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.

Is black money causing lack of good customer experience?

To my understanding a lot of black money today is deployed in buying real estates in India which is making the cost of real estate more expensive than what it should be based on the usual demand and supply curve.

Is this causing bad customer experience in retailing? Because of high realty cost are retailers compromising on parking space, number of check- out counters, space between aisles, number of support staff, saving cost on air conditioning to pay for high realty cost? etc etc and boy is this helping online retailing beyond its reasonable share?

Why even Reliance can't beat Flipkart now!!

Not sure if Reliance is planning to launch online store like Flipkart but here is my Perspective if they are planning one.

Reliance can put in 10 times the money what Flipkart has spent to build itself but it would be near impossible for them to capture higher market share (better yet Indian mind share.... a trust worthy image of Flipkart in our mind).

Possible reason:

1. Flipkart has this huge first-comer-advantage
2. Online retailing in India to most of us means Flipkart (mind share)
3. Their service, from whatever I have seen is impeccable. And because of which they have earned our trust (mind share)
4. And they seem to understand that they have to continue the pursuit to get more and more mind share and at a quicker rate than before (and I believe a large part of the money they have raised would be spent on that)

Their competitors are trying all sorts of marketing stunts (free vouchers, selling below cost to build user base, crazy repeated ads on TV, 100s of offers) but I doubt its working effectively.

But there is one way Reliance can beat them
If Flipkart screws up its service, that would build trust deficit for others to overtake them ( I hope they won't let that happen).

Another company which has huge Indian mind share is Cadbury Diary milk (“kuch meetha ho jaye”), makes it very difficult for competitors to outperform them. When I say Diary milk what comes to your mind “Premium Quality”, “Happiness”, “Licking your fingers J” , “Proposing a girl” , “Everybody love it”, “Apt for all celebrations”, “Good choice for a gift” ......... see they got your mind share.

Cannibalizing

Recently attended BPO summit at Gurgaon and everyone was talking about moving away from FTE or hourly based billing to Outcome-Based-Model......not an easy thing to do. But as the labor arbitrage benefits are shrinking and more and more competition is coming in from countries like Philippines, Indonesia, China etc who are able to offer labor at par with India or cheaper in most cases....your number one USP cannot be labor cost. Indian BPO industry has to find its USP around knowing business processes better than anyone else, owning domain intensive IT enabled platforms and high quality resources (pre-trained). Yes introducing outcome-based-model seems like Cannibalizing revenue but if not done we would anyway lose out to cheaper economies than India and probably to those who are newly entering into this industry and offering outcome-based-model as a differentiator as opposed to conventional model. The choice is ours, take the risk to protect long-term sustainability or slowly but surely get ready to lose.