Optimum Sales – How to Eliminate Uncertainty in Commercial Strategic Planning
Strategic planning, in most cases, is not the result of the inspiration of a brilliant executive; it is usually the result of hard, methodical work that ultimately allows them to make a decision with a low level of uncertainty.
Commercial strategic planning has its own methodology which, while not infallible, also allows for choosing the best business development option by reducing uncertainty. The reduction of uncertainty is nothing more than having different options for action to ensure that the results appear as they should. That is to say, we must stop predicting the future in a probable manner and move towards managing plausible scenarios and making decisions about them.
The generation of plausible scenarios allows us to plan different business models that help us establish various operational strategies for business development based on the evolution of the environment and local markets. Ultimately, it allows us to have different objective options for operational execution.
In scenario planning, it is important to construct each one of them through two major groups of factors that, depending on their interrelation, will provide us with one reality or another on which we must build one or another commercial strategy to achieve the results required by the company.
The first group of factors, or external framework, that we must consider in plausible scenario planning are those that are not even within the sectoral scope where our company operates. These include macroeconomic conditions, geopolitical changes, energy prices, international finance, demographics, social values, technological maturity, regulatory framework, international trade, exchange rates… All of them generate variables that condition our commercial strategy.
The second group of factors, or transactional framework, is composed of the elements that determine the activity sector of our company, such as suppliers, competitors, regulators, lobbies, investors, objective behavior of customers, among others.
The plausible combination of the elements that make up both the external and transactional frameworks, as well as their interrelation, provides us with different scenarios with a high level of plausibility that, among other things, reduce uncertainty, allow us to generate different operational strategies that respond to each scenario, give us a high decision-making capacity, and a high speed of reaction if we need to change the operational strategy.
Ultimately, plausible scenario planning allows us to generate more objective sales strategy decision options, with less uncertainty and a very high level of success.
| David Galve | General Director www.linkedin.com/in/davidgalve |  |
