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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 a 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 didn’t 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: SS has following 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 didn’t want to go for complete automation for all the processes at the same time but at the same time they were looking for a system to manage their sales forecasting process. • The time required to launch TH is comparatively less say 3-4 months as TH had few functions that were in PROCEED’s sales system and few other functions were needed to plan.
These functions which are created for TH can be useful for PROCEED also. So if SS goes for TH, then both TH and PROCEED can be planned simultaneously. • TH significantly reduced the number of people involved in the buying cycle this simplified the selling process for TH. • TH concentrated only on sales module which required very less customization this therefore reduced the cost incurred for customization significantly. • Also because of less customization it can cater to larger market. • PROCEED’s main issue was that the customer required a working module which is currently not available which is not in the case with TH. TH would give the company some fast orders which the company are currently looking for. • If TH does well then SS will get enough resources to get PROCEED back after few years and also that will be the right time to convert TH users to PROCEED. • The cost incurred for training the employees to use PROCEED is higher which is not the case with TH. RECOMMENDATION: On the basis of evaluation, it is recommended that SS should initially go for TH and then once it has established TH in market, it should then plan to launch PROCEED in the market.