Our Strategy At The Beginning: Learning
For both strategies, one of our tactics from the very start was to broaden our target market to two main groups but still marketing to all the other segments. We should have known that having a narrow focus on our target market, especially when first starting off would have been a wiser tactic. For instance, for SOFT, it was pointless to allocate some of our marketing money to groups like professionals and high earners who care more about quality rather than convenience. We became stuck with no growth and that is where other competitors starting getting ahead with higher growth. Overall we learned that when starting off, having one focus on a target market and then growing from there is best.
Another mistake was not considering our costs for both products, but specifically for SOFT. A majority of our sales and revenue came from SOFT but if we tried to reduce cost, our profit could have increased. We learned that high revenue does not always equal to a high profit. If SOFT was a lower priced product in the market, we should have also found initiates to lower our costs. Instead, at the beginning stages, we did the complete opposite and wanted to use all the money in our budget.
Most of our budget at the beginning stages went to our commercial team. We assumed that a large sales team would automatically lead to an increase in sales. We noticed an increase in our overall performance but only in the beginning stages. We learned that if our sales team is too large, we then have too high of a cost. For instance, if products do not sell, we still need to pay for wages. This was a mistake that we did not realize until midgame. Our highest cost came from the commercial team, which we noticed but did not try to reduce until later in the game.