Marketing, Sales, and Business Communication
Marketing and sales
Marketing creates, communicates, and delivers value while building customer relationships. The marketing mix-product, price, place, promotion-guides decisions; services add people, process, and physical evidence. Segmentation divides a market, targeting selects segments, and positioning shapes perception relative to competitors. Research is primary (collected for the problem) or secondary (already published). The sales process moves from prospecting and qualifying through presentation, objection handling, closing, and follow-up. AIDA describes attention, interest, desire, and action. CRM systems track interactions and support retention.
Communication
Communication follows sender, encoding, channel, decoding, receiver, feedback, and noise. Active listening, concise business writing, audience analysis, and appropriate tone matter. Traps: equating marketing with advertising; listing features instead of benefits; confusing push (channel incentives) with pull (consumer demand); and treating market share as the same as share of customer.
Worked example
Customer lifetime value (CLV) estimates long-term value: average purchase × annual frequency × retention years × margin. A customer spends $100 four times a year for five years at a 30% margin: 100 × 4 × 5 × 0.30 = $600. Rule of thumb: compare CLV with acquisition cost; a $600 CLV can justify a much higher acquisition spend than a one-time $100 sale.