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.