From August 1995

ISO for Sales and Marketing

Marketing Quality Assurance Ltd. (MQA) is the first certification organisation in the world to offer specialist assessment and training services to organisations wishing to develop quality systems for their marketing, sales and customer service activities. Assessment can be gained to the internationally recognised quality standard ISO 9001.

Recognising that the original ISO 9000 specification did not address activities prior to receipt of an order, that is the key activities of how a company goes about identifying and satisfying customer needs. MQA published their original quality assurance specification for marketing, sales and customer service in October 1990. This has since been revised and updated.

This new specification, an associated document to the ISO standard, embraces and extends the standard with the introduction of 35 additional requirements, all of which are based on international best practice.

These additional requirements focus on a number of marketing key activities, for instance:

• business, marketing and sales strategy, planning and performance measurement
• relations with external and internal customers
• management responsibilities with particular emphasis on business purpose and operating excellence

By combining two registrations, one for the core operating activities necessary to deliver the promised services and another, form MQA, for the marketing, sales and customer assurance activities, where the focus is on identifying and anticipating customer needs and expectations there is a unique opportunity to have all your organisation activities assessed to ISO 9000.

Where total quality management and business excellence are your goals we believe that the MQA route to continuous improvements provides an invaluable benchmark.