Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Aman Chopra Akansha Singh Anubhav Rawat Neha Chowdhury Prateek Malpani
A large sales staff hinders more than it helps a company climb the curve. Instead the firm should focus first on organizing itself so it can learn from customers and respond to them.
Hence entire organization needs to learn how customers will acquire and use it, a process we call the sales learning curve.
SLC Process
The sales learning process unfolds in three phaseseach requiring a different size sales force with different skills: 1. Initiation: Youve beta-tested the product and have few potential customers. Hire three to four salespeople to learn how customers will use the product and to support other parts of the company in refining the offering as well as marketing and selling strategies. Look for salespeople who: Communicate well with teams from other functions Tolerate ambiguity Have a deep interest in product technology Can bring customers together with various functional teams in your firm Can develop their own sales models and collateral materials
Scalix developed a product using as its core HPs OpenMail system and jumped into the go-to-market stage Scalixs initial strategy was simple: recruit a highpowered enterprise-sales veteran and sell direct to CIOs at large enterprises. They rapidly extended and expanded the enthusiasm and interest for the Scalix product at the CIO-level.
Scalix discovered a number of unanticipated problems. 1) It became evident that the CIO was not the decision-maker for these companies email vendor. 2) Scalix discovered that many large companies needed to get more comfortable with Linux before they would run email on it.
Problems
Company had expected the product to be mature and ready for prime time, but in actuality there were product stability and functionality issues that had to be dealt with. Frustration for sales people used to selling mature products. Sales force exposed to early product issues, no significant additional revenue opportunity to compensate for this. Experienced sales reps rebelled against new product and commission structure. Concerns that new product would be threat to hardware vendors. Low revenue - Product abandoned
Target points
Awareness amongst customers Delivery of a robust product that leads to customer satisfaction Identification and resolution of service issues Development of a repeatable sales model Appropriate market positioning relative to competitors Design of effective sales incentives
Develop a sales model Work upon a sales pitch