How it started
FlavaDean was established in 2013 as a joint effort between Lifvation, Mediquest and Healthrends with the goal creating a super sales force. This sales force would be timely as Singapore and Malaysia faces a huge labor shortage of qualified sales persons. Lifvation markets Radiancy, an Israeli based aesthetic brand in Malaysia and Singapore, Mediquest holds several distributorship of medical products and sells them primarily in Singapore. Healthtrends focuses on delivering medical solutions to patients in Singapore and Malaysia. The salesforce for all the three companies totaled 21 persons with a combination of 180 man-years of sales experience. To make this super sales force viable, all the sales person reported to the CEO of Lifvation. The CEO of Lifvation would be accountable to the tripartite. The project of a sales superforce had to be done on the cheap, with zero budget and no monies invested by the triparite other than access to the sales person.
Why FlavaDean
Naturally the first order of things was to find out how each sales person sold. The 21 sales person aged between 25-45 have attended various sales and power selling seminars. All our subjects can easily list their sales process on a napkin, Their bookshelf is filled with sales best sellers. Mapping out the 21 sales persons’ process yielded similar mechanics. Roughly, a 6 phase approach to driving sales. Get lead, get requirements, do the proposal, close the sales, collect the money. We also dicovered that every book they have read and courses they have attended tend to teach them the same 6 phases. The courses had variation on how to optimize each phase and they were nothing too ground breaking. The next phase of our study was controversial as it made of the sales person wary. We wanted to differentiate the best sales person from an average sales person. We poured through their performances appraisal, actual sales to quota performance and visited their customers to understand how their customer viewed the sales person.
In our of analysis of the 21 sales persons, we discovered that while the usual hygiene service standard of courtesy, accessibility and followup were needed for customer acceptance, what differentiates a good and an average sales person is the grasp of the content of the industry. Competency stood out amongst all the other factors. Comprehension drives the closure of many sale leads and gives the sales team a cohesive marketing program.
The end of the study provided a clear charter for FlavaDean. The idea was to create a living compedium of the industry knowledge starting with aesthetic and medical. That compedium can be constructed using Zifsoft’s Salsa program which integrates various pockets of data generated in the sales process without any change of the sales person working style and without any new software.
FlavaDean with its Salsa DB represents a living compedium into the aesthetic, medical and health industry in Singapore. The materials collected and references in Salsa can also be use to quickly develop new media for that is social media ready.
What is the current status
WIth the dissolution of the tripartite partnership in 2015, FlavaDean is in hibernation under the caretakership of Lifvation. Zifsoft’s Salsa development is still shaped by the charter of Flavadean which is to create a live compedium of industry knowledge.