Reconfiguration’s effect on the Strategic Selling Function.

Reconfiguration’s effect on the Strategic Selling Function.

Reconfiguration is about an organization’s ability to recombine organizational assets and structures as the organization grows and as new markets emerge and technologies change.

It has everything to do with the framing of new opportunities in order to achieve sustainability in an organization’s competitive advantage.

Strategic Selling Function

Selling function is an element of the marketing mix that is primarily tactical in nature.

Strategic Selling Function Framework (SSFF) posits a direct effect of sales function resources and capabilities on sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) and indirect effect, through the mediation of SCA.

SSFF consist of Selling function: Resources (Social capital, cultural capital and human capital; capabilities (New customer acquisition, customer relationship expansion and customer retention); Dynamic Meta –Capabilities (Seizing, sensing and shaping and reconfiguration) and Organizing Processes and Contexts (innovation capacity, customer linking, social network capacity, culture building capability and market orientation). They all form part of sustainable competitive advantage which lead to superior Long-term Returns.

Reconfiguration is needed to maintain an organization’s ability to successfully evolve and to escape destructive path dependencies because success likely to breed some level of routine for operational efficiency.

Changing organization is costly hence some organizations are doubtful to adapt to change in technology as it changes rapidly and to customer’s new preferences. It can adopt to one organizational structure that is a multi-divisional form with a relative abandonment of functional structure. Performance at the organization can be improved again by human resource practice influence such as teamwork, task responsibilities, etc.

The model of organizational change offers a basis for exploring the involvement of key executives in its change and learning procedure. Part of change management process is to emphasize on the four disciplines which are strategic intent, market insight, and innovation focus and business design.

The dynamic aspects of the new structure are captured in a series of team sensing and sharing structures and forums and seizing business process.

According to the Resource Based view, the key to competitive advantage is the uniqueness of each company’s resources, and profitability is achieved through exploiting differences in a firm’s portfolio of resources.

Capabilities are defined as processes for deploying resources for desired end results. There are three capabilities fundamental to the selling function: new customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer relationship expansion.

One would expect capabilities to be more closely aligned with strategic advantage that resources, and indeed it describes the state of empirical research.

There are three selling function resources that have an important impact on a firm’s ability to gather a strategic advantage; cultural, social and human capital.

Human capital consist of some factors like size of the sales force, selling approach expertise, knowledge of the sales force and the sales force’s reputation between its customers with respect to being reliable, loyal, and friendly. Some human capital elements are rare, inimitable, valuable, and non-substitutable.

Cultural capital refers to the belief system that guides behavior. The values, behavior and attitudes with characters guides’ employees’ actions and the relationships establish a firm’s cultural capital.