Topic: Managing Strategy & Growth
Order Description
Class Discussion for Week 9 re Rob, James, and Sophie’s Marketing Scenario

The idea of market segments and becoming close to their customers in terms of understanding their business issues, and ways in which the new product being formulated by Rob, James and Sophie could solve these issues and provide tangible benefits that customers would pay for, was making sense to the team.

They were discussing how to do their forward Leads to Sales projections for sales being made to start at the time they could likely deliver their product.

They had put some ‘steps in the sale process’ in their Salesprojections spreadsheet for converting a Lead to a Sale as applicable for the proposed Business / Sales Model they had worked through.

The discussion they are having is about tracking and analysing the key factors that affect the expected conversion rate from each step in the sales process to the next, and the length of time taken to convert from each of the step in the lead to sales process to the next step. While at this early stage they have to apply a ‘best guess’ for their initial projections based on their findings from the Customer Discovery / Validation / Initial Creation phases, they realise that if the reality turns out to be different they need to factor that into their projections as they learn more with each sale.

Sophie feels they will need to understand the reason(s) for the actual conversion rate from one step to the next being different to the projected one. ‘We need that information constantly to work on more accurate projections in future, as well as building our understanding of how we can best interact with our customer during the sales process to reduce the conversion time frame and increase the conversion rate’, she says.

Rob thinks this level of analysis may be too much work for such a small business, but James is tending to agree with Sophie. He senses that their business viability could depend on getting this as ‘right as possible’.

He also thinks that they have to get their marketing messages right so that the ‘leads’ turn out to be the right ones where there is a match between the customer needs and what they can and can not offer to the customer. ‘We don’t want to waste time on mismatch situations’, he says to the others. ‘We have precious few resources, and must make every post a winner’.

Rob also thinks they need to come up with some good looking sales numbers to help convince investors, and tells the others the sales people they will hire with investor money will be told to ‘get’ those numbers as part of their performance package. He says they will hire a sales manager to run the sales team make sure the numbers are achieved.

Their mentor had no hesitation in suggesting they talk to you to provide insight and guidance into these issues.