Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Management in IT
Lecture 4
Sales
Marketing
Tomasz Bogucki
The engineer perspective
AI-as-a-
Service
The manager perspective
Sales
AI-as-a-
Service
Marketing
Means to generate COSTS<SALES
Underestimating sales
• Before any sale there must be a need, opportunity, problem to solve
• Look back at the presentation on building and verifying business concepts
Before taking a common path to failure, such as:
• Using rapid design tools, frameworks, open-source libraries, integrating external
services … – today it is so easy to build complex solutions. Let’s build it and see
what happens next!
• It is more exciting to engage into cutting-edge new technologies then to
immerse into business requirements and people problems! People will love this
technology.
• It is more comfortable to design without thinking of customers and markets,
their requirements and limitations. We simply can’t go wrong!
• Let’s build a product/service everyone will want to use. Or at least as little as
0,001% of the world’s population!
Selling
Eternal
Youth serrum
• Unless your product is one of the above, selling will require effort
• Active sales – find customers, contact them and convince them to buy
• Passive sales – sell to customers who found your product/service
• Selling costs! Selling takes time! Return is not immediate.
Revenue model examples:
Sales model •
• License
• Software-as-a-Service
• Answers: how will you sell • Freemium app + in-app purchases (like
games with “pay-to-win” concept)
• The business model, and particularly the • Bronze / silver / gold subscriptions
sales model is equally important as the (Deezer, Revolut)
product/service itself
• Free test period / attempt to lock-in
customer (MS Office 360)
• Innovative sales models can be the key
differentiator, create advantage, be a • Success fee / commission (eBay, AirBnB)
valuable asset, even be patented • Selling advertising (YouTube, Facebook)
Customers
Retention Some % of them
will become your
regular customers
Customer acquisition – AIDA model
Attention (Awareness)
Interest
Desire
Action
Target customer: B2C vs. B2B (on average)
B2C (business to customer) B2B (business to business)
• More customers >1000 • Less customers <100
• Lower prices <200zł often free • Higher prices >2000zł and much more
• Passive sales (customers come) • Active sales (need to seek customers)
• Product needs to deliver result • Team needs to show professionalism
• Individual decisions, by impulse • Collective decisions, deep analysis
• Quick purchase • Purchase process can take months
• Little post-purchase help • Need to provide maintenance services
• Difficult to retain • Possible to build longtime loyalty
by Alex Cowan
Marketing mix – 4P
4P
1. Product
• Defining features, that are most valued by customers
• Suggesting future product improvements
• Developing service aimed at customer satisfaction Product
• A/B testing Price
2. Price Place
• Calculating prices to achieve planned sales and profits
• Analyzing market conditions Promotion
• Introducing price discounts (eg. volume discounts)
3. Place (distribution)
• Finding the optimal way to carry sales and delivery (stores, partners, internet, direct …)
4. Promotion
Promotion
• Making the market know you
• Product/service promotion
• Brand awareness
• Education
Classic
Price
• SEO
• Advertisement – internet • Discount offers
• Landing pages
• Advertisement – paper • Dedicated offers
• Brochures (print/pdf) media, TV, outdoor
• Public relations (PR) • Events (as host) • Bundles
• Local or global?
• What makes a difference is positioning / visibility
• SEO (search engine optimization)
• PPC (pay=per-click ads)
The equivalent of having a shop on the main street
Product/service price components
Pricing factors
• Costs Taxes
Variable
• Profit is a result of adding value costs
(depend on
• Similar businesses will tend to bring similar return volume)
• Defense tactics:
• Patents • Customer loyalty
• Securing know-how • Customer lock-in
• Information, design • Exclusive contracts
• Source code
• Barriers to market entry
• Hardware
• Non-disclosure agreements
Competition - Porter's five forces analysis
Not having a business advantage:
• Examples:
• Selling a mobile app is highly scalable, especially if there is no server component
• Contracting software engineering services is little scalable – requires people
Passive vs. active sales
Passive sales (customer come) Active sales (need to find them) Mix
Relate on marketing to attract
• • Relate on person-to-person • In various
attention and invoke action (AIDA) relations
proportions
• Technology aided • People dependent
• Measure
• Aim at mass market customers • Aim at individually selected effectiveness
customers
•Work well with simple to
understand, easy to onboard • Required with complex, tailored
products/services solutions
• Must for low value sales • Need higher unit sales value to
make them profitable
• High marketing costs should spread
among many customers even with • High unit sales costs require
low conversion rate. Acceptable CAC effective turning leads into
(customer acquisition cost) customers
Sale activities
• Active selling:
• Cold calls and e-mails (to selected, potential customers)
• Networking
• Partnerships (outsourcing sales)