The Sales Learning Curve

Author: Mark Leslie and Charles Holloway 

Do Not Ramp Up Sales Immediately 

When a company develops a new and innovative product, their first step is usually investing a lot of money and hiring a large number of sales persons in order to get their product out in the market and gather customers. However,  hiring a full sales force too fast just leads the company to burn through cash and fail to meet revenue expectations. Before it can sell the product efficiently, the entire organization needs to learn how customers will acquire and use it, known as "the sales learning curve". In this case, Scalix, a software company, develops an e-mail and calendaring program hosted on Linux, but struggled to get its sales model right.

Most companies expect sales reps to go from new employees to fully productive salespeople during their first months on the job, as they learn more about the product, the customers, the market, and the competition. However, the company needs to understand and examine their customers first, in order to meet their needs and better satisfy what they are looking for allowing them to maximize the sales of their product. At the same time, the sales representatives will learn about the buyer, what they want, how to approach them and more importantly, adjust their sales strategy to the sales curve and stage of the product or company.  

Key Issues

• Sales Representatives must earn how to sell the product before trying to convince a customer. 
• Sales force capacity was increased too fast. 
• The Product (email) was presented too fast.

Proposed Solutions

• The sales curve of a product varies and the salesperson must adapt to it in order to maximize sales. 
• Before selling the product efficiently you need to look at the sales curve and increase the sales force once you know how the customers reacted to the new product. 
• Having the customers see and maybe try the product before they buy it helps them understand why it is something they want to have, as well as understand the features it has in a more hands-on experience. 

Points of View

Seller: The seller has just created a new and innovative product which they want to implement and put in the market a soon as possible to make profit, increase their number of customers, and increase their "power" in their respective work area. They focus and invest a lot in the sales of the product, as they believe they need to reach as many customers as possible. 

Buyer: The product is great, but they still need to adjust some things. We are not willing to buy and invest in such product since it is so new and there is no proof that it is effective and reliabe as the company says.