The debate between shareholder primacy and stakeholder theory concerns the legal obligations of corporate directors. Introduction A corporation is never just a machine for making money. It is a legal institution, a social system, and a vehicle for allocating power, risk, and responsibility. That is why one of the most important debates in corporate governance continues to divide scholars, executives, regulators, and investors: should corporations exist primarily to maximize shareholder value, or should they balance the interests of all the people and institutions affected by their actions? This debate is commonly framed as shareholder primacy vs. stakeholder theory. Shareholder primacy says the corporation's central obligation is to its owners, the shareholders. Stakeholder theory says the corporation owes duties to a wider circle of affected parties, including employees, customers, suppliers, creditors, communities, and sometimes society at large. This is not a purely academ...
Marketing and sales strategy in a business plan works as a single commercial argument, not two separate departments. Kotler gave the discipline its framework, and I have tested that framework against Procter & Gamble’s brand architecture and Safaricom’s M-PESA rollout in Kenya. By the end you will know how segmentation, targeting, positioning, and the sales motion lock together into revenue.
By Kateule Sydney — Researcher and Writer | Last Verified: 2026-09-28 | Published by Kat-Syd Resources Hub
The marketing and sales strategy connects who you serve to how you sell.
Table of Contents
Market Segmentation and the Customer You Actually Serve
Definition
Kotler and Keller define market segmentation in Marketing Management as the process of dividing a market into distinct groups of buyers with different needs, characteristics, or behaviour, each of which might require separate products or marketing programmes. The point is not to describe the market. The point is to find the groups worth serving.
I want you to notice what the definition assumes. A segmentation is only valid if it produces groups you can reach and afford to serve. The four classic bases are these:
- Geographic — nations, regions, cities, and densities, used when the cost to serve varies sharply across distance.
- Demographic — age, income, occupation, education, and family size, the cheapest basis to collect and act on.
- Psychographic — social class, lifestyle, and personality, which explain why two buyers with the same income choose differently.
- Behavioural — usage rate, loyalty status, benefits sought, and readiness stage, the strongest predictor of future purchase.
My reading of the evidence is that most business plans fail at this step because they describe the market instead of segmenting it. A plan that says “the target market is urban professionals aged 25 to 45” has not segmented anything. It has named a demographic block and called it a strategy.
A real segmentation sequence runs in four steps:
- Survey and profile — gather needs, attitudes, and behaviour from a sample of the market.
- Cluster — group respondents by similarity of need, not similarity of description.
- Size and rank — estimate the revenue each segment can produce and the cost to reach it.
- Select — pick the segments the plan will actually serve and discard the rest in writing.
The interpretive insight is this: segmentation is an act of exclusion. If your plan names every segment, you have not chosen any.
Targeting and the Discipline of Saying No
Definition
Targeting, in Kotler and Keller’s terms, is the evaluation and selection of the segments the firm will enter. It is the commercial judgment that follows segmentation. Without it, the plan has a market but no customer.
The criteria I use to test any targeting decision are these:
- Size and growth — is the segment large enough and growing fast enough to matter at your scale?
- Structural attractiveness — Porter’s five forces apply at segment level, not just industry level.
- Fit with objectives and resources — can you actually win here with the money and skills you have?
I will put it this way: the harder discipline is not choosing a target, it is naming the targets you reject and stating why. A business plan that lists three segments and serves all three has usually chosen none. Key point: targeting shows up in the budget, not in the adjectives. If the marketing spend and the sales headcount are not concentrated on the chosen segment, the plan has not targeted anything.
Targeting strategies fall into three familiar shapes:
- Undifferentiated — one offer to the whole market, rarely viable today outside commodity categories.
- Differentiated — separate offers for separate segments, the model most consumer-goods firms run.
- Concentrated — one segment served deeply, the model most start-ups should run and most do not.
The insight to carry forward is that a concentrated strategy beats a differentiated one when your resources are thin. Only when the cash flow is stable does differentiation earn its cost.
Case Study
I will show this with two firms that executed the marketing and sales strategy from opposite ends. Procter & Gamble illustrates the differentiated model at global scale. Safaricom illustrates the concentrated model in an emerging market where distribution, not advertising, decided the outcome.
P&G operates a brand-management structure in which each brand owns its segment, its positioning, and its profit-and-loss account. The company reported net sales of $84.0 billion in its fiscal year 2024 results, with five product categories each carrying multiple billion-dollar brands. The structure forces segmentation to be operational, because every brand manager’s budget is defended against a named competitor in a named segment. Safaricom launched M-PESA in 2007 as a mobile-money transfer service aimed at a single, sharply defined segment: unbanked and underbanked Kenyan adults who had a phone but no bank account. By the time the service passed 30 million active customers in Kenya in the 2020s, it had become the dominant payments rail for that segment, and Safaricom’s annual reports credit it as the largest contributor to the firm’s service revenue. [VERIFY: confirm the exact M-PESA customer figure and year against Safaricom’s most recent annual report before publication.]
My reading of the pair is that both cases prove the same point from different directions. P&G wins by dividing markets into segments small enough to be owned. Safaricom won by refusing to divide at all and instead taking one segment that every other operator had ignored. The marketing and sales strategy is not a template. It is a choice about which customers you will serve and how you will reach them, and both firms made that choice explicit in writing before they spent the money.
Positioning and the Mind of the Buyer
Definition
Ries and Trout defined positioning in 1981 as the act of designing the company’s offer and image so that it occupies a distinct and valued place in the target customer’s mind. Kotler later folded the concept into the marketing-management canon, and it is now a required element of any credible business plan. Positioning is not what you say about yourself. It is what the buyer remembers when you are not in the room.
A positioning statement, in the form most planners use, contains four parts:
- Target — the specific segment the offer is for.
- Frame of reference — the category the buyer places you in.
- Point of difference — the one benefit you claim that competitors cannot easily match.
- Reason to believe — the proof, in evidence the buyer can check.
I will not pretend this is easy. Most positioning statements I read in business plans fail on the point of difference, because the difference is claimed rather than proved. “Superior quality” is not a difference. “Same-day delivery in three cities, verified by our courier logs” is a difference, because the buyer can test it.
The five positioning moves that work in practice, in the order I recommend applying them:
- Attribute positioning — lead on a single product feature the category does not offer.
- Benefit positioning — lead on the outcome the feature produces for the buyer.
- Use or application positioning — lead on the situation in which the product is used.
- User positioning — lead on the identity of the buyer the product is for.
- Competitor positioning — lead on the contrast with a named rival.
The insight I want you to carry forward is that positioning must be earned operationally. If the sales team, the packaging, the pricing, and the after-sales service do not all reinforce the same claim, the buyer will not hold the position in memory, and the marketing spend is wasted.
The Sales Motion That Converts Strategy Into Revenue
Definition
The sales motion is the sequence of channels, people, and steps through which the target customer is moved from awareness to payment. Kotler treats it as the fourth “P” of the marketing mix, place, but in a business plan it earns its own section because it is where strategy meets cash. A plan without a sales motion is a plan without revenue.
I want you to see the sales motion as three decisions, not one. The first is channel, meaning where the buyer meets the offer. The second is sales force, meaning who carries the offer to the buyer. The third is the conversion process, meaning the defined steps from first contact to signed contract or completed purchase.
The framework I recommend for any business plan is the following three-element structure:
- Channel design — direct, indirect, or hybrid, selected by the cost to acquire a customer in each channel.
- Sales-force structure — inside sales, field sales, or partner-led, matched to the average deal size and the buying process of the segment.
- Conversion process — the named stages, the exit criteria for each, and the metrics that show where deals stall.
My conclusion at this point in the plan is that the sales motion is where most business plans quietly break. The marketing section reads well, the positioning is clear, but the plan never states who will call the customer, how often, with what script, and against what target. When that section is missing, the plan has described a hope, not a business.
Conclusion
The case evidence I have laid out establishes that the marketing and sales strategy is a single connected argument, not two departmental sections stapled together. Procter & Gamble and Safaricom both won because the choice of who to serve was made explicit before the choice of how to sell, and both firms paid for the wrong choices early rather than late.
My detailed conclusion is this. The marketing and sales strategy matters because the business plan is a claim on capital, and capital is only released against a credible path to revenue. What it is supposed to achieve is a specific, defensible answer to four questions: which customers, with what offer, through what channel, at what cost to acquire. It applies whenever a firm commits resources to a market it does not already own, which means it applies at start-up, at expansion, and at every new product launch. The people responsible are not only the marketing manager and the sales manager. The founder or chief executive owns the choice of segment, and the finance lead owns the cost-to-acquire discipline that keeps the choice honest. The way it is executed is by writing segmentation, targeting, positioning, and the sales motion in sequence, testing each against evidence rather than adjectives, and updating the numbers quarterly as the market answers back. The main advantages of doing this properly are that capital is deployed against a named customer, that the sales team has a target it can hit, and that the plan survives contact with a competitor who is better funded. The main limitations are that good segmentation takes real research money, that positioning once fixed is expensive to change, and that a sales motion tuned to one segment often has to be rebuilt from scratch when the firm moves to the next.
The recommendations I would give any planner or founder are these:
- Name three segments and reject two in writing — the rejected list proves the target was chosen, not assumed.
- Write the positioning statement in one sentence — if it needs a paragraph, the position is not yet clear.
- Attach a cost-to-acquire number to every channel — a channel without a cost is a cost centre, not a strategy.
- Define the sales stages and their exit criteria — without them, the pipeline is opinion, not forecast.
- Review the segment choice every quarter — markets move, and the segment that paid last year may not pay next year.
A marketing and sales strategy is only as strong as the customer it is willing to refuse, and that refusal is the first real decision in the business plan.
References
- Kotler, P. & Keller, K. L. — Marketing Management, 15th ed. — Pearson
- Procter & Gamble Annual Report 2024 — P&G Investor Relations
- Safaricom Annual Report — M-PESA Customer and Revenue Data — Safaricom Investor Relations
- Ries, A. & Trout, J. — Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind — McGraw-Hill
- Porter, M. E. — Competitive Strategy — Free Press
Read Also on Kat-Syd Resources Hub
Functional Management — The Pillars — how marketing, operations, finance, and HR interlock in a working firm.
Entrepreneurship and Innovation Part I — Ideation and Opportunity Recognition — how the segment and the opportunity are identified before the plan is written.
Developing the Business Plan — Entrepreneurship and Innovation Part II — where the marketing and sales strategy sits in the full plan.
Written by Kateule Sydney — Researcher and Writer
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