Business to Business Markeing

PREFACE

In this reflection essay, the concept of “project” is embodied with “new business development process”. As new business development are everyday projects in my day-to-day work, and my company indeed manages the activity based on principle of project management.

The module concepts selected to be discussed here are around project selection: Analytic techniques (capital budgeting, cost/benefit analysis, shadow pricing), strategic misrepresentation, and procedural legitimacy (stage gate). These concepts are selected because they’re much associated with the major challenge in project management that my company is currently facing: to reduce chaos, streamline process and eventually increase productivity.

PART 1: MY WORK ROLE

COMPANY

The company that I’m working for is an American Fortune 500 company and a leader in world chemistry industry. The company's products and operations are currently managed and reported in six operating segments: Engineered materials, Cellulose derivatives, Intermediate chemistry, Food ingredients, EVA Polymers and Emulsion Polymers. Corresponding to the broad product portfolio, the downstream industry sectors that the company serves are diverse, including automobile, medicine, aerospace, electronics, consumer products, construction, Coating & Inks, and so on.

CHARACTERS OF THE BUSINESS

The company’s products all are chemical specialties, which has a number characters that distinct it from chemical commodity in many aspects:

1. Large customer base

Chemical specialties usually have smaller single customer volume than commodities. Correspondingly, customer base is larger, meaning many customer relationships need to be managed.

1. Technical resource-intensive

Chemical specialties are used based on their performance or function so heavy technical service is involved before and after the transaction meaning technical resource is essential for the business.

1. Constant new business development

While commodity chemicals normally have a fixed set of applications, specialties that usually have a number of attributes serve many different applications. And possibilities of new applications/market always exist with continuous product modification. Hence new business development is a constant endeavor, which is normally the main responsibility of marketing team in a chemical specialty firm. In fact, a large group of marketing team is not unusual to see in a chemical specialty firm.

1. Process-based new business development activity

For commodities, transaction is usually the main body of the relationship with customer, while for chemical specialties, new business development cycle consists of a number of steps, among which, transaction is only the last step and might be a relatively less important step compared with previous ones.