Your
rapidly growing pharmaceutical company has 24 sales representatives,
annual sales of $20 million and an extensive inventory of products
that it markets to hospitals and health care facilities. The sales
department has used glossy brochures, printed catalogs, and
PowerPoint presentations to present information to customers about
products but you would like to be able to create custom catalogs and
PowerPoint presentations for customer sales calls that are tailored
to different selling situations. You have found a sales software
package called PowerSales that provides these capabilities and that
can link automatically into the firm's enterprise resource planning
(ERP) system to reflect changes in pricing, availability, and new
products. The software also provides sales managers with forecasts
and detailed reports of each sales call. The package vendor has
suggested the following pricing option:
Base software
One-time installation charge
$115,00
Annual license charge $75,000
Custom content (one-time charges) for the entire sales
force
Specific product promotions and product
introduction $130,000
Product line overview presentations
$65,000
Sales skills training $57,500
Your company plans to use the same content for two years. After
determining the initial software configuration, the package vendor
supplies a consultant to guide the customization process, working
with the client to provide text graphics, animation, audio, and
video content for the system. The cost of the consultant is $2000
per day. You have been told that it would take about 50 days of
consulting time to customize and complete the package
implementation. Your firm would not need to purchase any new
hardware to run the package, but you would need an information
systems specialist at an annual salary of $75,000 to spend 20 hours
per month supporting the package.
- What are the total costs of using this package for the first
year? For subsequent years?
- The package vendor claims that after implementing the package,
its customers have increased sales by an average of 10% over two
years. How much increase in sales revenue should your company
anticipate if you implement this package?
- What additional information would be useful to guide your
purchase decision?