Michael Porter regarded the selection of a defendable position within an industry as the end result of a competitive strategic analysis. He argued that successful, profitable companies generally choose to compete on either low costs or by differentiating their products to meet specific customer needs. Although these two strategic options are mutually exclusive,...

A simple sales cycle consists of the following five phaseslead qualification; prospecting or marketing; proposal development; deal closure; sales follow-up.  The outcome of the follow-up phase (step 5) should feed back into step 3 where new proposals are developed, shortcutting the...

SWOT analysis was developed by the middle of the 1960s for large organisations to determine the strategic fit between an organisation's internal, distinctive capabilities and external possibilities and to prioritise actions. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. In the early 1950s, two professors of business policy at Harvard,...

The Canadian academic, Henry Mintzberg, distinguished six coordination mechanisms from organisational design literature. Any group of individuals that needs to accomplish a complex task faces two opposing requirements: the division of labour of the task into subtasks to support specialisation, and the coordination of these subtasks to accomplish the overall...