Marketsoft Harvard- Case Study
Market Soft Case study
Situation:
MarketSoft founded by Greg Erman, in 1999 had designed an innovative software product that addressed the problem of managing sales leads across the “extended enterprise”. The product eLeads was strategically developed upon extensive research to address three critical areas many of the fortune 1000 companies in the modern times are facing: 1.Leads get lost 2. No qualifying systems for the leads exist and 3.The leads are never tracked.
Problems:
1. The entire product was built based on customer needs that were identified by querying an extensive network of sales and marketing industry professionals. While MarketSoft used an elaborate LP language to ensure that what they heard translated to all of their personnel in exactly similar terms; perhaps the same level of scrutiny was not applied to the way in which the interviews themselves were conducted. 2. The product is designed to cater to the interests of only blue chip companies with more than 300 million dollars investment potential and simultaneously also possess specialized expertise such as in Oracle, Siebel or Scorpus for lead qualification. These are “must have” attributes before MarketSoft’s product can be used and these requirements shrink the market size significantly as only selective companies could possess all of these specialized skills. 3. The product has been developed and promoted to its clients with a tall promise of secure lead management system. The success of the product depends much on the success and efficiency of the Marketsofts patent protected business rules engine, Workflow business rules engine and prioritization business rules algorithms. The failure in any of these engineering designs can negatively impact the product’s success.
Analysis:
While addressing the first problem it is indeed beneficial that the interviewers did not lead on the interviewees towards any particular answer by leaving their questions open-ended; as an
Situation:
MarketSoft founded by Greg Erman, in 1999 had designed an innovative software product that addressed the problem of managing sales leads across the “extended enterprise”. The product eLeads was strategically developed upon extensive research to address three critical areas many of the fortune 1000 companies in the modern times are facing: 1.Leads get lost 2. No qualifying systems for the leads exist and 3.The leads are never tracked.
Problems:
1. The entire product was built based on customer needs that were identified by querying an extensive network of sales and marketing industry professionals. While MarketSoft used an elaborate LP language to ensure that what they heard translated to all of their personnel in exactly similar terms; perhaps the same level of scrutiny was not applied to the way in which the interviews themselves were conducted. 2. The product is designed to cater to the interests of only blue chip companies with more than 300 million dollars investment potential and simultaneously also possess specialized expertise such as in Oracle, Siebel or Scorpus for lead qualification. These are “must have” attributes before MarketSoft’s product can be used and these requirements shrink the market size significantly as only selective companies could possess all of these specialized skills. 3. The product has been developed and promoted to its clients with a tall promise of secure lead management system. The success of the product depends much on the success and efficiency of the Marketsofts patent protected business rules engine, Workflow business rules engine and prioritization business rules algorithms. The failure in any of these engineering designs can negatively impact the product’s success.
Analysis:
While addressing the first problem it is indeed beneficial that the interviewers did not lead on the interviewees towards any particular answer by leaving their questions open-ended; as an