Salesoft Inc.

SaleSoft Inc is faced with making a tough, time constrained and strategic choice to either continue with its PROCEED software development or redirect the efforts of the entire companys 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 companys future and indeed its very viability. I would recommend the company to 1. Fully redirect all of its 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 burnrate.

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.

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 didnt 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:
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 didnt want to go for complete automation for all the processes. We recommend introducing the Trojan Horse solution instead of continuing with PROCEEDs 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.

SaleSoft Inc.s Primary Objective

To become a leader in the high end of the Sales Automation software industry Why SaleSoft should not proceed with launching TH? TH would be targeted at organizations wanting to implement SA solutions in general or who lack awareness about it. Many of these organizations would go ahead with implementing TH and would not want to implement PROCEED. These organizations will also be targeted by giants like Microsoft and Lotus as well as CMS vendors. Competition from such cash rich and experienced companies might force SaleSoft out of the industry. There would be other organizations who would want to further their SA initiative and implement CSAS. SaleSoft will not be able to capture this market as its product PROCEED would not be ready by then and other vendors would be ready to capture the market. We can hence conclude that the ultimate objective of launching TH to capture customer base for PROCEED will, most likely, not be achieved. Investigate whether launching TH creates required funds Another issue with launching TH could be that it could create confusion in the mind of SaleSoft CSAS buyers. By the time PROCEED is launched, the buyers could be viewing SaleSoft at the low end of the SA software industry. Furthermore, TH should not be launched as a stepping stone for PROCEED as SaleSoft is not an established company in this industry and hence does not have buyers loyalty. Why should SaleSoft not proceed with TH? TH will definitely result in distracting SaleSoft from its primary objective. In addition, it will cannibalize sales from PROCEED that SaleSoft is currently marketing. So this will not be favourable as PROCEED will be more profitable than TH in the long run. Further, TH will result in preventing SaleSoft from forming relationships with consultants whose support is critical to the success of PROCEED. Finally as discussed above, there will be a huge competition for TH from big market...

PROCEED gives the organization the ability to streamline field sales activity, define associated business procedures, capture decision-critical metrics, and identify and manage constraints, facilitating continuous process improvement. As a result, PROCEED continues to deliver comprehensive visibility of performance, simplify sales processes, and strengthen enterprise-wide communication. Through its comprehensive suite of business objects, the system is designed to address the marketing, sales, and customer support requirements of an organization and provides measurable advancements in productivity through continuous process improvement and increased resource effectiveness, while integrating with all other departments to accommodate complete enterprise computing. -0-