About Office Solutions
1. Natalie oversees Sales and Marketing. Includes online advertising, direct sales to corporate accounts, emails, customer relationship management etc.
2. Office Solutions is a low–cost leader, online only, pay for Google ad, cookie–based search on FB, etc. no physical mailings, 2 emails a month to customers. Some cold calls to corporations
3. Natalie is head of sales and marketing – logistics, inventory, and vendor management are run by others.
4. Goals:
- Increase overall sales by 20% this year
- Increase profits by 10% this year. (What product categories, subcategories, regions, segments have highest profits, year over year trends)
- Most of our customers are individual consumers. Increase corporate accounts by 50% over the next 3 years.
5. Some ideas Natalie has for the future that students could consider for their projects.
- Create a loyalty program for most valuable consumers
- Looking to test market a new line of high–end furniture that includes traditional and standing desks, tables, and bookcases (regional analysis strong sales of furniture, total cost per sale)
- What to know more about what sells and where. Are our discount strategies working?
- Several new art vendors have approached us: two framed art companies one offering prints and one offering original art and one offering 3D art. (Which vendor, what region/ segment to test market)
- We sell a lot of office supplies to our consumer accounts. Some of those are small orders. Understanding the types of products frequently bought together would help us better target our promotions and sales and improve cross–selling.
- We’d like to drop underperforming products or even subcategories, but we still want to provide all the products requested by top 50% most frequent and profitable accounts.
- We charge a premium handling charge for same day shipping. What proportion of our orders are same day? Are same day orders always the same customers? Are they individual or corporate? Regionally specific or postal code specific?
- We’d like to better tailor our marketing efforts and focus on those subcategories, or even individual products, with the highest profit.
