Palladium Door Inc

The director of sales and marketing, Richard Hawly, at Palladium Door, Inc had to achieve a sales goal of $12.5 million for 2004. That was an increase in 36% over the sales for the year 2003.

The residential garage door awareness was very low according to the survey done by Palladium. Therefore, Palladium cannot build up a marketing strategy that would be based on brand recognition due to the insufficient awareness about its products in the market. Instead, it should first focus on offering a product that is cheap in price, reliable and has some amount of aesthetic appeal.

As brand recognition didn't play an important part in Palladium's case, it needed to focus on its distribution strategy. Various distribution strategies were suggested by the executives at Palladium. However, only one distribution strategy might not be successful in achieving the desired sales results. We need to consider a mix of different distributor marketing strategies.

I would suggest that Palladium should be focusing on its present distribution strategy. However, at the same time it should even focus its energy on strengthening its ties with the current distribution network. This can be done by calling up and following up with the distributors at least once every week, instead of the current strategy of following up just twice a month. This would even help in developing enthusiasm among the distributors and they would even sell more of Palladium products in the hope of achieving a better and efficient after-sales service.

Along with the above-mentioned strategy, Palladium needs to plan out a general reduction in the number of dealerships without granting any formal exclusive franchises. This would help the company in future by being flexible. Reducing the number of dealerships would even lead to a higher sales representative to distributor ratio. Thus, it would improve the quality of customer service. This plan calls for