The case begins with Dave Hersh, CEO of Jive Software, addressing a meeting of all employees and he was looking at shell-shocked faces of Jive Software employees after a massive layoff of 20 percent of workforce. After a year of record sales in year 2007, Jive has increased its sales force strength too quickly to match the sales growth and sale force started to miss the sale quota from the 2nd quarter of 2007 and his plane of sale in the in 2008 was even higher than 2007. The Jive Software was forced to make massive layoffs of its work compromising mainly of sales reps due to decreasing market trend and company’s sale.
Jive Software was founded by Matt Trucker and Bill Lynch with Dave Hersh as CEO in 2001 to meet the requirement …show more content…
The sales learning process unfolds in three distinct phases—the initiation phase, the transition phase, and the execution phase. Each phase requires a different size—and kind—of sales force, and represents a different stage in the production, marketing, and sales strategies of a company. It model states that the every company should go through these three phases so that there is no gap in organization. Let’s see these phases for Jive software
Initiation Phase
In the initial phase in which company is supposed to build a new product and is prepare itself to start selling it. The sales people involved in the sale process are expected to be of highly active, learning, understanding, capable and highly motivated. This is because the person is expected to pitch the sale to the customer with the perspective to build relationship, understand what customer wants, understand customer problem and then convey the same to the product development to build superior product. The person should be capable of understanding the true requirement as blindly changing product deviates the product development team from the desired output and product fails to meet the customer …show more content…
He need to develop and adopt to a more pro-active solution selling approach to target the customer's specific business need or problem they are trying to solve.
Though this will require the sales reps to have detailed knowledge of customers business and industry. However employing this approach would mean the sales reps are working more closely with the customers either by email, telephone or site visits which ultimately enables them to forge strong relationships with the key decision makers in these companies whilst also attaining vital market intelligence.
Revise Group Quota System
The current problems with the quarterly quota system is that when a deal fell through, it was unclear who was responsible, also when the deal was closed, it was unclear which selling method had been effectively utilized. One solution to this problem could be to apply an annual forecasting system. This will help in ending the mid-quarter quota issues that the sales reps faced under Jeremy Wilson's