CHAPTER 14
Evaluating Performance TO PERCEIVE — L A O -T S Z E
THINGS EARLY ON IS INTELLIGENCE.
NO MARKETING PLAN,
nor the management put in place to implement it, can avoid the need to respond to marketplace changes. After all, the marketing plan is simply a forecast of how a company’s products will progress in any particular market. No marketeer has ever gotten that prediction completely correct the first time, nor has the market remained unchanged for very long after a plan’s implementation. International marketing is a complex issue, even for small companies. Projects of all sizes run the risk of becoming so involved in daily functions that marketing managers fail to audit their progress. When this happens, the ability to plan for the next marketing phase is greatly diminished. The only way to combat this problem is to have a regularly scheduled monitoring and evaluation of the marketing plan.
Sales Analysis: Are You on Course? Prior to market entry, sales goals must be set in order to determine the level of acceptability of the product by consumers and to provide a base for forecasting revenues and expenses. Sales goals should be set at realistic levels and determined objectively. Goals should be based on the potential of the new market, not on domestic market experience. Always make conservative estimations of sales growth. Marketeers who have been successful in their home market often forget the amount of time it took them to reach that level of sales revenue. Expecting to duplicate that hardwon success on a compressed time scale in a new market will cause disappointment (or worse) in even the most receptive environment. A company can divide its fiscal year into whatever size portions it finds easiest to manage while still giving timely information. The most common method is to have twelve periods that correspond to the months of a year. Unfortunately, all of the months aren’t of equal length; some companies work instead on thirteen four-week-long fiscal periods per year. This allows marketeers to make more accurate comparisons among the various sales periods to determine where “peaks” and “valleys” truly exist. Much of the decision regarding this matter will be based on the type of product being sold and on consumer buying patterns. N O T E : Some large retailers have taken advantage of bar-coding technology to track
their sales on a minute-by-minute basis. This form of “real time” sales auditing allows for very precise inventory control and consumer feedback.
The key to proper sales analysis is accuracy and consistency. While marketing is rarely mentioned in the same breath with accounting, the two disciplines are
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