Can you stop twiddling your thumbs and ask some good questions!!

Some sales people just wait wait wait for the prospect to come back and say formally if they are getting the deal or not, but I believe a good sales guy should be able to predict in most cases what is going to happen with the deal, instead of keeping at it for ever, thinking that I have high perseverance or praying that the deal comes through. One good way to get out of this trap, is to think more from prospect's perspective, ask yourself these simple questions, why should they buy from you? what you got which the other vendors cannot provide? and did you differentiate yourself enough so you are at the top of prospect's mind? if none of these are giving you favorable answers then probably you aren't in the right position to get the deal.

In addition to these ask some good questions to the prospect, like dear prospect, do you think we covered everything you needed? is there any area you think we didn't exceed to your expectations? you will see sometimes prospect's sounding their concerns or telling you things, which will provide you enough insight where the deal is heading and what you need to do about it.

Recently, to one prospect I even asked, you are contemplating doing this in-house, which means you can pull this off at lesser cost, then what you think are the most compelling reasons for you to go with a Vendor like us? I got some answers from the prospect, which gave me some cues where this deal is possibly heading, and what I need to do. Should I persist? do something to change the equation? or just exit?

Bottom-line, ask some tough questions, connect dots, question why you are the only one who is BEST suited for this deal and if you think the prospect's selection criteria itself are misaligned for their own good, tell them that, because that is the biggest help you can offer them as a consultant and by the way, that may even get you the deal.

PS: let me know your comments and also what you think could have been a better title for this blog.

Happy Selling Value!!!

Manager Vs Leader - a perfectly wrong question

I see inordinate number of people asking this question, what is the different between manager and leader? I feel the question itself is wrong. Manager is yet another role like programmer, analyst , designer etc...a good manager is one who can manage assignments diligently and tactfully and has good people management skills, whereas leaders can be found in any role (not just managers), an individual who takes initiative, who inspires, who wants to challenge status quo and who wants to achieve their goals and help others achieve theirs is a leader. And that individual can be lowest in the rank of hierarchy but is still a leader. Make sense? let me know your comments on this.

Believe in YOU

- world is hitting hard at you, hit them back
- people are telling you NO, tell them YES
- too much noise around you, cut them all
- if people are telling you it is tough, tell them that is why you are doing it
- world will direct you at its will, if you don't trust yourself
- only you know eventually you are going to make it, so keep at it
- success is sweet, not because it is easy but because it is tough as hell
- failure is beautiful, so take it with grace
- believe in YOU, because that's the only way you are going to make it

Start Narrow and Then Broaden

If you are in sales and building your team and pipe ground-up, it is better you take a narrowed approach in terms of what services you are planning to offer, which geographies and customer segments to focus on, and then broaden your reach depending on how things are progressing. 

Pick up one service offering where you think your organization has a differentiator, one geography and one customer segment. Now put in a plan for 8 to 12 weeks, in terms of number of leads you want to generate, problems you can solve for your prospects using your service, your differentiating pitch, pricing models etc..

Now enhance your plan frequently based on your learning, maybe you have to change your pitch, add in a different dimension to your pitch, change your target prospects (example instead of focusing on CIO, you may have to focus on CMO), developing new questions for your first call,  change/enhance your differentiator so you don't fall in the same mind bucket as the prospect has put your competitors in. This one is not hard as long as you consciously try to consolidate your understanding of the market and align your plan accordingly.

Once you have established your offering in a geography and for a particular customer segment, you can start thinking of adding more services or expanding on your customer segments or even geography for that matter. 

Can you derisk your prospect?

If you can safe guard your prospect from the perceived risk of purchase then you have a better chance of making a sale. Try to uncover what the prospect thinks are the risk of purchase (it can be your company’s reputation, service quality, impact on his social status, your experience, timing of purchase etc etc) and see how you can address them effectively one by one. Idea is to learn what are the possible risk the prospect perceives around your product or service and see if those can be addressed in your marketing message or your presentations upfront.

What is your USP?

What is your unique selling proposition to your current employer (from growth perspective) or prospective employer (in case you are seeking a new job)? If you are not able to answer this question is few seconds, then you probably don’t have one.  How about writing down, what you think your USP should be, and then figuring out a way to achieve it? And during every self assessment, you ask, how is my USP doing compared to last assessment? And the response to that, better be good J

Indispensable Employee

Your job is to make yourself indispensable; not by withholding know-how, not by playing politics; not by forming unions; not by rejecting change; not by seniority but by embracing change, sharing know-how, zero politics and by being an exceptional performer.

Shopping.indiatimes.com is flawed

I see Indiatimes advertising shopping.indiatimes.com, it somehow looks flawed to me. Not the ad but the name “shopping.indiatimes.com”, one it is too long, second the word “shopping” or “Indiatimes” already means something to the consumers, which means you cannot build a new brand (new thought / new feeling) around it, third the name doesn’t standout like the other online retailers, fourth it sounds like a compromise not having a separate name for online retail store. When other online retailers are investing millions on building a brand (flipkart/ebay) which stands for something, you cannot build your brand around generic words or words which already mean something else like “indiatimes”. Also short, catchy, different and easy to recollect names are better for online or word-of-mouth viral. 

Consumer Scepticism

Consumer scepticism seems to be a big issue in India; consumers don’t seem to trust any product or service even with sufficient evidence and guarantee, they do double, triple checks and may be more. This is something which is ingrained into each one of us I think, right from our young age our parents tell us to check the change which the shop keepers are giving us, double check the bill when you leave the restaurant, check expiry dates when you visit a medical shop, don’t go by the printed rates, always bargain, cross check in multiple shops before you buy, check for original seal, don’t pay anything before delivery etc etc.

A large part of this scepticism stem from the fact that quality of services and products we consume  today are either poor or not consistent (by and large), false claims or assurance from sales / marketing people, poor control / management by food and drug governance body. There have been several instances of expired drug causing deaths; several times I have personally seen hoteliers making mistakes in restaurant bills; there seems to be a free market for illegal or counterfeit products. And topping the list is corruption across the board. 

Given the circumstances, consumer cannot help than to be sceptical about everything which comes across them. There is no silver bullet to change this but for better political leaders, better governance, better quality standards and good business ethics across the board.

CIOs Role – Am I reading the trend right?

Saw an article today by a well known CMO of retail giant talking about their technology initiative with respect to BI for understanding consumer buying patterns, Social Media investments for brand building exercise and investment on mobile technologies for m-commerce and promotion through QR code and coupons. 

Early this month, I attended a conference and the analysts there were hinting that CIOs needs to redefine their role to enhance their relevance in the organization. Was dealing with couple of large retailers on their mobile strategy and interestingly the budget for all mobile app development was with Marketing than with IT.

Cloud computing has literally simplified the entire work around capacity planning, procurement, on-going maintenance, up-time etc, which use to take up a large part of CIOs time. Secondly business is increasingly embracing outsourcing of non-core business activities like, IT Global Service Desk, Infrastructure Monitoring and Support and ERP support, which is then shrinking the internal IT team owned by CIOs. And Social Media, SEO and Mobile App development and related budgets are assigned to CMOs (at least in the B2C space).

Are all these trends pointing out that CIOs needs to reinvent themselves? Possibly seek ways to broaden their role? May be play a business role along with owning IT? I don’t know the exact answer to this but somewhere it seems a change is on its way.