NO COPIED ANSWER PLEASE

6. Explain how software sales calls may differ from other business-to- business sales calls.

CASE 2.1: TRIP REPORT FOR PRINCE CORPORATION, NOVEMBER 13-16 The purpose of this report is to inform, entertain, and supply the answers/safety tips for performing an Oracle demonstration of manufacturing, distribution, and financial applications. The account is told from the perspective of Michael Smith. Day 1 The week starts out with a conference call Monday morning at 9:00 A.M. between Michael Smith, Dave Sexton, Pat Conway, and Jed Lindstrom. The four discuss the pro- gress on loading demo data and Michael Smith's coordination efforts with Radley Cor- poration. Radley Corporation develops, installs, and supports bar code, RF automated data collection solutions, EDI, and supplier collaboration solutions. Its solutions are a critical component of the Oracle solutions, which Michael sells. The demo and the coor- dinating efforts from Radley Corporation are necessary for Oracle's sales presentation, which is just about ready to take place. Michael is supposed to have received a fax from Radley, but it has not come through yet. At 11:00 A.M., Michael starts entering the demo data for Prince Corporation, an auto- motive supply company based in Holland, Michigan. At 2:30 P.M., Michael receives a message that the machine for the presentation is shutting down. Michael hasn't quite finished loading the data, but knows that he can finish in the morning. At 3:30 P.M., he heads to the Dallas Fort Wayne International Airport and at 11:15 P.M. arrives in Holland, Michigan. Day 2 Michael meets his group in the hotel restaurant at 6:00 A.M. At 7:00 A.M., the sales team arrive at Prince Corporation and begin setting up the equipment. At 7:15 A.M., they see a signal from the Application Technician that will be repeated for the next four hours. He continually shakes his head "no" and slumps back in his seat, indicating that something is wrong. When Michael inquires into the nature of the problem, the Application Techni- cian asks him to come over and touch the back of the server. Having an inquisitive mind, Michael touches the back, to find it very cold. He asks the Technical Manager where these machines were the previous night. The Technical Manager says that the equipment was in the back of his Ford F150 pick-up with the four-wheel drive and roll bar. The Applica- tion Technician says that HP recommends that these machines are best operated at an ambient temperature of 60-80F, and that the 27F temperature in Holland along with the continuous snowfall were not conducive to the server operating conditions. The sales team collectively wait quietly together until 8:15 A.M. to see whether the servers warm up. At 8:16 P.M., they decide to pop open the machines and warm them with a blow-dryer. After unscrewing the screws, Michael and his group use a hotel room blow-dryer to warm the server. Everything appears to be okay, and with the Prince audience on their way, the members of the group hastily assemble the machine before booting it again. It doesn't boot, so Michael decides to conduct the demonstration with a laptop. At 10:00 A.M., the team start the presentation with an executive overview in Power- Point. By noon, they have discussed four bills of material, forecasts through January, a meta data service, a master production schedule, run material requirements planning, sub-inventory quantities, and some other important issues. After this discussion, another member changes to a screen shot of sales and marketing with the software, since this it is what the Technical Manager and Denny thought would excite Prince. Next, Michael signs onto the Oracle applications and begins to talk about menus and navigation through the system when a window pops up and asks Michael to dial a phone number to access the site. This occurs another five more times over a 45-minute period. Each time, the Application Technician has to come up to fix the issue. The Technical Manager keeps his head held in a slightly downward tilt by both of his hands. Having watched quite a few baseball games in his 42 years, Michael knows this is the signal to mean time out, let's take a break, and talk. The four Oracle employees meet in the hallway. They discuss the situation while Michael asks the Application Technician whether he has had this problem before. The technician replies with his solution, that after you use the modem non-stop it gets hot and won't function correctly. Michael decides to ask the Prince personnel if the sales team can stop the presentation at this point and resume the next day. The team then haul the equipment back out to the truck as the snow continues to fall. They arrive back at the hotel, assemble the equipment, and reboot the server to get the system up and running by 4:00 P.M. The sales team then work into the night to correct the problem. Day 3 At 7:00 A.M., the team have a breakfast meeting with Prince and they agree to reserve the conference room from 1:00 P.M. to 5:30 P.M. for the team to do another demonstration. By 1:30 P.M., the audience have been informed of how Oracle can work with inventory, engineering, and bills of material. Michael then walks them through how all of this could help them support their business, with two chalk boards full of drawings about how Oracle could support Prince's multi-plant environment in a flexible fashion that would provide unique value to them as they grew. At 5:30 P.M., the Quality Director of Prince proclaims that he sees how Oracle would enable Prince to meet its ISO certification challenges. Day 4 Another demonstration starts at 7:00 A.M., and the team face issues again: they can't get the digital projector or the computer monitor to turn on. At 7:20 A.M., Tom Radley starts the demo. He goes through some overheads summarizing the status, then informs the nce that Oracle is currently a single-plant solution. He states that Oracle will be coming out with a multi-plant solution in the future, but says, "Today all of our custom- ers operate in a single-plant environment." The sponsors from Prince stand up and ask Tom, "So today, your Oracle solution is a single-plant environment?" Tom responds, Absolutely." At 2:00 P.M., Michael returns to do his standard cost demonstration, which is a picture of the multi-plant foundation on which the Oracle costing module was built. At 3:15 P.M., the information reuse and integration folks take over and the team end the demonstra- tion around 5:15 P.M., when the team wrap up and thank the Prince executives for their time