Think Like A Customer — Part 1

Here at SalesScreen, we believe in the motto “Think like a customer”. We love to test and use our own product. Here are a few reasons why...

February 4, 2016

0 min read.

Nick Beltramo

Senior Copywriter

Thinking like a customer allows us to understand our system, users and target market in some of these ways:

It ensures that everyone here knows the system inside out, which is essential because everyone from design to marketing to development to sales must have an intimate understanding of what the product is capable of and how it functions for the end-users.
It is our way of ensuring that we are providing the best possible product to every single one of our customers.
It gets us thinking like a sales or support rep, so that we are designing products targeted exactly towards our user base.
It builds internal confidence in our product and our mission, which is to make sales and customer service more fun for people all around the world.

Eating Our Own Dogfood

Think Like A Customer — Part 1

Ready, fight!!! It gets REALLY competitive in here during team competitions.

We are always looking for new ways to make sales competitions more fun and bring extra excitement into the office. We believe that the more fun we have in building and developing the product, the more fun your business will have when using it. Not to go all hippy on you, but we love what we do and SalesScreen is our passion… we really do want to make sales fun every single day for users all around the world.

This is often referred to as “Eating your own dog food”, as explained in this brilliant Forbes article.

Similarly, in February 1980, Apple Computer President Mike Scott wrote an internal memo to all employees, declaring the end of typewriter use at the company. At the time, typewriters were the biggest competitor to the Apple II computer. In the memo, Scott wrote:”Apple is an innovative company. We must believe and lead in all areas. If Word Processing is so neat, then let’s all us it!We believe the typewriter is obsolete. Let’s prove it inside before we try and convince our customers!

The memo set a January 1, 1981, goal date for Apple to be a typewriter-less company.”

SalesScreen Monthly Sales Competitions

Our CEO, Sindre Haaland, has made a New Years resolution to come up with one new competition type each month that the entire office can participate in. More than 2/3 of our office make up the development, marketing and design teams, so it is important that we find fun ways to involve everyone regardless of whether they do sales or not.

This article by Les Lent of Sales Gravy does an excellent job of explaining how to engage and motivate your employees by running proper sales contests. Of course, this is a topic very near and dear to our hearts. Running real-time sales competitions truly is a huge benefit of sales motivation software and allows the entire office to get in on the fun, celebrate and compete together.

Last month, we ran a chat help support competition, using the Prize Competition to provide unique rewards ranging from bottles of wine to XP to chocolates and soda. It was tons of fun and it taught the entire office how to provide effective customer support just like the development team.

February Sales Competition Setup

Think Like A Customer — Part 1

Below is a direct copy-paste of Sindre’s email for this month’s February sales competition.

“So, following up on my new years resolution of having at least one competition running every month, it is time to announce the February competition. This month, we will run a team Fishing competition!”

POINTS

The competition is point-based and the following reports will be awarded with points: