Having an effective, appropriate marketing and sales effort is crucial if postal organisations are to cope with increasing competition from technology or alternative service providers, plus customers demanding cheaper, faster and more reliable services.

Transend fully understands how challenging postal marketing can be.

Transend's marketing and sales capability has been drawn from New Zealand Post's experience in operating successfully in what is believed to be the most deregulated postal market in the world.

Developing Marketing Capability

We have helped clients in developing countries to:

• Set up their marketing and sales departments from a zero base or re-shape existing marketing teams to better reflect the market needs
• Develop their market segmentation strategies and sales planning
• Research the market
• Review existing products, create new products and launch them to the local market
• Identification, scoping and launch of new revenue growth business opportunities leveraging off the existing customer base and the existing retail network
• Develop robust customer-centric marketing strategies and practices

Marketing in a Deregulated Postal Industry

When markets become liberalised or deregulated, the marketing activities of postal organisations need to change to reflect the organisation’s role in the new market.

Typically the focus is to increase market presence and to become more competitive and customer focused.

There will usually be a need to:

• Review how existing products and services are structured, priced and promoted
• Introduce a stronger, more competitive sales strategy for dealing with commercial customers
• Implement strong physical and electronic market intelligence processes and networks to monitor and measure market developments and analyse and respond to changes as the market opens up
• Model options for liberalisation, ensuring local Government and UPU obligations are monitored and factored into recommendations and/or submissions to Government and law-makers' decision-making, legal changes and competitor access proposals
• Develop and manage market and customer research required for a postal organisation to understand the impact of a newly liberalised market, especially among the highest-revenue-generating customers
• Research and plan for new competitor interconnect/access to the existing postal network and understand how the principles of market pricing can change the behaviours of incumbent and new postal operators
• Plan for operational impacts and analyse the effect when the market is liberalised, including procedures required for handling competitor mail items

Transend’s Approach

Transend offers a number of proven approaches and frameworks to meet an individual client's requirements and their particular challenges.

Product Review Framework

The Transend product review framework enables full, accurate and straightforward reporting of postal services' sales volumes and profit. It provides the means to help make postal services profitable, attractive and simple to understand and enables easier identification of further opportunities.

Pricing Framework

Transend’s approach to pricing includes:

• Collection of data about product cost and customer use
• Development of a simplified commercial pricing structure, for example, pricing by size.
• Design of discount structures. Discount levels for commercial customers can be securely set to prevent ad hoc discounting practices by sales people. This approach allows sales people to create contract pricing and/or customised quotations while visiting customers and is a practical way of managing expiring or renewing contracts and new proposals by customer.
• Implementation of sales tools and measurement of the sales team effectiveness