The Unknown History of Megaplan: Together for 10 Years

[jisansorkar12]

The promising 2000s and the turbulent 10s! Before the first iPhone had time to turn the mobile market upside down, cloud services appeared. We put our once-valuable flash drives away in a distant drawer and became addicted to clouds. And then, before we knew it, CRM systems entered our lives, helping many companies make a powerful leap: moving from random sales to a system with predictable results. That was when Megaplan became a promising startup, although the very concept of a startup was then familiar to few.

Some facts
2007 – Director of the online store Yutinet.Ru Mikhail Ukolov uruguay whatsapp list invented Megaplan
2008 – Start of use in the online store Yutinet.Ru and entry into the mass market
What is Megaplan 2010? It is a convenient task manager with basic project management functions and a customer base.
What is Megaplan 2020? It is a task manager, CRM, financial module, business process designer, mobile application.

The company's top managers talk about the difficulties and curiosities that accompanied Megaplan's transformation from a handy software for an online store into one of the market leaders.

Commercial Director Victor Shelike
Has been working at Megaplan since 2010. After studying at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University, he became interested in a vacancy for a business analyst in a promising technology company. During the interview, it turned out that it was more about the position of a sales manager, who had to be able to understand the client's business well in order to offer them a suitable solution. Victor considered this vacancy suitable and promising for himself.

"During the interview, they tried to dissuade me: why should I go into sales with such an education. But I said that everything fits together very well: I am a techie, and the product that needs to be sold is IT. Understanding the product will not be difficult for me, and a thorough knowledge of the product will be an important advantage.

We had a tradition at Megaplan: the first task of every newbie was to assemble a workstation. I was given a screwdriver and an IKEA table, and I successfully assembled it. And then they told me: "You did such a great job! Hang a dry erase board on the wall for us to write down our sales results on."

The Unknown History of Megaplan: Together for 10 Years 1

When I assembled the table and hung the board, I was told that it was time to study Megaplan. At that time, the company had no training center, no trainers, and no system for introducing newcomers to the course of business. We only had the website help.megaplan.ru, and as a new employee, I had to study it. After reading the guide and passing the internal exam, I started working with clients.

Our clients
One client from Novosibirsk bought a boxed Megaplan solution for 25,200 rubles and asked when we could send him a disk. By that time, we had not released them for a long time, all the necessary programs could be downloaded from the site. But the client demanded that we send him a disk, since he paid for the "boxed version". We offered a compromise: burn Megaplan to a disc, sign it with a marker and send it. But with one condition: they will not install the system from this disk, since it contained an outdated version, but they will download the program from our site. This option suited the client.

At that time, we had only two radio telephones for four sales managers without any IP telephony. Because of this, we could not listen to conversations with clients and analyze them. My salary at Megaplan was two times lower than the salary at the roller skate shop where I worked before. We sold less than a million rubles a month.

Few people knew about CRM systems back then. Megaplan was a little more advanced than Excel tables: no reminders, no integration with mail and messengers, no telephony. Our internal admin panel was extremely inconvenient back then. For example, you had to track your call schedule for the current day yourself (now the program reminds you of scheduled calls). There were no notifications either. If a colleague left a comment on your client's card, you could only find out about it by accidentally opening the card.