EGG-energy

When you bring electricity to a Tanzanian village for the first time ever, every person in the village will know about your project within a few days. This doesn’t, however, automatically translate into customer subscriptions: people will not understand the value proposition, pricing or service levels. To get the customer count growing we wanted to build a sales presence that is more typical of a tech start up than a traditional development venture.

EGG-energy sales team ready to go

EGG-energy’s approach is all about getting our sales people out of the office and where the potential customers are. We made several initiatives to support sales. First, to motivate the sales reps, each new, installed customer that he approached outside the station brings the rep a sizable bonus. Second, we built demo kits to demonstrate what the lights, switches and battery would look like inside the customer’s house.

Hussein and Jukka explaining the concept at the market

Finally, we did sales training, increased the amount of marketing materials handed out and are currently improving the link between closing a sale and having an installation scheduled. As the household decision maker is seldom home during daytime and closing the sale at site is difficult, we now collect phone numbers from prospects, and do follow up calls after they have had a chance to discuss the purchase with the right people.

Micah and Hussein demoing the product

Demand for electricity is driven by appliances and at the moment chargers for mobile phones drive many of the purchase decisions. High on our task list is sourcing new products for which our batteries provide enough power and which we can find at prices that suit our target group. A TV bundle by the world cup is a must!

The very first experiences from increased sales efforts are promising. First, the monetary incentive (up to some 50% of the monthly salary with good sales performance) seems to be an efficient motivator: sales people spend a lot of time doing house calls. Second, we have been winning over a very high percentage of our potential customers and have increased the traffic at the charging station significantly. Next few weeks will show how good we are at converting the increased demand to paying customers.

Jukka

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 1:59 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.