One of the unforgettable experiences in the fall semester was the Ignite Leadership Series in October. Each of the first-year MBA core teams was assigned a local company and requested to suggest solutions for problems the local business owners would like to sort out.
My team worked on a Madison-based civic intelligence company, which offers general contractors and engineering firms’ AI-driven software that scans municipal meeting minutes and agendas. The company wanted to formulate new strategies for pricing, product expansion, and improving the company’s value.
My teammates embraced my idea of adding a new option to the current pricing model. Because the company wanted to increase its average contract value for large corporations, I thought adding a high-end choice would make the current high-priced option more appealing to large clients. We put our heads together to make this renewed pricing model convincing for the current customers and easy to understand for new customers.
The classes we had taken in the semester were so practical that we could apply what we had learned to this project. Our five-member team came up with a variety of ideas for product expansion, which is one of the benefits such a diverse team enables. The team management class we had attended also helped us put our ideas together.
Developing a solution to enhance the company’s value was a bit challenging, but we could finally find out our answer by closely communicating with the CEO of the company. She was so generous and spared her busy time to meet with us online. Our team identified that the company is a disruptor, so its marketing and sales need to reflect that. We, therefore, proposed to show real customer stories, that is, how they used the data from the company to drive business results, which we believed to allow the company to be assertive in pricing negotiation.
The highlight was that our team was chosen by the company as the winner of this competition. We were so glad that the CEO appreciated our solutions and said she would bring up our proposal in the next board meeting. We hoped we had contributed to the company.
It was amazing that we could engage in such a project with a real company in the middle of our first semester of the MBA program. I look forward to applying what I learned from this experience to a project we RMI members will work on in the coming spring semester.
Categories: