Identify key problems;
Develop and evaluate alternative courses of action, and;
Select a course of action and suggest appropriate strategies and tactics to accomplish the chosen course of action.
Analyzing the Current Situation – The proper context must be established for the case analysis. You should summarize key environmental factors such as industry trends, level of competitiveness, customer perceptions, legal considerations, and evolving technology at the outset of their analysis. Often, it is enlightening to summarize the external environment in terms of opportunities and threats to the firm being studied. There should also be some assessment of the internal environment of the firm in terms of strengths and weaknesses. Assumptions are frequently made in case analyses, and your interpretations of the current operating environment are crucial in determining the validity of these assumptions.
Identification of Key Problems – Sales management is not practiced in discrete sub-functions, and most of the cases are related to several functional areas. I encourage a problem definition that encompasses the interactive nature of sales management decision making. Ensue you are identifying the underlying problem and not just the symptoms of this problem.
Identify and Evaluate Alternatives – You will develop reasonable alternatives and evaluate them in terms of feasibility, projected costs advantages, disadvantages, and potential short term and long term consequences. Make sure you are not proposing utopian solutions that would be financially impossible to justify. On occasion, an analysis will generate a solution with only one reasonable alternative and offer several other pitifully weak alternatives in an attempt to make it appear that rational analysis has taken place. I feel that the cases generate more
than one alternative on almost all the issues presented and that you should be expected to describe more than a single alternative.
Select a Course of Action – A course of action should be explicitly stated and the appropriate strategies and tactics to accomplish the chosen course should be discussed. Often, charting a course of action can be a difficult job, but implementation is the true challenge. Since you will be stopping short of the actual implementation, you should be aggressive in your case analysis to produce a workable action plan that would have a reasonable probability of success in the implementation phase.
This assignment represents 25% of your grade. The length requirement (2,000 to 2,500 words) only applies to the body of your document – the title page, addendums, reference pages, and similar examples will not count towards the length of your assignment. I expect you o use at least four other sources besides your textbook.
