Walmart's Strategic Landscape: Navigating Mission, Vision, and Customer Engagement - Essay Sample

Company’s Background

Walmart Inc. is a corporation that primarily focuses on retail and wholesale services. It is an American multinational retail corporation and the leading organization in terms of sustainability, creating corporate philanthropy, and, eventually, a range of job opportunities. The company has about 56 banners or locations in 27 different countries across the world. Following its massive customer turn-up annually, the company has registered a total of 2.2 million associate workers in the various 56 banners (Walton, 2012). Moreover, Walmart operates a range of hypermarkets, departmental, and grocery stores with its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. It was first founded by the businessmen brothers, Sam Moore Walton and Lawrence Walton, but was later incorporated as a multinational unit in 1969 (Walton, 2012).

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Typically, the merchandise and extended range of services are often sold by Walmart are often at averagely low or standard prices. It is also imperative to understand that the company operates its activities using various segments, including Walmart U.S., Walmart International, and Sam's Club (Walton, 2012). Sam's Club segment comprises the company's membership representing the various warehouse clubs and samclubs.com. On the other hand, Walmart U.S. specializes in consumer products, which fundamentally operates under the trade names such as Walmart, Wal-Mart, and the Walmart Neighborhood Market Brands. The consumer products are also sold with names such as Walmart.com and several other ecommerce branding options. Finally, the segment for Walmart International acts as the managing body of supercenter, supermarket, hypermarket, and the warehouse club (Walton, 2012).

Mission Statement

The mission of Walmart Company is to help individuals to save much of their money while making purchases for various consumer products, as a means of leveraging or promising them a better and improve life (Walton, 2012). The statement is a direct reflection of the company's founding ideals and beliefs. The critical strategic decisions made by Sam Walton were usually based on the fact that more goods and services should be availed to customers at the lowest prices possible to support bulky shopping and the extent of satisfaction. This led to Walmart's slogan, "Save Money” (Walton, 2012).

Vision Statement

The vision of Walmart as a corporation is to eventually make it become the ultimate destination for every customer who aims at acquiring fundamental goods and services, and at the same time, intends to save money, regardless of their budget quotations (Walton, 2012). This vision was first incorporated into the company in 2017, during an extensive investment meeting summit.

Walmart’s Strategic Prospect for Customers

Naturally, a strategic prospect in business refers to the process aimed at identifying, qualifying, and prioritizing sale opportunities, intended to add more potential customers into the group of their loyal consumers (Ingram et al., 2016). Walmart Corporation is an internationally recognized organization for its two significant business keys: The one-stop shopping model and Everyday Low Cost (EDLC) (EDLP). Using the previously mentioned three segments: Walmart U.S., Walmart International, and Sam Clubs, the company has made it easier to reach its targeted customers globally because the monitoring process of the decentralized distribution chain is examined in a more straightforward manner (Ingram et al., 2016). The company has a reliable 150 centers of distribution to reach new customers to facilitate more relaxed delivery. Even though the company is known to sell its products at the minimum prizes and costs, it has remained competitive, functional, productive, and customer-centric because of the following programs;

The strategic sales funnel an example of a sales prospecting strategy that represents a set of trust-based sales by using a funnel (Ingram et al., 2016). Other targeted groups are the sales leads and the surrounding suspects, which refers to varying organizations that are more likely to purchase the products. Sales product is another essential individual in the sales prospecting agency (Ingram et al., 2016). Walmart has systems and salespeople who can identify the sales product, and directly initiate the purchases to them

Most importantly, the everyday Low Cost (EDLC) prospecting strategy allows Walmart to utilize definite control measures in monitoring and restrict their expenses so that customers are left with a more significant proportion of the savings (Kickul & Gundry, 2002). Secondly, the Everyday Low Price (EDLP) strategy is ideally used by the organization to keep its prices at a consistently lower rate, without imminent fluctuations due to promotions and shortages. In convention, this is a technique of assuring the customers that prices will not change, as it occurs in different companies that value products, based on the absence of promotional activities (Kickul & Gundry, 2002). Besides, the EDLP method allows consumers to build enormous trust with the organization, hence may become a loyal customer.

Thirdly, the company uses a Savings Catcher & Ad Match to technically evaluate the markets and their prices (Kickul & Gundry, 2002). After the evaluation, the system adjusts accordingly to ensure that the prices are either at par or below the competitors' prospected costs. Rollbacks are another crucial set of the company's methodology to lower the price of specific products to match the customers' cost-saving expectations. In other words, prices for some products will slightly rise due to environmental factors, but Walmart ensures that rollbacks are applied so that the rates of cost savings are not compromised for the consumers. Besides, Walmart also has a range of distribution centers that allows its customers to make their orders online and indicate their most specific preferred pickup locations. With this intervention in place, customers save transportation costs; hence they can use the savings to purchase other products. The ecommerce capabilities further give Walmart customers a substantial opportunity to make online orders through the interpreted online grocery that seems almost the same with the physical grocery. Finally, Walmart usually provides its customers with fresh products, devoid of its perishability characteristics (Kickul & Gundry, 2002). Goods such as vegetables and fruits are typically channeled faster for deliveries. However, the company still offers a money-back guarantee of up 100%, which allows a customer to gain trust and confidence that quality products will be delivered.

How Walmart Prepares and Plans For Sales Dialogue and Presentations

Sales dialogue refers to the conversation process between the sellers and buyers, which occasionally occurs as salespeople make attempts to develop a staunch customer relationship. To have an enhanced sales dialogue that targets the largest population of the customers around the USA and globally, Walmart has online sales dialogue templates that operate as a tool that directly links salespeople to buyers (Cicala et al., 2012). The online platform, which is one of the ecommerce components, has the additional advantage that it can collect pertinent information for several customers at once instead of physical grocery, which serves a specific number of customers at a particular time.

Nonetheless, the philosophy of sales representations is that after successfully implementing the sales prospecting and dialogue plans, effective measures should be used to persuade the new customers in buying the company’s commodities (Cicala et al., 2012). One of the high-rated mechanisms through the use of written sales proposals, which is typically a self-contained piece of presentation consisting of various verbal sales that can convince the buyer. Walmart uses its different segments to assign the salespeople to make such written proposals to prospected buyers (Cicala et al., 2012). However, the online platform has also had a massive effect in convincing many prospective buyers because of increased feedback boxes' increased positive reviews. Research has postulated that in the 21st century, purchasing decisions for several online was contemporarily made, based on the previous customer reviews. As a result, the good reviews by the company's loyal and new customers have supported sales dialogue and presentations.

References

Cicala, J. E., Smith, R. K., & Bush, A. J. (2012). What makes sales presentations effective–a buyerseller perspective? Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/08858621211196958/full/html

Ingram, T. N., Avila, R. A., Schwepker, C. H., & Williams, M. R. (2016). Sell. Cengage Learning.

Kickul, J., & Gundry, L. (2002). Prospecting for strategic advantage: The proactive entrepreneurial personality and small firm innovation. Journal of small business management, 40(2), 85-97. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1540-627X.00042

Walton, S. (2012). Case Study: Walmart. Strategic International Management, 67. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-658-07884-3.pdf#page=75