Strategic Sales Question:

Q1. (worth 10 points) The Vice President of Sales has asked you to assist her with these 2 questions. Each is worth 5 points. a) She has asked you to explain, with little ambiguity, each of the components and the relationship between them for business strategy, marketing strategy, and sales strategy for a start-up Canadian company offering complex SAAS-based productsfservices to small to enterprise-sized customers across North America in the next year. b) The Vice President has asked you to conduct an analysis and advise her on any changes she should make to her sales strategy and propose sales management components to achieve goals for 2021. The details on current situation are below. The company is Marvino is a provider of virtual conference management software as a service offered to companies of various types and sizes that are interested in engaging their partners, customers and prospects via virtual conferences and tradeshows. As a consequence of COVID the marketplace for virtual conference management software has exploded with more than 10 companies offering services. Marvino's difference is ease of use in setting up the virtual conference and detailed user tracking enabled for their clients. Marvino was founded in Oct 2019 and for the past year+ has grown through hard work. They are now a supplier to companies of all sizes from startups with a few employees looking to engage their prospects to enterprise customers looking to run multi-day virtual conferences to be attended by 100's of partners, customers and prospects all the way to industry associations wanting to run annual events to be attended by 1000's of members. The details of the business are as follows: Marvino provides full suite Virtual Conference Management software solutions including design of event, event setup, operational support and detailed event tracking analytics. These solutions range from do it yourself as the service is a hosted one all the way to comprehensive consulting services to assist with large scale events. Marvino bills on a per event usage revenue model based on # of users. On average the revenues are $5000 usage charge for the software for a single do it yourself event involve less than 100 attendees and up to $100,000 for an enterprise event attended by 100's. The breakdown is $50,000 for the use of the platform over a few days and $50,000 for consulting services provided. On the industry association end the contracts can be as high as $250,000 with 1000's of attendees. Revenue as of Sept 2020 year-end were $2,000,000 and EBITDA was 5% of revenues. Revenue is forecast to be $10,000,000 by Sept 2021 with EBITDA remaining at as Marvino invests in this growth They are focused on growing their customer base in the mid-market as well (companies of 50-100 employees), and also to grow their business in the enterprise space and among associations as the majority of 2020 revenues came from startups and small companies. There currently are 5 sales people as of Oct 2020. They are plans to hire up to 15 more this year. These sales people were largely responsible for getting new business wherever they could nd it and for the past year there was very little structure in place as sales people went wherever the business was across the country. The sales person was responsible for all outbound prospecting, opportunity management and deal signings. The sales person was also responsible with managing the successful implementation and project management of the event including coordinating any required consulting services to be done by various staff. There was 1 person at head ofce for Marvino who was responsible for handling any IT or service requests. Oftentimes the customer called the sales person directly for any help at all. Marvino has aggressively utilized social media and content marketing as the primary elements oftheir inbound marketing communication program with a focus on lead generation. Thus far while it does generate some inbound leads for the sales person it is not yet a reliable source of good quality leads. A recent report in a Top US Professional Services Magazine outlined how Virtual Conference management software is becoming increasingly complex as customers across the world demand more for less. The situation facing vendors is that it is more and more expensive to design the applications and there is considerable downward pressure on pricing plans. The VP also stressed to you some concerns about the increasingly centralized approach to buying becoming more and more common at smaller and smaller companies. She even joked about a 2-person startup company asking for Marvino to prepare a 50 page submission to an RFP issued by the company for Conference solution. Up until now the Vice-President has been managing without a written sales strategy. She doesn't know if her current approach is the best. As she looks to 2021 and beyond she has asked you to assist her in putting together an overall sales strategy and proposing sales management components