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.

Circus Acrobat

These are people who are highly skilled and talented yet they are not valued much (in terms of what consumers are willing to pay to see their performance). I thought more the scarcity better the value, but these people are scarcely available (what these guys can do very few people in the world can copy) yet not valued high. Why?

I think the problem is positioning, instead of positioning themselves as mass entertainer available for large middle class population at 100 bucks a show, they should focus on positioning themselves as niche expensive entertainers for upper class audience performing only in private parties, thus becoming a symbol of esteem for upper class to have them perform in their parties. This also means that number of performance would be limited (not 3 per day but few per month) giving the Circus Acrobat time to hone their skills, making them even more scarce, valuable and full of variety.

And probably the acrobat should rename themselves from Circus Acrobat to Elite Acrobat as the word Circus is related to masses and easy affordability while the positioning we want is niche and expensive.

Even scarcity can benefit only if you know how to position it in your market place.

Don't worry but work through

It is natural to get worried when things don’t go the way we want; effective way to come out of the worry zone is to work through the problem than just over think, whine and regret about it. Simple way to start would be to write down the problem statement and possible reasons and resolutions we can think of. Now based on our day-to-day learning we should refine the reasons and resolutions which we wrote last, this way eventually we can have the best possible solution, deeper and better understanding of the given problem, and the ability to overcome it. 

Pizza Hut – Happy bell

If you are happy with the service and food, you ring the bell as you leave the restaurant but what if you are not happy, how would Pizza Hut know about it? Sure, there may be a customer feedback book kept at the POS station, you can ask for it, take a pen, think over, frame sentences and express your unhappiness. 

While the expression of happiness is so simple (just ring the bell and get off), why isn't there an equally easier way to express unhappiness about service or food? Like a red push button, which you can press before you leave if you are unhappy. 

By making the process simple Pizza Hut is at least getting the feedback in the first place, otherwise there may be customers just walking off swearing not to come-in again and Pizza Hut would be totally oblivious to it. My point is make the process of getting feedback as simple as possible especially when you are targeting mass consumers.

Creativity

You would have said to your team, be on-time, get your numbers right, be on top-of-things, know your customer better etc etc but how many times do you ask them to be creative? Creative in their approach, creative in solving problems? Seldom, I would guess.

Start embracing creativity; it can help your team get out of difficult situations; can help change status quo; bring in a better way of doing things; etc

Have you or your team done anything creative today? This week? This month? This year? Well may be we can start measuring too.

Simple Analytics

Though a lot of us know that data analytics can really help your decision making skills, a very few number of people use past data to derive helpful information (I am not talking about complex statistical methods or anything like that but simple ones).

I have seen companies going through the same set of problems again and again (like a vicious circle), in spite of having all the data in hand, which can help them with new insights, provide visibility into the root causes, help them setup relevant process etc but they fail to take advantage of data analytics.

If you have bunch of data, doesn't matter which departments (Sales, Marketing, Finance, Project Management), put them all in an excel sheet and try to view the data in different dimensions (sum, average, relative comparison, by category etc) I am sure you will get insights you didn’t expect. Stop the temptation to make quick calls and take some time to analyse the data you have.

Most companies would have the data to answer these questions, but they won’t know the answer for it because they miss simple analytics

1.       What % of your customers are costing you money than yielding you profits? Do you see trend?

2.       Top 5 reasons for your success last year, last quarter? Can you now enhance those further?

3.       Profits margins by product line? Is one eating into the other?

4.       Attrition % in your top 20% of employees vs middle 70% vs bottom 10%

5.   % of sales lost due to poor salesmanship, % lost on internal delays, % lost on price, % lost on incompetency  

6.       Top 3 reasons you lost to competition? Can you narrow the gap now?

7.       Top 3 reasons customer bought from you? Can you repeat now?

8.       Efficiency vs Effectiveness  (On-time vs Quality)

9.       Return on training investments? Quality of training? % relevance to business impact?

10.   Do you have a differentiator compared to competition? How much? 2 fold, 5 fold, 10 fold?

11.   Lead generation to conversion % company-level, service-wise, product-wise, geo-wise, resource-wise

12.   Company-wide process compliance %?

13.  % of revenue leakage across the board? Late entry into the market / inefficient process / execution challenges

Insights are right in front of you!! Try Simple Analytics!!!

Tiger Woods - Personal Credibility

Companies like Accenture, AT & T and Gillette never marketed Tiger woods' personal credibility (Tiger being good, honest, faithful, trustworthy etc), Accenture showed up Tiger's Photo and had a tagline..."High performance delivered", but when the scandal happened Accenture terminated the contract with Tiger.  He was still a top class player, aligning to the endorsement tagline, then why was his personal credibility given more weightage than his professional performance? Why can’t these two be mutually exclusive?

When someone starts performing well, gets to the top rank in sports (or any other field), we start liking them and like lead to trust invariably. So when someone slips on personal credibility (even though it may not impact their professional performance), trust is broken which leads to dislike. And if someone is disliked by masses; you don’t want your product or service to be endorsed by them. 

Worldview and Frame

Was reading all marketers are liars.....and I came across these two words, Worldview and Frames. It says if you can understand worldview (group of consumers having same belief about something) and frame your marketing strategy around it, that may help you get attention from consumers and possibly a sale.

And I see some of the marketers adopting this strategy

1.      Nihar oil ad says 2% of its revenue will be spent on children’s education – are they trying to target consumers who believe in charity?

2.      Red Label chai, tasty bhi aur healthy bhi – are they trying to embrace consumers who think tea is good for health or change the view of consumers who think tea is bad for health? Or both?

3.      Ad on Tata unpolished dal – are they trying to attack the worldview that polished dal is good?

4.      Flipkart, Ebay everybody seems to be talking about 100% guarantee on products – are they attacking the worldview that online buying is not safe?

5.      Small IT companies claim to their prospects about personalized attention – they are targeting the worldview (group of prospects having same view) that biggies cannot provide personalized attention to customers.

Interesting to see how companies are framing their marketing strategies around worldview.

Can we mimic ourselves to be an Apple or Google? Can we?

This is just a thought about what individuals can adopt from top companies like Google or Apple?

Can we raise our risk appetite constantly? Trying something new in our job?
Can we take a forward looking approach, instead of living in our past glory?
Can we try to innovate ourselves and our skills significantly?
Can we stop regretting on what went wrong; take only lessons learnt and move on?
Can we re-invest our earnings significantly in ourselves?
Can we be someone with whom people feel proud to be associated with?
Can we measure our performance quarter on quarter?
Can we inspire people around us and show new reality?
Can we learn to differentiate ourselves by our unique capabilities?
Can we mean and stand for so something special?
Can we present ourselves well, professionally and ethically?
Can we learn to turn our performance down cycle to up cycle instead of quitting?

Though we are individuals, I think we can still operate and measure ourselves like a company. Like a top company. Like a Google or Apple.

Masala Chai

Well here is the glass; we (all the people who attended the conference) were severed Masala tea / chai in at the Grand Hyatt Luxury hotel. If this glass was used in a road side tea shop, our reaction to it would be "normal" (because we all know this is what they can afford for the money they charge us), if the same glass is used by a two star hotel / decent restaurant, we would think it's a "compromise" by them, and when used by a 5 star luxury hotels, we think they are being "authentic" or "original" about it (Hyatt smartly served coffee side-by-side in expensive crockeries to make the glasses look more authentic than compromise). 

Same glass, different place, different opinion. 

Is Gartner losing its edge?

Was part of Gartner's IT Symposium at Goa, though its a great place to network for IT service providers focusing on India, I found most of Gartner analyst sessions not so engaging enough (except keynote sessions), partly may be they were throwing too many figures on the screen, than showing some real-time compelling success stories or could be that information today has become so ubiquitous (because of Internet, socialmedia & mobile) that you already know most of what Analyst is talking about or may be what the Analysts were speaking was resonating with People who were not in the IT services business. Whatever may be the reason, my take is that with information becoming more and more ubiquitous, Gartner needs to innovate more in their offerings..... sorry if I am sounding arrogant here trying to comment on Gartner...but this is just my perspective based on my world's view.

All things being equal

Some of the products in the market offer features which sounds futuristic or one which are not needed immediately by the consumers or those which are helpful only for about 10% to 20% of the consumer base. Let me give few examples, selling NFC (near field communication) mobile phones in markets like India which doesn't have an ecosystem yet for NFC, Samsung trying to market its tablets on charts App, which probably will not be used by majority, Fevicol marketing its products showing furnitures thrown in water, but the fact is majority of us would keep furnitures away from water.

Then the question is why are these companies providing these features or promoting their  products around these features? Because in the age of high competition, you need to answer this question in the consumer's mind, 'all things being equal whom should I go with', in that scenario the features like Charts, NFC or Water proof furnitures will pop-up in their mind. Even though these features are not mandatory for them, they gave a one-up score to a company compared to others. And it also managed to capture their mind and their interest, hence consumers buy them.

So when the consumer is asking the 'all things being equal' question, is your product popping up in their mind?

Patience and Aggression at work

If you can balance between the two, Patience and Aggression depending on the situation, then you have a winner in hand. Being patientful all time doesn't help and same is the case with aggressiveness, but if you can moderate these two behaviours of yours appropriately depending on what you are dealing with, you can make a world of difference in your approach, decision making and execution skills. That's my thought.... let me know yours.

Sales not working out?

Here is an incomplete list on where you or your organization may be going wrong on sales


Always me-too strategy

Never a head of curve

No passion for BHC (Beat-the-Hell-out-of-Competition)

No value proposition

Not aggressive (No Speed)

Not working hard

Don’t realize that good is bad in this world (be exceptional)

Internal Collaboration sucks

Poor or No retrospection

Not performance driven

No one to confront problems

No outside-in approach

Collective thinking is missing

Incompetent Sales Team

Focusing on too many things

Trying to make everybody happy internally

No distinct positioning

No Monitoring No Measuring

Don’t know how to beat down-cycle with up-cycle

Trying to sell poor products or services

Not engaging with prospects

Athletes

Athletes become champions not when millions of people are watching them on TV, not when 1000s of people are chanting their names on the field, not when they go and receive the medal but in the early morning silence, when no one is watching them, no one is encouraing them, no one is rewarding them.... yet they go out and practice every single day in anticipation of that winning moment. That is when they become champions.

Did you practice in your area of work today?

Be an athlete.

Low-ball-game

Sales people sometimes offer their products and services at the lowest possible price (even below cost at times) and then hope that they can make up their lost margins on possible additional or recurring sales. Nothing wrong with the strategy if overall you can still cover up your cost and make a healthy profit. But at times vendors go overboard on this, leading to poor after-sales-support (not enough money left for support)
and huge losses  (resulting even in a shutdown).  Hope you have your checks and balances in place to avoid low-ball-failures.

Passenger’s Trust Deficit Syndrome

If you have travelled in suburban trains in India, you know that they stop for about 30 seconds in every station, and getting in and out of them is hassle at times, because there is congestion near the gate (even people who are not getting down are standing near the gate). This congestion is partly due to what I call the Passenger’s trust deficit syndrome, passenger don't trust that every other passenger would step near the gate only a few seconds before their stop, since no one is trusting the other, they all clog the gate making the entry and exit difficult. This is the same syndrome we experience with flights, moment taxiing is done everybody gets up so fast (clogging the entire aisle, even though they know it would take about 4 to 5 minutes for the gates to open) from their seat because partially they are afraid that someone from behind will pass ahead of their row. Some amount of mutual trust and discipline among passengers can help avoid congestion to some extent.

Engaging is hard in sales

Why engaging with a prospect is difficult? Because it needs a lot of hard work which most of the sales guys are not willing to put. If you have to engage then you have to


1. Do proper pre-call analysis about the prospect and their company (background, product, services)

2. Read few stuff related to the contact person, their industry, their business model, their competition etc

3. Listen...Listen...Listen, if you are more worried about putting across your point or your presentation, then you will lose when it comes to engaging with the prospect, because every word coming out of prospect's mouth can give you cues on how you can engage with them.... use it productively

4. If you feel your prospect is good at something.... don't lose the chance to appreciate them (sales guys sometimes are obsessed about completing their presentation and they don’t see how good the prospect is at something.... and fail to pass on a compliment... too bad)

5. Engaging means you have to constantly improve on being more creative, amusing and sharply attentive!! Because these are the 3 attributes which can help you engage with anybody much better.

6. Prospects are pre-occupied with their priorities at times, and you may need to grab their attention if you need to engage. Try this, it may work ”If you can provide me 10 minutes of your full attention, I can show you something which may turn be very important for you and you can then decide to continue or not”, and then don’t try to rush through, that will only lead to completing your ten minutes with no results. Try to engage.... in most cases prospect will end up spending more time with you.

7. Don’t be transactional in your approach, which is desperately trying to seek the answers for the questions you have in your mind...start friendly, engage and then incrementally seek answers to your questions, works better.

Number one

If something (product or service) is number one, it is easier to buy because

- There is a lot of social proof around (testimonials)
- Doesn't need a world of buying analysis (there is no competition for number one)
- Pretty easy to justify your decision to your boss (after all you bought the number one product or service)
- People around you readily accept that you have made the right choice
- And in the event something goes wrong with what you bought you still get the benefit of doubt

This doesn’t just hold good for products or services, it holds good for you as well.
So are you striving to be number one? And helping your employer buy YOU?

Got No Mentor

Don't have a mentor who can help out? Who can guide you? Who can help you in your career growth? Well there is an alternate available (may not be perfect but it works), retrospect and read relevant books (related to your job). Frequently retrospect on what you are doing? How good are you doing in your job / business? What went wrong and right? Your perspective on things? Etc when you read relevant books, at time you will get answers to your problems, situations or questions, which are lingering in your mind from your retrospects. Try out!!!

Flights = Cheapest fare

Cheapest fare, is this the only value-add flights can provide? and when everybody is providing lowest possible fare, it is no more a value add..... it has just become a norm in the airline industry.... you search for flights in travel search engine, and by default it sorts by lowest price first. Why can't I have 5 more sort options based on value-added services? Put flights in google and this is what you get? cheap cheap cheap

Is there a way that I can charge few 100 bucks extra and still make consumers buy tickets from me? give me your options? what are those value-adds / service differentiations which can help me charge more and still beat the competition? put your wild ideas here

Collect a lot of money and give back a portion of it

Collecting a lot of money in small transactions from a large set of people and then giving a portion of that money back to few individuals in large transaction, and in the process earning a hefty profit. Well I am talking about the transaction cycle around KBC (Kaun Banega Crorepati).

Products companies sell their products to common man (small transactions with large set of people), to increase their sales, they advertise further in KBC, KBC gets a portion of what the product companies earned from common man, KBC then invites common man to their show and pay winners a portion of what they earned from product companies (large transaction with few individuals, in other words winners).

You are right this is the way most transaction cycle work around advertising / TV shows, but I never got it this clear until I started thinking about it while watching KBC…. and in case of KBC it is slightly different, it starts with majority common man shelling out money to minority common man receiving a part of the same money back (while in case of other TV shows you only get entertainment)

Why the hell is he resisting me?

Sometimes prospects have general sales resistance, they are either mentally switched off right from the time you start or they avoid you by all means!!

And one of the big reason for this are the sales guys themselves

In the past one of the sales guy would have grossly misused prospect’s time
Would have made false claims around his offerings and got away with it
Would have betrayed prospect’s trust in one way or other
Would have provided pathetic after sales support etc

The more number of sales guys the prospect meets who does all or some of the above, the prospect is negatively conditioned against sales guys

Now you may be all good but when you come in front of this prospect as salesman, he is bound to have a general sales resistance against you..... because you are a sales guy.....and his conditioning states you are there to take undue advantage of him.

Now for no reason of yours, you need to work extra hard to overcome the general objections........so if you are a sales guy be caring and true to your prospects, as not being so would hurt you one day or other.