Being customer centric

Trying to write again after a long gap, hope I continue.

Being customer centric means keeping your customer's interest ahead of your own interest. 

I have few real world experience where I felt the company is customer centric and they care about their customers.

I was at Starbucks and I wanted to try almond milk latte instead of regular one. Got my latte and I didn't like it, I threw my cup in trash and went back to ordering my regular latte. Barista seeing me return said 'you didn't like our almond latte', he took my new order and didn't charge for it and said 'thanks for giving it a try'.

Rented Enterprise car for few days, and was passing through toll roads, I found there was no cash counter to collect the toll fee, it was all automated and I didn't have the RFID tag for auto payment, and with those high speed camera capturing my number plate, I was worried if I would get a ticket, called enterprise many times to learn how this works but nobody picked up the phone. While returning the car, I told them that I was dissatisfied with lack of phone support, and they apologized and immediately provided me 30% discount on my bill, I was pleasantly surprised by their gesture.

Ordered few products from Amazon, I was out of house when the order got delivered, I logged into my amazon account to track my order, apparently they kept the box near my locked door and took a photo proof of it and left. By the time I returned, my box was stolen, I informed the apartment security and then called Amazon, they heard what I had to say and said 'No problem sir, would you like to re-order those items for no-charge or should be credit your account'. 

Through these experiences, I learned what customer centric means.

10 rules for being a successful sales person

Here are 10 rules you can follow to become a better sales person.

1. Never show desperation. You certainly have to create an urgency in prospect's mind but don't push the prospect too hard to buy, take it one step at a time.
2. Qualify first, not every prospect is right for you and vice versa.
3. Be a professional and the same time be friendly, you don't want to make your conversations too formal all the time.
4. Be prepared with your product/service, know it in and out.
5. Know everything about the prospect. Spend an hour or two studying about them.
6. Focus on what value you can provide, how you can help the prospect achieve their goals.
7. Know a little bit about everything, be it politics, music, movies, sports, culture, industries, businesses among others, helps break the ice and connect better with the prospect.
8. Become a story teller, stories about how you served other customers and how it helped them etc. Best way to keep the prospects interested and engaged.
9. Follow-up without dropping the ball, key to winning deals is to constantly prove to the prospect that you are there, you are diligent and responsive.
10. Don't make it transactional, build relationship with your clients so they become your friends and well wishers.

Marketing Mindmap

Here is the marketing mind-map, I call it Marketing+ because along with Marketing it includes Branding and PR as well. Hope this comes across handy to understand what each one of them mean and what are the other factors involved here.

Mind-map below - Zoom in on the picture to see the details.

Click here Marketing+

Scrum Selling - The new way of selling

How many times we have made sales plan and kept at it for months, without knowing where it is going? and often mistakenly calling it as "perseverance" or telling oneself  "Well, it does take time, so let us not change direction". Running a plan for 6 to 12 months and then saying "We have tried everything and it doesn't seem to be working", and ending up blaming the market or the product/service or delivery organization or something else, this isn't the way sales process should be structured.

How about making sales process a little more agile/nimble in nature, how about implementing Scrum agile principles in selling and see how that works, well that is exactly what I have been trying for some time now. I can tell you first hand that it works. Here is the mapping of Scrum Agile to what I call "Scrum Selling"

1. Form a Scrum team of not more than 5 people, typical combination will be one sales executive, 2 lead generators, 1 or 2 contact collectors. 
2. List down all your campaigns (a typical campaign includes details like, industry you are targeting, service/product you are planning to sell, target audience (designations), target companies, your differentiator, email pitch and voice-mail pitch) - This becomes your campaign backlog.
3. Define your sprint cycle time, typically 2 weeks, first day of the sprint you basically do your planning, and everyday the team meets (scrum meeting) to share success/rejection stories, innovative idea for sourcing leads, prospect's reaction to your messages etc. This meeting takes about 20 minutes or so.
4. At the end of the sprint, do a retrospect, if required tweak your pitch, your preso, get an understanding of the market based on all your conversations with prospects and align your approach accordingly. 
5. Prioritize your campaign list based on how things are evolving on the sales side, repeat the process.

Sales plans are effective when you infuse the learning from the market (learning from prospects, partners, competitors, subject matter experts) into your outreach campaign and the best way to do is "Scrum Selling", the process is so nimble, that you can accommodate your day to day learning into your execution plan unlike the conventional model.

So wanna try this for few weeks? let me know your thoughts on this.

3 for 2 offer - Weird

I really don't understand the promotion Landmark has on books, it says "3 copies for 2", which means one copy is free, but as an individual what do I do with those other 2 ditto copies? gift to my friends/relatives? find 2 friends/relatives who has similar interest as mine and are willing to split the cost? (difficult thing to do takes extra effort) go with full price and just take one copy but then I don't get any discount/promotion on the book (which doesn't make me feel good). If I do go with the offer and don't find anyone who wants to buy from me, I end up paying double the cost compared to regular price of a book (so I am not going to take that risk). Other options is calling up people I know and pre-booking them to take a copy from me before I actually buy, in which case each one gets 33% discount (what are the chances of that happening, very slim). 

This whole scheme seems to work only for people who can find two more buyers or has a need to gift books, and I believe that would constitute only 5 to 10% of buyers, which means 90 to 95% of the buyers will not be interested in this offer, which makes the whole promotion irrational, now there is this angle of Landmark having over-stocked on few books and hence this offer is specific for those books, but this can be fixed at once by enhancing the procurement process, why would someone repeat this mistake and try these weird promotions (I have seen this type of promotion at landmark for last 2 years at least).

3 for 2, may works well for say apparel industry, wherein I can buy 3 shirts, same brand and same quality, but different designs, but making this work for books (ditto copies), doesn't make sense to me, instead a straight 10% discount would work better, and probably help compete with flipkarts of the world.

Your comments please...... let me know if I am missing something here completely.

Sales Mindmap

I like putting things in a mind-map format, a single diagram which pretty much captures all aspects of a business or a specific function, in this case I have tried to do it for "Sales". Content provided is about 20% based on my experience and 80% from books I have read (like "All marketers are liars", "The art of closing", "Rain making conversation", "Influence", "Thinkertoys"), but I take the credit for putting all of it together :) and trying to connect the dots. Idea wasn't to cover all that is possible but all that I felt was crucial.

I tried embedding the image here but it doesn't render well, hence providing a dropbox link, and I hope the link last forever. Please let me know your comments on this.

Sales - Mindmap

Sales: One BIG reason we won

If I have to look back at some of the deals we (sales and delivery team) won in last few years and I ask myself what was the single biggest reason behind each of the victories apart from the standard credentialization etc, it will be the following.

- Aspiration: Sold to a travel company that we can build a site, with a google type search box, wherein people can come-in and search anything and everything about travel/vacation and system will display appropriate tour packages for them. Showed new reality. Got the deal.
- Speed: Unbelievable turn-around time on submitting a proposal with benefit statements, our passion and speed was contagious. We won.
- Extra-Mile: Surprised the prospect with website mocks - which they didn't ask for, while other vendors were trying to please the prospect by showing only their past performance.
- Creativity: Presented 3 fresh ideas on how their product can be different and more engaging with consumers and act as differentiator, other vendors were busy giving discounts.
- Pre-call-analysis: we said to the prospect, we can talk about your company for 30 mins non-stop, do you want see how well we know you? Created an impression which lasted forever.
- Risk-elimination: Told to the prospect don't pay if you don't like, we aren't a company happy earning money without delivering value first. Of course they liked us!!
- Idea: Converting a prospect idea to reality, prospect came up with a question, "hey is this something possible?" and we went back with 30 slide detailed ppt on how we can achieve it together and what are the benefits. That just gave the power to the prospect to internally champion the idea and get us the deal.

The point is, if you keep asking simple questions like the ones below, you will invariably add value to the prospect and will stand-out, thereby increasing your probability of getting the deal.

- Why should the prospect buy from you?
- What can the prospect get from you which other vendors cannot provide?
- Are you giving the prospect just what they asked for or thinking multiple level beyond that?
- Am I really solving a problem for the prospect at a holistic level?
- Are we helping the prospect differentiate themselves in the market?
- Am I making sure to de-risk my prospect from possible failures?
- Am I making my contacts at the customer side look good in front of their bosses?

"Be a consultant and help your prospect buy from you"