Sales strategies

An offensive sales strategy is based on the objective of acquire customers, whereas defensive sales strategies objective is to retain customers. To retain customers is fundamental to improve customer loyalty, which can be "free willed" or forced. Several authors demonstrate that customer satisfaction is important to customer loyalty (Fornell 1992; Zeithaml, et al., 1996; Bolton 1998; Cronin, et al., 2000; Sivadas & Baker-Prewitt, 2000). and more specific shows that customer loyalty minimize the likelihood of customer defection (Anderson & Sullivan 1993; Mithas, Jones, & Mitchell 2004).

Customer satisfaction is related with several tangile and intangible assets of the companies, like brand, market presence, product portfolio, service quality and price policy. There are findings indicate that service quality has a positive association with satisfaction and/or loyalty of customers (Parasuraman et al., 1988; Dabholkar et al., 1996; Bloemer et al., 1998; Athanassopoulos et al., 2001; Gomez et al., 2004; Theodoridis & Chatzipangiotou, 2009; Jayasankaraprasad & Kumar, 2012; George & Kumar, 2014) and that customer loyalty is linked to lower price elasticity (Anderson, 1996). Also, the relationship between satisfaction and loyalty as related to products and services was shown also by several authors (Kraft et al., 1973; Newman & Werbel, 1973; LaBarbera and Mazursky, 1983; Garfein, 1987; Bloemer & Lemmink, 1992; Bloemer & Kasper, 1995). There is also a very interesting study that have evidence that physical aspects play an important role in determining service quality in Saudi Arabia's hipermakets (Mahfooz, 2014) and the more favourable the store image, the higher the valence of the store to the customer (Bloemer et al.,1998). These evidences are quite important because shows how perception can influence these drivers of customer loyalty.

Acquire customers, in general, is based on developing existing or new markets, developing existing or new products or, branding programmes (Clow, Duffy & Black, 2011). Studies of conjoint analysis demonstrate the importance of brand, product and price on the customer choice, and that, miss information can have impact on results. Miss information can be driven from absence in the market, this is, the customer lacks of knowledge of some offering because there isn't a market segment that is not filled or a country market that is not present or even, he isn't aware of that offering.

For a succesful company the managment of brand, market presence, product portofolio, service quality and price is crucial for balance the sales strategies between customer acqusition and retention. It is demonstrated that attracting new customers is higher cost than retaining existing ones (Hart et al. 1990; Reichheld & Sasser 1990; Dominici & Guzzo, 2010). But, what is the balance between acquisition and retention?

These assets are determinated by the Touch Points, this is, where the customer takes into account on his choice the value of brand, market presence, product portofolio, service quality and price. The Touch Points are advertising, complaints, customer support, social networks, sales representatives and stores (phisical and/or virtual). For each of these Touch Points is possible to have measures that can be linked to customer acquistion and retention. Like the amount of investment; number of visits, views or likes; or, perception of goodness and/or quality. The question is to study which of these measures is better in each case.

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