Requirements

Please read the following scenario carefully relative to your role at Salesforce.com -- and with consideration to who your customer is. Then craft an essay response to answer the questions outlined to summarize your overall sales strategy and approach. Set the scene, outline your plan for success, and highlight expectations of what it will take to win and service the deal.

Background

Salesforce.com offers hosted CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) applications that manage customer information for sales, marketing, and account management support, providing clients with a rapidly deployable alternative to buying or maintaining their own sales reporting solution. The company's CRM applications are used by approximately 80,000 clients worldwide for generating sales leads, maintaining customer information, and tracking customer interactions. Other customer-based software vendors include companies like Net Suite and Oracle Siebel, that equally lay claim to "helping clients to develop effective CRM strategies." Today, systems like Salesforce.com are at the heartbeat of every successful one-to-one sales and marketing driven organization in the world.

Your Role at www.salesforce.com

You are a high-performing strategic sales representative for Salesfocre.com. You were recruited into the role because of your interpersonal skills and empathy - and because you have the ability to understand the customer's business and can usually find unique ways to add value. You are typically precise, deliberate, curious, industrious and fact-based in how you operate. Your company - Salesforce.com -- is a world leader in on-demand CRM services. Unlike most other CRM applications, companies who use your services centrally store, record, and track their customer and sales data at Salesforce.com. One of the benefits of on-demand CRM services is that the customer neither incurs upfront capital investment, nor the need for investing heavily on-site and IT administration. Your company also offers solutions that are customized to specific customer needs, such as creating different interfaces for different departments and work groups - while facilitating the process of providing privileged access to data for specific authorized work groups and creating versioned experiences in different languages.

Your Target Customer: Chic Clothing Company

Your potential client is Jesse Golden, the marketing director at Chic Clothing Company (aka "Chic"). He is in a high-pressure, high-risk role that is all consuming. Driven by demands of the job, his mode of operating causes him to be intense, demanding, impatient, pushy, and sometimes even overly aggressive. Jesse reports into the company CEO - Pepe Le Chic, and he also relies heavily on his Exec Asst. to keep him on track and organized. A family-owned business located in Garden Center, CA, Chic is expanding at a fast pace not only in the US, but it is now also in Latin American markets - given the company entered into supplying Spanish-speaking markets 2 years ago. The company currently has a US-based salesforce of 20 people and 4 members of a LATAM based team who support the needs of local buyers in each country. Based on the Chic book of business, each salesperson is responsible for up to three to four major customers - and resultantly, a salesperson at Chic typically earns a base salary of $75,000 per year (with up to an additional $75,000 in sales commission.) In its current state, the Chic CEO realizes that the company does not have full control of its selling efforts. Domestically, the company has a strong relationship with its department store buyers, but there have been recent signs of work overload and dissention among the sales team. The net result is that some Chic customers have already expressed concern at the current state of disorganization at the company.

The buyers of Chic apparel and other fashion merchandise typically come from mid- and high-end department stores, that resell the products they purchase from the company under their own private label brand names. Chic works closely with its suppliers in more than five countries, mainly in Europe and Asia to deliver just-in-time fashion inventory to its department store buyers. Chic also has a small manufacturing facility in California for new sample development initiatives (exclusive clothing lines) and other small-batch order production of other specialty items (e.g., including fashion accessories.) In a fast-paced and seasonally dictated world of fashion, Chic is constantly challenged to develop, source, sell, and deliver its products - while managing an excessive in-flow of inventory returns for the clothing lines not sold by buyers - making its inventory management operations very difficult.

Quick Facts about Chic

The apparel and fashion industry is high risk and fast-moving, with several new designs launched every season. And repeat orders vs. order return requests must be met as fast as possible given that end-users (i.e., the consumers who shop at department stores) very quickly change their tastes. As a company that operates in mid- to high-end markets, Chic positions itself as a sourcing company with a fast turn-around for its customer. The nature of the industry requires salespeople to be highly diligent in market-information gathering, processing, and dissemination across geographic areas and departments. Having the current "facts at their finger-tips" is a mantra that the CEO Pepe Le Chic has always believed in - but not always executed upon.

At present, the in-house team uses Microsoft office spreadsheets for almost all selling activities -- such as recording sales calls, reporting to sales managers, and tracking delivery orders, to name just a few. Jesse joined the company two months ago and is looking to make a great impression on the company CEO, and to improve the apparent chaos. But he has realized the current system being used for tracking and sales reporting has clear signs for overload, error, and inefficiency. Mistakes have started to occur too often, and the company has received several complaints about shipment delays, wrong labeling of products, and incorrect packaging. As marketing director, Jesse has spent several days making sense of disparate information about Chic's domestic sales and has mixed reports about its overseas operation. Jesse's Exec. Admin lamented that "the spreadsheets provided by the sales team are not in uniform format, making it difficult to track and consolidate the database." Meanwhile, all of Chic's salespeople claim that the needs of each of their customers are not the same, and therefore they need to uniquely customize their spreadsheets to that they can keep track of things more easily on behalf of their buyers.

With high pressure for growth, Chic is looking for a better way to consolidate and manage its customer database. Jesse is also in the process of establishing a new sales office / strategic beach head in Mexico to better manage Chic's business in the growing Spanish-speaking-only markets. In other LATAM markets, the focus is on customer acquisitions (new customers) and lead management, while in the US, Jesse is more concerned about keeping Chic's existing (strategic partnership) customers happy.

Your Objective

Devise a strategic selling strategy for Salesforce.com to win the Chic business. Plan for how you would approach Jesse Golden -- and develop an outline strategic selling approach to convince the Chic Clothing Company that you have the right CRM software solution for their business. Based on a recent 10% price increase, a single user-license to Salesforce.com costs $10,000 per year, per person. But you have the flexibility to offer discounts if needed for multiple subscription-packages to satisfy the needs of an entire sales team at an enterprise level. Tell your story in essay format and describe the action you will take to convince Chic to sign-up for a multi-year subscription to Salesforce.com:

• How would you characterize the current situational context for Chic?
• What is your selling philosophy and what's your strategic approach?
• With whom and how are you going to initiate contact - and what is your goal for setting up a meeting(s)?
• Be specific, what is your plan for developing a Relationship, Customer, and Presentation strategy?
• Provide a diagnosis with reference to Jesse based on his likely buying behavior, preferred communications style, and relative to how he prefers to engage?
• Characterize Chic's goals, problems, and needs - and how that relates to Jesse's needs?
• Describe your value proposition / proposed solution for Salesforce.com and provide persuasive reasons to believe to convince Chic of why they should buy from you?
• What are examples of some of the potential pitfalls that might cause you to lose the deal - and therefore, what will you do to minimize risk?
• What do you sense could be the major objection(s) Chic might have and how might you prepare to counter these?
• If you can close the deal, what are the immediate next steps and how would you "service the sale" once Chic signs up for a subscription?