Has anyone here not heard of Groupon? I have an appetite for successful marketing and sales operations. It’s amazing to see a huge machine working in perfect unison.
I’ve had my eye on groupon for a long time and decided to request an interview with Scott Lohmann Division Sales Manager.
The results, you will enjoy here:
Interview with Scott Lohmann – Division Sales Manager at Groupon
Tell us a bit about yourself and what made you choose your line of work?
I am originally from South Jersey, right outside of Philadelphia. However, I have lived in 20+ places since my first real job out of college, when I started working for Procter & Gamble. P&G is where I really began to excel at sales, particularly sales to the SMB sector. The small business is the “bread and butter” of our economy, and I am very passionate about trying to help them acquire new business, retain their existing business and help them develop to the point where they can sustain themselves over a long period of time. Over the past 20 years, my positions have always had me manage some type of SMB sales team and/or sales ops teams from 8 to 200+ employees. The majority of my positions have been with companies that offer some type of financing, advertising or promotions to the small businesses.
I read about Groupon’s new G-2 product and think it would be interesting for SaaS Addicteaders to understand how does a giant like groupon come to relalize a shift in their product and then, how does it market it , in a customer environment that does not know to expect that from groupon?
Our G-2 product has been an incredible success story, and I have seen this happen firsthand in the Bay Area. Our typical “old style” feature had our subscribers being pushed one email, and our merchants only being featured for a small period 3-5 days. With G-2 we can now continually market the merchant to subscribers that perhaps are delaying their purchase, did not have the opportunity to purchase during the initial time period or the timing was not right. For our merchants, we now manage to the number of units that the merchant wants sold, during the initial sales period, and in subsequent months. If the merchant wants 25 units sold in November, we’ll attempt to sell 25 units, if they want 250 units sold, then we’ll attempt to sell 250 units. Obviously, this allows the merchant the opportunity to be somewhat flexible with their selling.
What has been your most effective method thus far to supporting you end-users?
By end-user, I am assuming the merchant? With our merchants, I would say our Merchant Center, our ROI Calculator and our Capacity Calculator have been three of our top innovations that help the merchants quickly access their analytics and/or prepare for their features. The tools are simple to use, easy to understand, and have really helped our merchants experience the real benefits of Groupon.
How does groupon introduce new online features to your customers?
Each day Groupon offers it’s Feature of the Day to its over 200M subscribers worldwide thru it’s push marketing efforts, basically an email directly sent to the subscriber. In addition, each of our markets now have a pull marketing strategy, with a geo website. The subscribers can go directly to that city’s site and search for their offer of choice.
What is the corner stone of any product penetration strategy and which tactics do you find to work most of the time?
Make it simple, make it consistent and build it with excellence. All of our merchants have been vetted against Yelp Reviews, past experience, and generally what our subscribers are demanding. Focusing on the demand of our subscribers, and the demand of our merchants, regardless of our other goals, is THE priority.
