Face to Face Marketing and Door to Door Marketing 

Professional Qualified Sales Experts present products and services, calling on companies using our proven door to door Marketing agent , door-to-door sales technique and door to door Marketing agent in mumbai.

We convert potential customers to sustainable clients in the shortest space of time( door to door sales, door to door Marketing agent ). Our professional teams interact with customers, educating them on our clients’ products/services, as well as generating immediate sales or leads with interested customers.

Marketing and advertising budgets have come under increasing pressure. door to door Marketing agent and Door-to-door sales is a low cost distribution channel, and is an effective way to gain more return on investment. It secures increased value with minimum spend, allowing access to a customer base which is not always reached by existing marketing strategies.

Through Door to Door sales, customers can choose the most suitable deals, especially because they have a chance to ask questions and have the offering clarified by our qualified sales experts in mumbai

Door to Door Sales Agency 

We believe our experience, our sales ability and the detailed processes we have in place ensure we successfully launch new products to the market. Our sector experience and data insights ensure we are calling on the right outlets to maximise return on investment during the critical launch phase.

We have proven experience in launching challenger brands to the market along with well-established range extensions and completely new products.

We believe Fulcrum is the door-to-door-sales agency in pune best suited to owning the responsibility of launching your new product – why not give us a call to find out if we can help you?

I did door-to-door sales for nine years, in hundreds of different cities and towns all across the india. Through long, hard, agonizing trial and error, I eventually developed enough skill that I could take any product into any area on any day and make sales.

In the beginning, I struggled. But when I was about to give up on myself and quit (like 99.9% of people that try door-to-door sales do within their first few days),  experienced salesperson to give me a chance to get on track.

What I saw that day changed my life forever.

I watched as the experienced salesperson drove to an area where he had previous sales success, and listened as he explained to me why he parked his car in the exact spot he did to start his day and laid out his exact plan of attack.
Within the first 10 minutes, I learned a valuable lesson that not only made my door-to-door sales career much easier, but has also been the key to bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for my own companies, and those of thousands of others I’ve consulted to:

A current customer is the easiest person to make a sale to – many, many times easier (and less expensive) than trying to get new customers.

Most business owners operate a risky, day-to-day, transactional business, believing that the reason for getting a customer is to make a sale. That’s their biggest problem: making nothing more than “a” sale to a customer. After that initial transaction, they simply hope that their product or service or location is good enough that they will get a repeat visit from that customer.

On the other hand, sharp business owners (and door-to-door salespeople!) know that the point to making a sale is to get a customer. We have systems put together to maximize the value of that customer by making future offers to them, so that they buy more of the same product or service, or a different version, or even an entirely different product or service.

In other words, we recognize that a current customer is the easiest person to sell to, and a prospect is the hardest and most-expensive person to sell to. Therefore, we concentrate on maximizing the value of every new customer we get.

If you want to grow your business during these challenging economic times (and even during boom times), your time and effort should be invested in working to turn prospects into customers and retain them to market to in the future.
While your marketing is doing its job to get you prospects, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:

Inviting
Informative
Enjoyable

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded “buyer’s remorse.” You want to minimize this as best you can, and if you’ve provided a quality product or service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made, the risk will be lower.

However, returns can still occur. Here are the two most effective ways to deal with this:

Offer to refund money — no questions asked
Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product

These offers alone will also lessen the impact of buyer’s remorse, because the customer will trust you more just because you showed the confidence in your product or service to offer these options in the first place.

There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:

Offer a special price as an opportunity for them to test the market.
Offer a lower price with a legitimate reason, such as clearing out inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s braces, or another tangible reason. (Added bonus: Customers love you for doing this, because it makes you so much more human to them.)
Offer a referral incentive.
Offer a smaller, less expensive entry-level product to build trust.
Offer package deals.
Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
Offer extra incentives, such as longer warranties or free bonuses, if they order by a certain date.
Offer financing options, if applicable.
Offer a bonus if they pay in full.
Offer special packaging or delivery.
Offer “name-your-own-price” incentives.
Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
Offer to let them trade up or upgrade to something better if they want.
Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.

The options are really only limited by your imagination and marketing skill. You can use these or other ideas to discover what works the best for your specific business, with your specific products, services and target market.

Even if you ever find yourself doing door-to-door sales.

Marketing company in bosari

Media as an Instrument of Control vs. Media as an Agent of Change

Media as an Instrument of Control

In many countries, the media is used by the government as an instrument of control and for propaganda purposes. For instance, the Chinese media is heavily controlled and censorship is direct and deep. In countries like the United States, though there is no explicit control, the media is expected to follow the line set by the corporates and the establishment. Of course, this does not mean to say that the media in the US is biased. Just that the forms of control are different and with corporate media houses ruling the roost, sponsors, and advertisers determine the agenda. This is the case in India largely thanks to the tradition of the press being an agent of change in the country.

The other aspect here is that all governments irrespective of whether they are democratically elected or authoritarian realize the importance of the media in the agenda setting function and hence use the media to their advantage. It is common to find media houses aligned to one political party or the other. This is the case in many countries around the world. The difference is the degree of manipulation that the establishment resorts to in each country.

Media as an Agent of Change

The previous section might have touched upon the negative aspects of the media and hence, this section is intended to bring out the other side of the story (no pun intended). Despite restrictions and censorship, mediapersons in many countries work tirelessly and courageously to report and publish according to their conscience and not according to the dictates of the establishment. With the advent of the internet and social media, it has become easy for journalists with a conscientious bent of mind to pursue their passion and ideals. Because of the fluid nature of the medium, the internet is harder to control and manipulate though there are cases where the establishment resorts to control over websites and the publications.

The Bottom Line Imperative

Considering the fact that mediapersons have to walk a tightrope between the establishment and their duty to the citizenry, the bottom line imperative ought to be fairness, truthfulness, and objectivity in their reporting. This can be done by ensuring that stories that are controversial are not killed or buried in the maze but instead, they are given the importance they deserve. Further, media houses ought to shun the temptations of power and perks and be neutral and unbiased in their reporting. This can be achieved if the mediapersons do not fall into the habit of receiving favors from the establishment and the corporates beyond a point.

Finally, it is simply not possible to have objectivity all the time as sponsorship and advertising revenue is the backbone of the media. Therefore, the aim should be to be as objective as possible and as independent as possible within the constraints. This is not a tall order and can be achieved with experience and a deep-rooted commitment to values instead of being driven by profits alone.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

Commercial Sales Methodologies are evolving at a slow pace

Yesterday, I attended a presentation about Sales Performance International’s (SPI  new “Solution Selling 2.0” program.

The one and only sales process does no longer exist

From what I heard, I think “Solution Selling 2.0” might help sellers to be more effective to help customers in their buying process. I found most interesting that the company, probably owning the most process oriented commercial sales methodology, had to concede that in today’s world, using one and only one sales process is no longer effective. I could not help to chuckle when I heard this. I had already written about the need for a multiple process approach in 2008.

Since then, others, such as McKinsey have shown that the customer buying process are different in function of customer loyalty (McKinsey Quarterly 2009 No2.) Also for quite some years, CSO insights consider that best in class companies have a dynamic sales process. Which to me indicates that also they consider that a one size fits all approach is no longer effective.

Implications for Sales Management

The need for several sales processes  increases complexity for sales management. It is no longer sufficient to inspect that the sales process is followed. Managers now need to be able to inspect that the most suitable process is followed. While the design of these different processes can be delegated (e.g. to sales operations), managers must be able to judge which process is the most suitable for a given buying situation. Universally applied criteria for the selection of the right process must be defined and applied.

The need for an outside-in view

To come to meaningful selection criteria for the appropriate sales process, a mapping to the customers buying process is fundamental. It is relatively simple to see if the customer buying process is considered in the sales process. I usually look how sales stages (the top level definition of a sales process) are labeled in the CRM system. If you do not find any terms reflecting the customer situation, then there is a high likelihood that your sales process is internally focused. You would be surprised how often you still find this situation in running CRM implementations. If you find yourself in this situation an effort must be made to understand the customer’s buying behavior (outside in) before even contemplating to move to a set of various sales processes.

Call for action

Moving towards various sales processes to be more responsive to different customer situations is a change management process. Sales Leaders and Mangers are the first targets who must adhere to this change. Are you as leaders and managers willing to make this effort?

A Skills Deficiency of Our Own Making

Four out of five companies worry they are not training as many salespeople on the skills they need

Companies are struggling to train as many salespeople as they want on the skills they need, but it’s partly a product of their own doing.

According to a new joint survey between my company, Corporate Visions and Sales & Marketing Management magazine, nearly 80 percent of companies say they are not able to train as much as they want primarily because of pressure not to take salespeople out of the field.

Ironically, when we asked “who is the primary decider of what training salespeople should get,” the No. 1 answer was “their manager.” In other words, the very same people who struggle to justify time out of the field.

Sound like a conflict of interest? That’s because it is one.

Faced with the contradictory pressures to drive the business or take time to hone their team’s skills, the majority of managers are opting to take a pass on the training, according to 56 percent of respondents. The next-highest reason for limiting training reach was budget constraints, which ranked a distant second at 37 percent.

Three big training challenges and possible solutions

Faced with this kind of pressure, senior sales management and training leaders need to reconsider their options when it comes to providing the necessary skills development. Here are three considerations in the form of challenges/solutions your company will need to wrestle with if you are struggling with this same dilemma:

Competency models tied to key performance indicators vs. generic roles and responsibilities curriculum

Custom learning paths vs. arbitrary learning paths

Flexible, just-in-time and online options vs. rigid, scheduled and classroom-only option

Competency model-driven training curriculum

According to Sirius Decisions, 70 to 80 percent of companies do not follow a competency-based training model, meaning there’s no standard set of skills that salespeople need to master, and no agreement about what level of proficiency they must show.

What’s a reasonable roadmap for developing a competency-based training program? One idea is to build a competency model around the three “value conversations” salespeople must master across the buying cycle. These value conversations are tied to the critical moments of truth in any deal cycle.

•   Pipeline (Create Value) – Provide training, practice and coaching on the ability to disrupt the status quo, convince a prospect or customer of the need to change, and then effectively differentiate from competitive alternatives to create more qualified opportunities.

•   Proposals (Elevate Value) – Provide skills development and tools to improve the ability of reps to connect external factors and key customer initiatives to your solution, and then build a meaningful business case that communicates value and passes muster with key executive decision makers.

•   Profits (Capture Value) – Provide concepts and techniques to make sure your reps don’t let value leak and margins suffer as the deal makes its way through the process and you confront the inevitable pricing pressures as you run the procurement gauntlet.

By ensuring reps are being trained, coached, measured and certified on these value conversation skills, you’ll improve the relevance of your curriculum relative to sales’ key performance indicators.

Custom learning paths based on performance indicators

With a competency model in place, you can now replace your outdated “arbitrary learning paths” with custom learning paths designed to up-skill salespeople in the areas they actually need, as opposed to relying on unreliable manager opinions or generic role- or tenure-based development plans.

Helping to make this easier is the fact that data is available from several sources, which can help determine each rep’s specific area of training needs. For example:

Helping to make this easier is the fact that data is available from several sources, which can help determine each rep’s specific area of training needs. For example:

•   You can look to your CRM system to find which reps are struggling to create pipeline sufficient to meet their quota.

•   You can see which reps tend to have deals and proposals get mired in the middle of pipeline because they struggle to get executive-level buy-in.

•   You can look at deal data to see which reps are the most unscrupulous about discounting and pricing.

Using these performance indicators, you can begin to assign the appropriate training to your reps, helping you address the areas of greatest concern. You can also consider behavioral outcome type assessments that help determine the skills gaps associated with each of the competencies in your model. Well-written surveys that include benchmark data for comparison to low and high performers can help you prioritize which reps need help in which areas.

Flexible learning modalities

Competency models and custom learning paths won’t help your reps unless you can get the right training to the right reps at the right time. As the survey revealed, time is the biggest enemy of a great training program. In traditional classroom learning, reps are often waiting to attend a scheduled class in a city near them that may be months out from when you have determined their need, only to have that date come and the rep’s manager decide they can’t leave the field (or, perhaps a travel freeze could keep them grounded in their home office).

Classroom training may still be perceived as the standard when it comes to driving behavioral change in the field. However, valuable as that format is, it will have zero impact if you can’t get reps into the classroom when they need it.

That’s why companies need virtual training formats that aim to replicate the training rigor of a classroom setting. This virtual format should be based on competency models, custom learning paths and situational learning modalities that improve reps’ performance without removing them from the field.

Evidently this is becoming more obvious to companies, with 65 percent of respondents indicating they plan to increase spending on virtual, modular training formats. Meanwhile, investment in instructor-led classroom training?—?perceived as the most effective in terms of driving behavior changes?—?is set to remain flat, according to the survey.

Clearly, there’s growing interest in virtual training, but the survey results suggest that the quality of the format hasn’t caught up to the demand. In fact, only 9 percent of respondents rated virtual training as the most effective for behavior change compared to classroom (45 percent) and manager-led coaching (39 percent).

But, given the choice between getting no training and getting some training?—?in particular, training that is tied to key competencies and customized to performance indicators, and can be pushed immediately?—?we may have reached a fundamental tipping point in the area of sales skills training.

Check out Corporate Visions’ State of the Conversation Report: “Beyond the Classroom,” to learn more about how these trends are driving significant changes in sales training.

door to door Marketing agent in Pune

door to door Marketing agent in mumbai

Interactive marketing , Advertising, direct marketing activation, display advertising,

Airports Activation, Brand Activations, B B Research

Face to Face Marketing and Door to Door Marketing 

Professional Qualified Sales Experts present products and services, calling on companies using our proven door to door Marketing agent , door-to-door sales technique and door to door Marketing agent in mumbai.

We convert potential customers to sustainable clients in the shortest space of time( door to door sales, door to door Marketing agent ). Our professional teams interact with customers, educating them on our clients’ products/services, as well as generating immediate sales or leads with interested customers.

Marketing and advertising budgets have come under increasing pressure. door to door Marketing agent and Door-to-door sales is a low cost distribution channel, and is an effective way to gain more return on investment. It secures increased value with minimum spend, allowing access to a customer base which is not always reached by existing marketing strategies.

Through Door to Door sales, customers can choose the most suitable deals, especially because they have a chance to ask questions and have the offering clarified by our qualified sales experts in mumbai

Door to Door Sales Agency 

We believe our experience, our sales ability and the detailed processes we have in place ensure we successfully launch new products to the market. Our sector experience and data insights ensure we are calling on the right outlets to maximise return on investment during the critical launch phase.

We have proven experience in launching challenger brands to the market along with well-established range extensions and completely new products.

We believe Fulcrum is the door-to-door-sales agency in pune best suited to owning the responsibility of launching your new product – why not give us a call to find out if we can help you?

I did door-to-door sales for nine years, in hundreds of different cities and towns all across the india. Through long, hard, agonizing trial and error, I eventually developed enough skill that I could take any product into any area on any day and make sales.

In the beginning, I struggled. But when I was about to give up on myself and quit (like 99.9% of people that try door-to-door sales do within their first few days),  experienced salesperson to give me a chance to get on track.

What I saw that day changed my life forever.

I watched as the experienced salesperson drove to an area where he had previous sales success, and listened as he explained to me why he parked his car in the exact spot he did to start his day and laid out his exact plan of attack.
Within the first 10 minutes, I learned a valuable lesson that not only made my door-to-door sales career much easier, but has also been the key to bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for my own companies, and those of thousands of others I’ve consulted to:

A current customer is the easiest person to make a sale to – many, many times easier (and less expensive) than trying to get new customers.

Most business owners operate a risky, day-to-day, transactional business, believing that the reason for getting a customer is to make a sale. That’s their biggest problem: making nothing more than “a” sale to a customer. After that initial transaction, they simply hope that their product or service or location is good enough that they will get a repeat visit from that customer.

On the other hand, sharp business owners (and door-to-door salespeople!) know that the point to making a sale is to get a customer. We have systems put together to maximize the value of that customer by making future offers to them, so that they buy more of the same product or service, or a different version, or even an entirely different product or service.

In other words, we recognize that a current customer is the easiest person to sell to, and a prospect is the hardest and most-expensive person to sell to. Therefore, we concentrate on maximizing the value of every new customer we get.

If you want to grow your business during these challenging economic times (and even during boom times), your time and effort should be invested in working to turn prospects into customers and retain them to market to in the future.
While your marketing is doing its job to get you prospects, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:

Inviting
Informative
Enjoyable

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded “buyer’s remorse.” You want to minimize this as best you can, and if you’ve provided a quality product or service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made, the risk will be lower.

However, returns can still occur. Here are the two most effective ways to deal with this:

Offer to refund money — no questions asked
Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product

These offers alone will also lessen the impact of buyer’s remorse, because the customer will trust you more just because you showed the confidence in your product or service to offer these options in the first place.

There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:

Offer a special price as an opportunity for them to test the market.
Offer a lower price with a legitimate reason, such as clearing out inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s braces, or another tangible reason. (Added bonus: Customers love you for doing this, because it makes you so much more human to them.)
Offer a referral incentive.
Offer a smaller, less expensive entry-level product to build trust.
Offer package deals.
Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
Offer extra incentives, such as longer warranties or free bonuses, if they order by a certain date.
Offer financing options, if applicable.
Offer a bonus if they pay in full.
Offer special packaging or delivery.
Offer “name-your-own-price” incentives.
Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
Offer to let them trade up or upgrade to something better if they want.
Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.

The options are really only limited by your imagination and marketing skill. You can use these or other ideas to discover what works the best for your specific business, with your specific products, services and target market.

Even if you ever find yourself doing door-to-door sales.

marketing consultants in pune

Process is Everything to Hire Better, Faster, and Proactively

Process is Everything to Hire Better, Faster, and Proactively

Process has lots of benefits and every executive knows it. With that knowledge, almost every executive is disappointed with the final results of that process.

The problem is not that everyone is missing a hiring process, but that the hiring process is not aligned to the organizational needs.

This misses the target of driving optimal hiring results. To make any process improvements, overcoming legacy thinking is a real challenge.  Will you get candidates through headhunters, Post & Pray, employee referrals or other sourcing means?  I can’t think of one client who didn’t have a hiring process in place, however all of them were not achieving the outcomes they desired and acknowledged a need to modify their strategy which would improve their process and results.

It seems so logical that if you want to make progress, then adjust your strategy, people, tools, process, or systems.  But however logical it may sound, simple fear causes people to delay or forego an improvement.

We’ve found there is a basic foundation to hiring talent that when properly utilized, speed to hire and quality will improve by over 30%.  Here are 5 proven steps that need to be in place and will improve your confidence to hire better, faster, and consistently.

1. Strategy and Planning: Develop a 12 month Hiring Demand Matrix and stage gate hiring strategy, process and metrics.  You will need tools such as Job Descriptions/Profile, Candidate Screening Summaries, Key Competencies, Interview Guides (with ratings), and qualitative/quantitative comparisons that define what is great and what is good.

2. Sourcing: Sourcing Talent pools with highly effective tools that will vet and match candidates for current and future roles

3. Recruiting: build a contact strategy and structure to connect with talent, scripts/talking points that present highlights of the opportunity, and guidelines to match their skills and align their career goals with your company opportunity

4. Screening and Assessment: Screen candidates via 7-10 questions specific to the needs of your company for the role, cultural fit, career fit, and motivational fit. Utilize chosen assessment tools as another data point for decision making

5. Talent Pipelining: Proactively approach and build relationships with the Talent Pool that matches your future hiring needs.  This will give you a competitive advantage to hire better people faster.

Process drives consistency and by providing consistency in all aspects of hiring talent, there is more clarity in defining what you are looking for, how you will get there, and how to measure how you are doing throughout the process. Better process. Better performance.

Let’s set some expectations. This process rarely produces a six-sigma result. If you can move your results from a 50:50 result to a 60:40 result, you have made an enormous leap forward in the performance of your organization. Start with the number you are starting with, then make your estimate from there of your expectation.

Brand Name

Brand name is one of the brand elements which helps the customers to identify and differentiate one product from another. It should be chosen very carefully as it captures the key theme of a product in an efficient and economical manner. It can easily be noticed and its meaning can be stored and triggered in the memory instantly. Choice of a brand name requires a lot of research. Brand names are not necessarily associated with the product. For instance, brand names can be based on places (Air India, British Airways), animals or birds (Dove soap, Puma), people (Louise Phillips, Allen Solly). In some instances, the company name is used for all products (General Electric, LG).

Features of a Good Brand Name

A good brand name should have following characteristics:

1. It should be unique / distinctive (for instance- Kodak, Mustang)

2. It should be extendable.

3. It should be easy to pronounce, identified and memorized. (For instance-Tide)

4. It should give an idea about product’s qualities and benefits (For instance- Swift, Quickfix, Lipguard).

5. It should be easily convertible into foreign languages.

6. It should be capable of legal protection and registration.

7. It should suggest product/service category (For instance Newsweek).

8. It should indicate concrete qualities (For instance Firebird).

9. It should not portray bad/wrong meanings in other categories. (For instance NOVA is a poor name for a car to be sold in Spanish country, because in Spanish it means “doesn’t go”).

Process of Selecting a renowned and successful Brand Name

1. Define the objectives of branding in terms of six criterions – descriptive, suggestive, compound, classical, arbitrary and fanciful. It Is essential to recognize the role of brand within the corporate branding strategy and the relation of brand to other brand and products. It is also essential to understand the role of brand within entire marketing program as well as a detailed description of niche market must be considered.

2. Generation of multiple names – Any potential source of names can be used; organization, management and employees, current or potential customers, agencies and professional consultants.

3. Screening of names on the basis of branding objectives and marketing considerations so as to have a more synchronized list – The brand names must not have connotations, should be easily pronounceable, should meet the legal requirements etc.

4. Gathering more extensive details on each of the finalized names – There should be extensive international legal search done. These searches are at times done on a sequential basis because of the expense involved.

5. Conducting consumer research – Consumer research is often conducted so as to confirm management expectations as to the remembrance and meaningfulness of the brand names. The features of the product, its price and promotion may be shown to the consumers so that they understand the purpose of the brand name and the manner in which it will be used. Consumers can be shown actual 3-D packages as well as animated advertising or boards. Several samples of consumers must be surveyed depending on the niche market involved.

6. On the basis of the above steps, management can finalize the brand name that maximizes the organization’s branding and marketing objectives and then formally register the brand name.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

Are your Salespeople asking the right questions…….

to add value to the conversation with and informed self driven prospect.

Reading a contribution by Paul McCord to an interesting discussion on sales force ineffectiveness started by Dave Brock over at The Customer Collective, lead me to this question. I think it is a real challenge we have to become aware of and have to have answers to if we want salespeople to be able to continue bringing value to their interactions with such prospects. Bringing this value is key for the salesperson to build credibility and establish a relationship to generate sustainable revenue streams.

Most buying processes, today, start by a search on the net. This allows prospects to form an opinion about a product or service and its potential suppliers without needing the help of the salesperson. Before the Internet, salespeople were the gateway to this information. What is left now is the mistrust and fear from prospects to be manipulated by the sellers. Before they did not have the choice than engage with the salesperson anyway. Today, prospects are given means to form the opinion keeping the salesperson out of the loop until late in the buying process. .

As if this were not enough, new lead generation and lead nurturing tools, mostly operated by the marketing organizations, cause that the initial contact between the prospect and the salesperson is even later in the buying cycle.

When a sales person finally can establish contact with the prospect, this prospect is already very advanced in the decision process. Salespeople just wanting to close a deal, probably will even be happy about this. They run though the risk that they might become obsolete very soon, if all they do is taking the order. The number of purchases customers are able and willing to make via the Internet without direct human intervention from the seller is growing daily.

For purchases where the customer is not willing or able to make the purchasing decision without a salesperson’s help, we have to consider modifying the approach of needs analysis as it is taught today.

While a patient, seeing a doctor, will accept that the doctor goes through his/her diagnosis procedure despite the fact that the patient formed an own opinion about his/her state of health, a prospect having formed an opinion about a solution is very unlikely to accept the standard needs analysis procedure from a sales person. Such an analysis would be perceived as a waste of time. Studies done with buyers in the IT sector revealed that they already think salespeople are making the sales cycle too long compared to how they want to buy.

Why is it more difficult for a sales person to use the classical needs analysis scheme with an informed self driven prospect? Prospects rarely see a sales person as a trustworthy authority for where they seek help. Their impression will be reinforced by the fact that chances are high the salesperson will not be able to help immediately. Prospects will ask for help in their decision on a level where the salespersons first must consult with other functions within their organization. Salespeople risk giving the impression of ‘just being a conduit without much value added’.

Nevertheless, a salesperson seriously interested in building a relationship instead of closing a deal,has to make sure that the prospect has not formed any wrong perceptions about a certain offering. Purchases done on wrong perceptions will end up in customer dissatisfaction.

Guess who the customer is going to blame if this were to happen, the sales person. “He/she should have told me so that this offering does not fit my needs”. It is an irrational reaction. First the prospects mistrust salespersons and make it difficult for them to fulfill their role of a consultant. When expectations are not met, customers need somebody to blame. Ironically, they accuse the same person, that they before did not let do the job properly. We cannot change the customer. So we have to adapt the behavior of the salespeople.

The remedy, I suggest is to modify the questions we ask informed self driven prospects.

Using confirmation questions could be the way forward to provide value for interaction with such prospects. Why not start with something like “I assume you have set your mind on this solution X to help you improve your business in area Y.” I think few prospects would object being asked this type of question . It acknowledges the fact that the prospect is already far advanced in the decision process. It also signals that the sales person is focused on the customer’s business outcome and wants to make sure that the solution meets the prospect’s expectations in this respect.

For such an approach to work, we not only need to focus on the questioning technique used by the salesperson. Being able to ask this simple question requires, that the salesperson understands what business problem a particular offering solves.

Ask yourself where the salesperson can get this information within your organization? I would not be surprised if no place could be found where this is readily available. Salespeople, aware of the need for such information, will thus have made up their ideas by themselves. Leaving salespeople alone in this important task, creates the risk of ending up with unsatisfied customers. Sales people might have formed wrong perceptions for themselves and despite good intentions will end up perpetuating their wrong perceptions to their prospects. The customer will thus end up with unmet expectations.

Preparing salespeople to add value to informed and self directed prospects will require new approaches for sales enablement. Teaching people what a product does, how it compares to competition etc. is relevant because salespeople are expected to know more if they want to gain credibility with their prospects .But it is not sufficient. Sales people also and maybe first need to understand what business outcome a customer can expect from buying a certain offering. I consider it a task of marketing to create this understanding.

Successful sales enablement will thus start with marketing expanding their focus and understanding themselves as a service provider to the sales force. After all they were instrumental, with their websites, lead generation and -nurturing systems, creating the new environment salespeople have to live in.

door to door Marketing agent in Pune

door to door Marketing agent in mumbai

Interactive marketing , Advertising, direct marketing activation, display advertising,

Airports Activation, Brand Activations, B B Research

Face to Face Marketing and Door to Door Marketing 

Nothing beats the reality that one gets when you can interact with potential clients face to face physically moving from door to door within a community or household to household, face to face field marketing is also called personal selling or door to door marketing, customers are met directly in order to sell their products, using this method of field marketing we rely on our skills and persuasive abilities. During the period where we get to interact with the client face to face we get more chance to pass across edible information which would be useful to all our customers at that time and it’s also an opportunity for us to get feedback and to gauge your opinion about our business.

I did door-to-door sales for nine years, in hundreds of different cities and towns all across the india. Through long, hard, agonizing trial and error, I eventually developed enough skill that I could take any product into any area on any day and make sales.

In the beginning, I struggled. But when I was about to give up on myself and quit (like 99.9% of people that try door-to-door sales do within their first few days),  experienced salesperson to give me a chance to get on track.

What I saw that day changed my life forever.

I watched as the experienced salesperson drove to an area where he had previous sales success, and listened as he explained to me why he parked his car in the exact spot he did to start his day and laid out his exact plan of attack.
Within the first 10 minutes, I learned a valuable lesson that not only made my door-to-door sales career much easier, but has also been the key to bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for my own companies, and those of thousands of others I’ve consulted to:

A current customer is the easiest person to make a sale to – many, many times easier (and less expensive) than trying to get new customers.

Most business owners operate a risky, day-to-day, transactional business, believing that the reason for getting a customer is to make a sale. That’s their biggest problem: making nothing more than “a” sale to a customer. After that initial transaction, they simply hope that their product or service or location is good enough that they will get a repeat visit from that customer.

On the other hand, sharp business owners (and door-to-door salespeople!) know that the point to making a sale is to get a customer. We have systems put together to maximize the value of that customer by making future offers to them, so that they buy more of the same product or service, or a different version, or even an entirely different product or service.

In other words, we recognize that a current customer is the easiest person to sell to, and a prospect is the hardest and most-expensive person to sell to. Therefore, we concentrate on maximizing the value of every new customer we get.

If you want to grow your business during these challenging economic times (and even during boom times), your time and effort should be invested in working to turn prospects into customers and retain them to market to in the future.
While your marketing is doing its job to get you prospects, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:

Inviting
Informative
Enjoyable

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded “buyer’s remorse.” You want to minimize this as best you can, and if you’ve provided a quality product or service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made, the risk will be lower.

However, returns can still occur. Here are the two most effective ways to deal with this:

Offer to refund money — no questions asked
Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product

These offers alone will also lessen the impact of buyer’s remorse, because the customer will trust you more just because you showed the confidence in your product or service to offer these options in the first place.

There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:

Offer a special price as an opportunity for them to test the market.
Offer a lower price with a legitimate reason, such as clearing out inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s braces, or another tangible reason. (Added bonus: Customers love you for doing this, because it makes you so much more human to them.)
Offer a referral incentive.
Offer a smaller, less expensive entry-level product to build trust.
Offer package deals.
Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
Offer extra incentives, such as longer warranties or free bonuses, if they order by a certain date.
Offer financing options, if applicable.
Offer a bonus if they pay in full.
Offer special packaging or delivery.
Offer “name-your-own-price” incentives.
Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
Offer to let them trade up or upgrade to something better if they want.
Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.

The options are really only limited by your imagination and marketing skill. You can use these or other ideas to discover what works the best for your specific business, with your specific products, services and target market.

Even if you ever find yourself doing door-to-door sales.

Marketing company in bosari

Media as an Instrument of Control vs. Media as an Agent of Change

Media as an Instrument of Control

In many countries, the media is used by the government as an instrument of control and for propaganda purposes. For instance, the Chinese media is heavily controlled and censorship is direct and deep. In countries like the United States, though there is no explicit control, the media is expected to follow the line set by the corporates and the establishment. Of course, this does not mean to say that the media in the US is biased. Just that the forms of control are different and with corporate media houses ruling the roost, sponsors, and advertisers determine the agenda. This is the case in India largely thanks to the tradition of the press being an agent of change in the country.

The other aspect here is that all governments irrespective of whether they are democratically elected or authoritarian realize the importance of the media in the agenda setting function and hence use the media to their advantage. It is common to find media houses aligned to one political party or the other. This is the case in many countries around the world. The difference is the degree of manipulation that the establishment resorts to in each country.

Media as an Agent of Change

The previous section might have touched upon the negative aspects of the media and hence, this section is intended to bring out the other side of the story (no pun intended). Despite restrictions and censorship, mediapersons in many countries work tirelessly and courageously to report and publish according to their conscience and not according to the dictates of the establishment. With the advent of the internet and social media, it has become easy for journalists with a conscientious bent of mind to pursue their passion and ideals. Because of the fluid nature of the medium, the internet is harder to control and manipulate though there are cases where the establishment resorts to control over websites and the publications.

The Bottom Line Imperative

Considering the fact that mediapersons have to walk a tightrope between the establishment and their duty to the citizenry, the bottom line imperative ought to be fairness, truthfulness, and objectivity in their reporting. This can be done by ensuring that stories that are controversial are not killed or buried in the maze but instead, they are given the importance they deserve. Further, media houses ought to shun the temptations of power and perks and be neutral and unbiased in their reporting. This can be achieved if the mediapersons do not fall into the habit of receiving favors from the establishment and the corporates beyond a point.

Finally, it is simply not possible to have objectivity all the time as sponsorship and advertising revenue is the backbone of the media. Therefore, the aim should be to be as objective as possible and as independent as possible within the constraints. This is not a tall order and can be achieved with experience and a deep-rooted commitment to values instead of being driven by profits alone.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

Commercial Sales Methodologies are evolving at a slow pace

Yesterday, I attended a presentation about Sales Performance International’s (SPI  new “Solution Selling 2.0” program.

The one and only sales process does no longer exist

From what I heard, I think “Solution Selling 2.0” might help sellers to be more effective to help customers in their buying process. I found most interesting that the company, probably owning the most process oriented commercial sales methodology, had to concede that in today’s world, using one and only one sales process is no longer effective. I could not help to chuckle when I heard this. I had already written about the need for a multiple process approach in 2008.

Since then, others, such as McKinsey have shown that the customer buying process are different in function of customer loyalty (McKinsey Quarterly 2009 No2.) Also for quite some years, CSO insights consider that best in class companies have a dynamic sales process. Which to me indicates that also they consider that a one size fits all approach is no longer effective.

Implications for Sales Management

The need for several sales processes  increases complexity for sales management. It is no longer sufficient to inspect that the sales process is followed. Managers now need to be able to inspect that the most suitable process is followed. While the design of these different processes can be delegated (e.g. to sales operations), managers must be able to judge which process is the most suitable for a given buying situation. Universally applied criteria for the selection of the right process must be defined and applied.

The need for an outside-in view

To come to meaningful selection criteria for the appropriate sales process, a mapping to the customers buying process is fundamental. It is relatively simple to see if the customer buying process is considered in the sales process. I usually look how sales stages (the top level definition of a sales process) are labeled in the CRM system. If you do not find any terms reflecting the customer situation, then there is a high likelihood that your sales process is internally focused. You would be surprised how often you still find this situation in running CRM implementations. If you find yourself in this situation an effort must be made to understand the customer’s buying behavior (outside in) before even contemplating to move to a set of various sales processes.

Call for action

Moving towards various sales processes to be more responsive to different customer situations is a change management process. Sales Leaders and Mangers are the first targets who must adhere to this change. Are you as leaders and managers willing to make this effort?

A Skills Deficiency of Our Own Making

Four out of five companies worry they are not training as many salespeople on the skills they need

Companies are struggling to train as many salespeople as they want on the skills they need, but it’s partly a product of their own doing.

According to a new joint survey between my company, Corporate Visions and Sales & Marketing Management magazine, nearly 80 percent of companies say they are not able to train as much as they want primarily because of pressure not to take salespeople out of the field.

Ironically, when we asked “who is the primary decider of what training salespeople should get,” the No. 1 answer was “their manager.” In other words, the very same people who struggle to justify time out of the field.

Sound like a conflict of interest? That’s because it is one.

Faced with the contradictory pressures to drive the business or take time to hone their team’s skills, the majority of managers are opting to take a pass on the training, according to 56 percent of respondents. The next-highest reason for limiting training reach was budget constraints, which ranked a distant second at 37 percent.

Three big training challenges and possible solutions

Faced with this kind of pressure, senior sales management and training leaders need to reconsider their options when it comes to providing the necessary skills development. Here are three considerations in the form of challenges/solutions your company will need to wrestle with if you are struggling with this same dilemma:

Competency models tied to key performance indicators vs. generic roles and responsibilities curriculum

Custom learning paths vs. arbitrary learning paths

Flexible, just-in-time and online options vs. rigid, scheduled and classroom-only option

Competency model-driven training curriculum

According to Sirius Decisions, 70 to 80 percent of companies do not follow a competency-based training model, meaning there’s no standard set of skills that salespeople need to master, and no agreement about what level of proficiency they must show.

What’s a reasonable roadmap for developing a competency-based training program? One idea is to build a competency model around the three “value conversations” salespeople must master across the buying cycle. These value conversations are tied to the critical moments of truth in any deal cycle.

•   Pipeline (Create Value) – Provide training, practice and coaching on the ability to disrupt the status quo, convince a prospect or customer of the need to change, and then effectively differentiate from competitive alternatives to create more qualified opportunities.

•   Proposals (Elevate Value) – Provide skills development and tools to improve the ability of reps to connect external factors and key customer initiatives to your solution, and then build a meaningful business case that communicates value and passes muster with key executive decision makers.

•   Profits (Capture Value) – Provide concepts and techniques to make sure your reps don’t let value leak and margins suffer as the deal makes its way through the process and you confront the inevitable pricing pressures as you run the procurement gauntlet.

By ensuring reps are being trained, coached, measured and certified on these value conversation skills, you’ll improve the relevance of your curriculum relative to sales’ key performance indicators.

Custom learning paths based on performance indicators

With a competency model in place, you can now replace your outdated “arbitrary learning paths” with custom learning paths designed to up-skill salespeople in the areas they actually need, as opposed to relying on unreliable manager opinions or generic role- or tenure-based development plans.

Helping to make this easier is the fact that data is available from several sources, which can help determine each rep’s specific area of training needs. For example:

Helping to make this easier is the fact that data is available from several sources, which can help determine each rep’s specific area of training needs. For example:

•   You can look to your CRM system to find which reps are struggling to create pipeline sufficient to meet their quota.

•   You can see which reps tend to have deals and proposals get mired in the middle of pipeline because they struggle to get executive-level buy-in.

•   You can look at deal data to see which reps are the most unscrupulous about discounting and pricing.

Using these performance indicators, you can begin to assign the appropriate training to your reps, helping you address the areas of greatest concern. You can also consider behavioral outcome type assessments that help determine the skills gaps associated with each of the competencies in your model. Well-written surveys that include benchmark data for comparison to low and high performers can help you prioritize which reps need help in which areas.

Flexible learning modalities

Competency models and custom learning paths won’t help your reps unless you can get the right training to the right reps at the right time. As the survey revealed, time is the biggest enemy of a great training program. In traditional classroom learning, reps are often waiting to attend a scheduled class in a city near them that may be months out from when you have determined their need, only to have that date come and the rep’s manager decide they can’t leave the field (or, perhaps a travel freeze could keep them grounded in their home office).

Classroom training may still be perceived as the standard when it comes to driving behavioral change in the field. However, valuable as that format is, it will have zero impact if you can’t get reps into the classroom when they need it.

That’s why companies need virtual training formats that aim to replicate the training rigor of a classroom setting. This virtual format should be based on competency models, custom learning paths and situational learning modalities that improve reps’ performance without removing them from the field.

Evidently this is becoming more obvious to companies, with 65 percent of respondents indicating they plan to increase spending on virtual, modular training formats. Meanwhile, investment in instructor-led classroom training?—?perceived as the most effective in terms of driving behavior changes?—?is set to remain flat, according to the survey.

Clearly, there’s growing interest in virtual training, but the survey results suggest that the quality of the format hasn’t caught up to the demand. In fact, only 9 percent of respondents rated virtual training as the most effective for behavior change compared to classroom (45 percent) and manager-led coaching (39 percent).

But, given the choice between getting no training and getting some training?—?in particular, training that is tied to key competencies and customized to performance indicators, and can be pushed immediately?—?we may have reached a fundamental tipping point in the area of sales skills training.

Check out Corporate Visions’ State of the Conversation Report: “Beyond the Classroom,” to learn more about how these trends are driving significant changes in sales training.

door to door Marketing agent in Pune

door to door Marketing agent in mumbai

Interactive marketing , Advertising, direct marketing activation, display advertising,

Airports Activation, Brand Activations, B B Research

Face to Face Marketing and Door to Door Marketing 

Nothing beats the reality that one gets when you can interact with potential clients face to face physically moving from door to door within a community or household to household, face to face field marketing is also called personal selling or door to door marketing, customers are met directly in order to sell their products, using this method of field marketing we rely on our skills and persuasive abilities. During the period where we get to interact with the client face to face we get more chance to pass across edible information which would be useful to all our customers at that time and it’s also an opportunity for us to get feedback and to gauge your opinion about our business.

I did door-to-door sales for nine years, in hundreds of different cities and towns all across the india. Through long, hard, agonizing trial and error, I eventually developed enough skill that I could take any product into any area on any day and make sales.

In the beginning, I struggled. But when I was about to give up on myself and quit (like 99.9% of people that try door-to-door sales do within their first few days),  experienced salesperson to give me a chance to get on track.

What I saw that day changed my life forever.

I watched as the experienced salesperson drove to an area where he had previous sales success, and listened as he explained to me why he parked his car in the exact spot he did to start his day and laid out his exact plan of attack.
Within the first 10 minutes, I learned a valuable lesson that not only made my door-to-door sales career much easier, but has also been the key to bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for my own companies, and those of thousands of others I’ve consulted to:

A current customer is the easiest person to make a sale to – many, many times easier (and less expensive) than trying to get new customers.

Most business owners operate a risky, day-to-day, transactional business, believing that the reason for getting a customer is to make a sale. That’s their biggest problem: making nothing more than “a” sale to a customer. After that initial transaction, they simply hope that their product or service or location is good enough that they will get a repeat visit from that customer.

On the other hand, sharp business owners (and door-to-door salespeople!) know that the point to making a sale is to get a customer. We have systems put together to maximize the value of that customer by making future offers to them, so that they buy more of the same product or service, or a different version, or even an entirely different product or service.

In other words, we recognize that a current customer is the easiest person to sell to, and a prospect is the hardest and most-expensive person to sell to. Therefore, we concentrate on maximizing the value of every new customer we get.

If you want to grow your business during these challenging economic times (and even during boom times), your time and effort should be invested in working to turn prospects into customers and retain them to market to in the future.
While your marketing is doing its job to get you prospects, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:

Inviting
Informative
Enjoyable

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded “buyer’s remorse.” You want to minimize this as best you can, and if you’ve provided a quality product or service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made, the risk will be lower.

However, returns can still occur. Here are the two most effective ways to deal with this:

Offer to refund money — no questions asked
Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product

These offers alone will also lessen the impact of buyer’s remorse, because the customer will trust you more just because you showed the confidence in your product or service to offer these options in the first place.

There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:

Offer a special price as an opportunity for them to test the market.
Offer a lower price with a legitimate reason, such as clearing out inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s braces, or another tangible reason. (Added bonus: Customers love you for doing this, because it makes you so much more human to them.)
Offer a referral incentive.
Offer a smaller, less expensive entry-level product to build trust.
Offer package deals.
Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
Offer extra incentives, such as longer warranties or free bonuses, if they order by a certain date.
Offer financing options, if applicable.
Offer a bonus if they pay in full.
Offer special packaging or delivery.
Offer “name-your-own-price” incentives.
Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
Offer to let them trade up or upgrade to something better if they want.
Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.

The options are really only limited by your imagination and marketing skill. You can use these or other ideas to discover what works the best for your specific business, with your specific products, services and target market.

Even if you ever find yourself doing door-to-door sales.

marketing consultants in pune

Process is Everything to Hire Better, Faster, and Proactively

Process is Everything to Hire Better, Faster, and Proactively

Process has lots of benefits and every executive knows it. With that knowledge, almost every executive is disappointed with the final results of that process.

The problem is not that everyone is missing a hiring process, but that the hiring process is not aligned to the organizational needs.

This misses the target of driving optimal hiring results. To make any process improvements, overcoming legacy thinking is a real challenge.  Will you get candidates through headhunters, Post & Pray, employee referrals or other sourcing means?  I can’t think of one client who didn’t have a hiring process in place, however all of them were not achieving the outcomes they desired and acknowledged a need to modify their strategy which would improve their process and results.

It seems so logical that if you want to make progress, then adjust your strategy, people, tools, process, or systems.  But however logical it may sound, simple fear causes people to delay or forego an improvement.

We’ve found there is a basic foundation to hiring talent that when properly utilized, speed to hire and quality will improve by over 30%.  Here are 5 proven steps that need to be in place and will improve your confidence to hire better, faster, and consistently.

1. Strategy and Planning: Develop a 12 month Hiring Demand Matrix and stage gate hiring strategy, process and metrics.  You will need tools such as Job Descriptions/Profile, Candidate Screening Summaries, Key Competencies, Interview Guides (with ratings), and qualitative/quantitative comparisons that define what is great and what is good.

2. Sourcing: Sourcing Talent pools with highly effective tools that will vet and match candidates for current and future roles

3. Recruiting: build a contact strategy and structure to connect with talent, scripts/talking points that present highlights of the opportunity, and guidelines to match their skills and align their career goals with your company opportunity

4. Screening and Assessment: Screen candidates via 7-10 questions specific to the needs of your company for the role, cultural fit, career fit, and motivational fit. Utilize chosen assessment tools as another data point for decision making

5. Talent Pipelining: Proactively approach and build relationships with the Talent Pool that matches your future hiring needs.  This will give you a competitive advantage to hire better people faster.

Process drives consistency and by providing consistency in all aspects of hiring talent, there is more clarity in defining what you are looking for, how you will get there, and how to measure how you are doing throughout the process. Better process. Better performance.

Let’s set some expectations. This process rarely produces a six-sigma result. If you can move your results from a 50:50 result to a 60:40 result, you have made an enormous leap forward in the performance of your organization. Start with the number you are starting with, then make your estimate from there of your expectation.

Brand Name

Brand name is one of the brand elements which helps the customers to identify and differentiate one product from another. It should be chosen very carefully as it captures the key theme of a product in an efficient and economical manner. It can easily be noticed and its meaning can be stored and triggered in the memory instantly. Choice of a brand name requires a lot of research. Brand names are not necessarily associated with the product. For instance, brand names can be based on places (Air India, British Airways), animals or birds (Dove soap, Puma), people (Louise Phillips, Allen Solly). In some instances, the company name is used for all products (General Electric, LG).

Features of a Good Brand Name

A good brand name should have following characteristics:

1. It should be unique / distinctive (for instance- Kodak, Mustang)

2. It should be extendable.

3. It should be easy to pronounce, identified and memorized. (For instance-Tide)

4. It should give an idea about product’s qualities and benefits (For instance- Swift, Quickfix, Lipguard).

5. It should be easily convertible into foreign languages.

6. It should be capable of legal protection and registration.

7. It should suggest product/service category (For instance Newsweek).

8. It should indicate concrete qualities (For instance Firebird).

9. It should not portray bad/wrong meanings in other categories. (For instance NOVA is a poor name for a car to be sold in Spanish country, because in Spanish it means “doesn’t go”).

Process of Selecting a renowned and successful Brand Name

1. Define the objectives of branding in terms of six criterions – descriptive, suggestive, compound, classical, arbitrary and fanciful. It Is essential to recognize the role of brand within the corporate branding strategy and the relation of brand to other brand and products. It is also essential to understand the role of brand within entire marketing program as well as a detailed description of niche market must be considered.

2. Generation of multiple names – Any potential source of names can be used; organization, management and employees, current or potential customers, agencies and professional consultants.

3. Screening of names on the basis of branding objectives and marketing considerations so as to have a more synchronized list – The brand names must not have connotations, should be easily pronounceable, should meet the legal requirements etc.

4. Gathering more extensive details on each of the finalized names – There should be extensive international legal search done. These searches are at times done on a sequential basis because of the expense involved.

5. Conducting consumer research – Consumer research is often conducted so as to confirm management expectations as to the remembrance and meaningfulness of the brand names. The features of the product, its price and promotion may be shown to the consumers so that they understand the purpose of the brand name and the manner in which it will be used. Consumers can be shown actual 3-D packages as well as animated advertising or boards. Several samples of consumers must be surveyed depending on the niche market involved.

6. On the basis of the above steps, management can finalize the brand name that maximizes the organization’s branding and marketing objectives and then formally register the brand name.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

Are your Salespeople asking the right questions…….

to add value to the conversation with and informed self driven prospect.

Reading a contribution by Paul McCord to an interesting discussion on sales force ineffectiveness started by Dave Brock over at The Customer Collective, lead me to this question. I think it is a real challenge we have to become aware of and have to have answers to if we want salespeople to be able to continue bringing value to their interactions with such prospects. Bringing this value is key for the salesperson to build credibility and establish a relationship to generate sustainable revenue streams.

Most buying processes, today, start by a search on the net. This allows prospects to form an opinion about a product or service and its potential suppliers without needing the help of the salesperson. Before the Internet, salespeople were the gateway to this information. What is left now is the mistrust and fear from prospects to be manipulated by the sellers. Before they did not have the choice than engage with the salesperson anyway. Today, prospects are given means to form the opinion keeping the salesperson out of the loop until late in the buying process. .

As if this were not enough, new lead generation and lead nurturing tools, mostly operated by the marketing organizations, cause that the initial contact between the prospect and the salesperson is even later in the buying cycle.

When a sales person finally can establish contact with the prospect, this prospect is already very advanced in the decision process. Salespeople just wanting to close a deal, probably will even be happy about this. They run though the risk that they might become obsolete very soon, if all they do is taking the order. The number of purchases customers are able and willing to make via the Internet without direct human intervention from the seller is growing daily.

For purchases where the customer is not willing or able to make the purchasing decision without a salesperson’s help, we have to consider modifying the approach of needs analysis as it is taught today.

While a patient, seeing a doctor, will accept that the doctor goes through his/her diagnosis procedure despite the fact that the patient formed an own opinion about his/her state of health, a prospect having formed an opinion about a solution is very unlikely to accept the standard needs analysis procedure from a sales person. Such an analysis would be perceived as a waste of time. Studies done with buyers in the IT sector revealed that they already think salespeople are making the sales cycle too long compared to how they want to buy.

Why is it more difficult for a sales person to use the classical needs analysis scheme with an informed self driven prospect? Prospects rarely see a sales person as a trustworthy authority for where they seek help. Their impression will be reinforced by the fact that chances are high the salesperson will not be able to help immediately. Prospects will ask for help in their decision on a level where the salespersons first must consult with other functions within their organization. Salespeople risk giving the impression of ‘just being a conduit without much value added’.

Nevertheless, a salesperson seriously interested in building a relationship instead of closing a deal,has to make sure that the prospect has not formed any wrong perceptions about a certain offering. Purchases done on wrong perceptions will end up in customer dissatisfaction.

Guess who the customer is going to blame if this were to happen, the sales person. “He/she should have told me so that this offering does not fit my needs”. It is an irrational reaction. First the prospects mistrust salespersons and make it difficult for them to fulfill their role of a consultant. When expectations are not met, customers need somebody to blame. Ironically, they accuse the same person, that they before did not let do the job properly. We cannot change the customer. So we have to adapt the behavior of the salespeople.

The remedy, I suggest is to modify the questions we ask informed self driven prospects.

Using confirmation questions could be the way forward to provide value for interaction with such prospects. Why not start with something like “I assume you have set your mind on this solution X to help you improve your business in area Y.” I think few prospects would object being asked this type of question . It acknowledges the fact that the prospect is already far advanced in the decision process. It also signals that the sales person is focused on the customer’s business outcome and wants to make sure that the solution meets the prospect’s expectations in this respect.

For such an approach to work, we not only need to focus on the questioning technique used by the salesperson. Being able to ask this simple question requires, that the salesperson understands what business problem a particular offering solves.

Ask yourself where the salesperson can get this information within your organization? I would not be surprised if no place could be found where this is readily available. Salespeople, aware of the need for such information, will thus have made up their ideas by themselves. Leaving salespeople alone in this important task, creates the risk of ending up with unsatisfied customers. Sales people might have formed wrong perceptions for themselves and despite good intentions will end up perpetuating their wrong perceptions to their prospects. The customer will thus end up with unmet expectations.

Preparing salespeople to add value to informed and self directed prospects will require new approaches for sales enablement. Teaching people what a product does, how it compares to competition etc. is relevant because salespeople are expected to know more if they want to gain credibility with their prospects .But it is not sufficient. Sales people also and maybe first need to understand what business outcome a customer can expect from buying a certain offering. I consider it a task of marketing to create this understanding.

Successful sales enablement will thus start with marketing expanding their focus and understanding themselves as a service provider to the sales force. After all they were instrumental, with their websites, lead generation and -nurturing systems, creating the new environment salespeople have to live in.

door to door Marketing agent in Pune

door to door Marketing agent in mumbai

Interactive marketing , Advertising, direct marketing activation, display advertising,

Airports Activation, Brand Activations, B B Research