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THE BURNING QUESTION

SaleSoft Inc is faced with making a tough, time constrained and strategic choice to either continue
with it¶s PROCEED software development or redirect the efforts of the entire company¶s workforce
to deliver the Trojan Horse (TH) product in time for the sales automation conference. The decision
taken will have to be absolutely exclusive and is expected to have a critical impact on the
company¶s future and indeed it¶s very viability.
MEMO TO SALESOFT MANAGEMENT
I would recommend the company to
1. Fully redirect all of it¶s efforts to get Trojan Horse (TH) product to market quickly so that they
can showcase it at the SA conference. This would be necessitated by the financial situation of
salesoft Inc as analyzed in this document. They can concentrate on getting the PROCEED product
out after demonstrating TJ.
2. Adopt a customer oriented value-based pricing for Salesoft and price it at a higher entry point
of $1000 for the computer hardware market.
3. Clearly choose the computer hardware industry as their target market segments and spend
minimal time and effort in getting involved with selling to financial sector industries.
4. Realign their internal sales organization to cater to the needs of the TH customer base more
effectively and strongly consider the possibility of offshoring some of the software development to
lower cost locales like India and China to reduce the cash burn-rate.
CASE ANALYSIS
It is evident from the case that Salesoft Inc has very limited funds for operation and has to show
positive developments to venture capitalists before they can raise further funds. Their situation is
further exacerbated by the fact that they have already emba ...
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MARKETING - I

ASSIGNMENT 3

SaleSoft, Inc (A)

CASE FACTS:

The main objective of SaleSoft (SS) is of becoming a leader in the high end of the Sales
Automation (SA) software industry for which they introduced PROCEED which had very little
competition and high demand. Now, SS needs to decide whether or not to introduce a Trojan
Horse (TH) product which could potentially distract SS from its primary objective.

There is a risk that if SS launches TH then the sales of PROCEED might get affected.
PROCEED had received good response but to convert interest to actual sales was taking time and
also with limited funds it had to show performance.

SA has a market for around $1 billion and expected growth was 40 % annually for next five
years.The time to sell and install a typical SA project took anywhere from 22 to 30 months.

The major concerns for the company were that:

‡ Company didn¶t have enough resources to have separate forces for the two products (TH and
PROCEED).

‡ If company sells both the products, then customers might end up buying TH rather than
PROCEED which is great loss to company as the company has invested a huge amount to get
PROCEED in market.

PROBLEM STATEMENT:

SaleSoft needs decide to whether to go ahead with PROCEED or not.

OPTIONS:

SS has following options:

‡ Can either go for PROCEED

‡ Or can go for Trojan Horse

‡ Or can go for both.

EVALUATION:

‡ TH was more than CMS but less than CSAS.

‡ TH mainly targets those customers who didn¶t want to go for complete automation for all the
processes at ...
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We recommend introducing the Trojan Horse solution instead of continuing with PROCEED 's
development due to multiple reasons that we will illustrate. To start off the financial situation is in
crisis when it comes to PROCEED as it requires 1 million dollars and it will take a total of 8 month
with 5modules still remaining to be fully operational and that is not feasible as the sales
automation conference is taking place in 3month where the product will not be ready. As the CSAS
illustrates that it was difficult for vendors to satisfy the customers as many of its functions are not
required by the customer and so will not come into play.
On the other hand inquiring TH is more beneficial financially as it only requires $200,000 to
develop and will need nearly half a million to market within the next few month which entitles its
availability for the automation conference which one of the first main goals and requirements for
the successful launch of any of the two products. Also on the other hand being more of a CMS
products it satisfies more of the customer need and as stated the resources are not available to
have both products available.
Finally although all the attention and time will be given for TH, and PROCEED will be dropped this
is no issue, as HR requires even less resources and effort then PROCEED and the Sunk cost that
came into play when manufacturing Proceed will not be taken as a total loss only if drooped as this
stage, a more catastrophic outcome might be if the product was continued and didn't meet
minimal requirements.

The buying cycle of proceed is illustrated in 7 main steps with a total duration of 37-64 months:
Realization by senior management.
Evaluate potential Benefit
determine Methodology
decide type of ...
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