Case Study On Spinning Mill

“Can i rely on sales force? And do you think it will lessen my burden?” asked Mr.Shargeel Khalid director of Khalid Shafique Spinning Mills Ltd. as we were having a meeting in his office regarding the division of work, and how company can spread its wings in international market. We proposed him to hire a sales force as it will reduce his administrative time and company could sell more. Since its inception Khalid Shafique Spinning Mills Ltd was operated by Mr. Shargeel who formed this new factory due to his passion of becoming an entrepreneur. Currently there are two types of marketing:

1. Consumer marketing

2. Industrial marketing

What this spinning mill does is industrial marketing in which they have long term contracts on huge levels and bulk ordering by buyers. In industrial marketing you have a marketing team which involves the owner in it too. Such industries include leather, garments, fabric, yarn industries etc. It depends on in-house management of organization whether to have a sales team for marketing or not. The textile sector of Pakistan has a culture of doing personal selling and most of the businesses in textile sector are family owned due to which the mill owner wants to create his own relations with the buyer and avoids hiring a sales force. Mr. Shargeel Khalid is involved with the company transactions sees finances of the company and is sometimes a part of marketing activities.

What owner currently practice is to just target buyers who want your manufactured product, work with them and provide them consignments on low level and then create relation. So there are no advertisements as performed for consumer products, in textile sector you get orders on consistent quality in the later years.

If you are introducing a new product or form of fabric and if you want to export it then a whole export schedule is formed. The process for that is that you make buyer ready, offer him rate, negotiate, do documentation, finalize the contract and then do shipment which is part of the production plan. There are two types of people involved in this plan which includes production staff and marketing people.

Multinationals like Sapphire mills, Nishat mills etc have sales force. They have whole marketing and sales team they go out in international exhibitions and find buyers of their product promoting brand names and marketing them. Currently sales technique adopted by Mr. Shargeel is that he goes to textile exhibitions abroad and gets the list of exhibitors with their contact information in it. They target exhibitors who use yarns and then contact them. As yarn is a raw material commodity they don’t perform door to door selling. Mr Shargeel Khalid does believe that for a good expanding business you need to perform market research in such exhibitions and they hardly find any Pakistani exhibitors.

People do not place orders or prefer Pakistan cloth because of the political unrest in our country and we lack variety and professionalism.

Khalid Shafique Spinning Mills Ltd lies in the 2nd tier and in this tier of textile industry they consider their marketing strategy to be best as they have hired a sales and marketing manager to look after their sales and marketing activities though not having any sales people. Sales activities should be left for marketers. Domestic market is also led by the marketing manager. They aim and focus towards developing a new form of fiber.

The actual selling process currently taking place is that they are called by buyers of yarn from domestic market, price is negotiated and form of payment is decided whether cash or credit.