Skillsoft 2: Strategic Sales Planning

At the beginning of every Skillsoft assignment, I like to take the test before and after going through the course to be able to compare what I have learned by completing the material. Upon completing my beforehand attempt of the course test, I had very poor scores averaging under 55%. After going through the assigned material and learning what the course had to teach me, there was a dramatic increase in my score to 83%. I didn’t think that my original score was that bad based on the fact that I hadn’t even viewed the material yet, it astounded me that just a little bit of listening and note taking could increase my score by 30%. What I learned from the course is as follows. The primary focus of the strategic sales planning course was to teach the importance of analyzing competition, segmenting customers, creating value propositions, and developing the sales process/strategy. Correctly being able to analyze the competition is a huge step in being able to fully coordinate your strategic sales planning. Listing out the key competition in terms of primary, secondary, and potential competitors helps to be able to find how you measure up within the market. Another key idea from the course was segmenting customers. Knowing whether or not a segment is diverse enough to sustain long term success can be a difficult task without doing the proper market research. For example, trying to market toward a small segment like 90+ year old males living in Northern Minnesota is not going to be able to sustain long terms sales and growth. There just isn’t enough demand, and the segment isn’t diverse enough. Developing value propositions is another term from the course that was very important. Differentiating and separating a product from the competition and showing what you have that the competitors don’t is a way of