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Technology Stocks : Vantive Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Geof Hollingsworth who wrote (2450)	8/26/1998 9:40:00 PM
From: Melissa McAuliffe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3033

To tell you the truth I don't know what really happened. But one thing I know is that whatever happened he (or any other CEO for that matter) has to put the most positive spin on it that he can. This whole concept of solution selling didn't just start in the second quarter. Ok...depending on the sales force maybe they just didn't get it. And maybe all the way up through the VP of Sales didn't get it. Hard to believe though and if true does not bode well for the short term. If that was the issue then he should have said that's why we lost sales....not why we didn't close them. And he didn't say that or anything close as I recall. He said they just couldn't close them on time which has nothing to do with a feature/function sale. The more I think about it he would have been a lot better off to skip the back to basics talk, feature/function, etc. and simply say we did a poor job at managing the closing process. Of all the things that would have been the easiest to fix. Now here's a question. I don't know everything that's in these SFA systems. But wouldn't you think that their software would have stuff like this to help them manage not only the sales process but the closing process?? I would think it would. Sorry but I find it a slight bit strange that a company who markets SFA software doesn't even know what their own sales/forecasting process should be and has to go back to basics. As far as how long it's going to take to fix....I think the one big problem vntv is going to face is that there just aren't that many really good sales reps out there in the first place. So to start losing the ones you have and then to have to replace them with reps of lesser caliber is only going to make it that much harder and take that much longer. Who knows...maybe I'm wrong. But sometimes you have to put your own interpretation on what they tell you.