A sales learning curve is analogously to manufacturing learning curve and it's the learning curve between the company and the customers. The company will have to modify its offering and processes as the customers adopt the products. The firm should learn from the customers at first and reorganize the company itself until everything begins the settle. It's very crucial for a startup company to recognize the time required to educate customers and learn how they will use it and the inevitable of design modifications until a fully completed product. There are three phases along with the learning curve, initiation phase, transition phase, and execution phase. Three phases are very distinct from each other, as the initiation phase is the stage where product is not yet profitable and transition phase is when the product is being refined and sales have reached a sustainable level. As the result, each phase requires a different types and sizes of development, marketing, and sales.
During the initiation phase, which is the phase when the product is ready to get into the market until the breakeven point, there are few customer willing to consider buying the product. Assigning a large group of sales is unreasonable to sale the products to public. Instead, the sale team should try to learn how the customers use the products and propose ideas to the engineering, product marketing, and marketing communications to modify the product as well as the market strategy. A small sale force will lower the cost but bring up the better ideas to the other teams of the company. Some of the characteristics of sales in this phase include ability of communicating to other parts of the company, tolerance of ambiguity, deep interest in the product, and ability of brining customers together along with other functional teams. Sales will have to keep asking feedback from the customers and perhaps target future potential customers. Feedback including reasons of using or disposing the...