Case analysis
Sales Management Session 7(Managing Major Account)
C: Siebel Systems: Anatomy of a Sale
Case Analysis: Siebel System-Anatomy of a Sale, Part 1-3.6
How should Carman Respond to the invitation to tell the
...
Case analysis
Sales Management Session 7(Managing Major Account)
C: Siebel Systems: Anatomy of a Sale
Case Analysis: Siebel System-Anatomy of a Sale, Part 1-3.6
How should Carman Respond to the invitation to tell the Quick & Reilly executives what he
thought of Oracle? What features of this interaction influence your opinion? Would your
opinion of the right response change if the circumstances were different?
As per the TAS approach, which was always used by Siebel, the initial conversation should revolve
around assessing the opportunity, i.e. the need and capability of the consumer then defining the
competitive strategy as to the approach towards the customer. The third step revolves around
establishing a rapport with the consumer and developing a relationship strategy thereafter comes
the execution stage of turning the ideas into action and then testing and improving the plan. Carmen
should initiate a probing activity as this is the exploratory stage of KAM. Howsoever Carmen cannot
straightforwardly negate the query and therefore a mixed approach should be established. Looking at
the response given by him, he could have also added a few FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) questions
to know more about the consumer.
Under a different scenario like a sales lead, the approach would have to be strictly as per the TAS
mechanism, it is solely because of the setting of the scenario, i.e. a trade show where the
prospective leads come with all sorts of queries to test the grounds a mixed approach can be used
but still with the TAS steps in tandem.
How should Carmen qualify the prospect? Should he ask “What’s your budget?” Should he
suppress his curiosity and leave it to the prospect to bring up information about the size
and timing of the opportunity? If he asks for information, how will he use it?
In order to qualify the prospect, Carmen should probe more and Assess the Opportunity. He needs
to assess the customer need i.e. of lost leads or lead tracking in this case, then understand the
customer’s business profile and financial condition without directly asking the question about budget
in the first go, which might require some research at the back end and cannot be done directly at the
a trade show, howsoever if under a scenario that he was aware of the attendees of the trade shows
he could have done this research beforehand. Secondly, he should do a self-assessment if they can
do justice to the client requirement and have a proper solution fit which in this case is available with
Siebel. As the client has already referred to a competitor, he should also ask questions and utilize
the information obtained to put forth the value proposition of Seibel in later on stage to win the
customer.
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