly integrated.  

The Internet has changed the game completely. The rapid growth in the use of the Internet as a sales and marketing tool has been a major shift. The Internet can help with everything from gathering voice of the customer research to providing self-serve product information and shopping.  Early pioneers like Amazon and Dell illustrate how fully integrating sales and marketing into the fabric of the business and its operation can pay off in market leadership.