Month: June 2012

Another June, another monsoon season starts. This is what I wrote a year ago:

This week’s links:

• 32 Innovations that will change your tomorrow: from New York Times Magazine. “…this issue is about…all the little failures, trivialities and not-quite-solved mysteries that make the successes possible. This is what innovation looks like. It’s messy, and it’s awesome.”
• Why Every School in America Should Teach Entrepreneurship: by Steve Mariotti in Time. “I believe owner-entrepreneurship education can help solve the youth unemployment crisis, rescue our low-income communities by increasing home ownership and employment, and help close the wealth gap.”
• Windows 8: by Michael Mace. “Windows 8 is a very interesting, provocative, even courageous product.  But I’m not sure it’s going to succeed.”
• The TV Business in the US may be starting to collapse: by Henry Blodget. “TV is not going to disappear, just the way newspapers haven’t disappeared. But it just defies common sense to think that the huge change in user behavior over the past decade won’t ultimately hurt the TV business.”
• China’s economy: A special report in the Economist (May 26 issue). “China’s economy is not as precarious as it looks. But it still needs to change.”

Solve

Once in, the focus has to be problem solving. There is a need to clearly understand the challenges the enterprise (buyer) is facing, and then position the atomic units into a whole solution. As someone put it, “pitch the hole, not the drill.” People buy solutions, not products or services. They want solutions to their problems. Without understanding the reasons for the possible purchase, the pitch is going to be vague and a waste of time for both the buyer and the seller.

Scale

Once a successful sale has been made, then it is time to Scale – both vertically in the same enterprise, and horizontally across similar companies in the industry.  The learnings in the sales process are what will help do both. If one department in a customer has a challenge, it is possible that others will have similar challenges which can also be solved with the same “atomic units’ – and now there is a reference also. Other companies in the industry are also likely to face a similar set of challenges, so a similar pitch can help widen the sales funnel.

Last Word

It is very important for senior management in a company to spend their time on Sales.  Their ability to think beyond the immediate and position better will help in crafting the pitches necessary to train the sales team appropriate and prime it for success.

Continuing on the Sales theme, I wanted to add a commentary on what I think of as the “3S Model” – Switch, Solve and Scale.

Switch

In most cases, the enterprise prospect is likely to be using some solution already. So, the goal is to Switch that customer to using your solution. In the event that the enterprise is not using any solution, it is going to be hard to persuade it unless it is a breakthrough product and you are the only one selling it.

Two key components in the pitch to Switch are Trust and Tech. It is very important for the buyer to be able to trust you. That must be established quickly in the sales pitch. Then, talk about the tech capabilities and the customer base so they know they are dealing with the right entity. All that this does is establish parity and open the door a little wider.

Once the MoM is done, the next action is the creation of a proposal, based on the identification of the specific requirements. The proposal should be short and crisp, and cover the most important points (commercials, payment terms) clearly, and leave as little scope for ambiguity as possible. Like presentations, there should be internal templates for proposals so it should be possible to craft these rapidly.

It is also important to ensure these proposal templates are updated. I recently found one of our sales offices giving proposals using a template that was at least a year old.

The customer record should then be updated in the CRM database with an accurate assessment of the opportunity size and expected time to closure. This will then show up as part of the sales funnel.

Summary

The sales meeting and presentation is the most crucial aspect of the selling process. With the right homework prior to the meeting and rapid follow-up after the meeting, it should be possible to accelerate getting the purchase order.

After the meeting, a quick follow-up is important to ensure the momentum is maintained. The first thing that needs to be done is that a summary of the Minutes of Meeting (MoM) should be sent out to the attendees. If any presentation was made, it should also be attached.

The MoM should clearly have the actionables with the names of the people who are responsible for them. Ideally, MoM should be sent out within 24 hours of a meeting. If any questions came up in the meeting that could not be answered, they should be replied to quickly.

In my own experience, this is where the impetus of a good meeting can be lost. Without the right follow-up, everyone gets busy with their own life and the memory of the meeting fades. So, it is very critical to ensure that the purposefulness is maintained.

I have been in so many presentations that are so dry that one either starts fiddling with the phone or switches off midway. This is the death knell for a sales pitch.

Presentations need to come alive. There need to be “props” which help in drawing the attendees on. This can happen in two ways. One, by giving handouts of specific items which have been done for other customers. Two, by giving live demos that the attendees can do themselves.

These “props” help bring the story to life. They make the solutions real. They show how others are using them. They break the dull dreariness of the presentation. These are what the attendees will remember after the presentation.

I wrote this a year ago:

The way India’s political system is structured, elections happen every year, sometimes multiple times in a year. So, some state or the other is always going to the polls every few months. In this situation, there is a sort of N+1 syndrome that creeps into policy-making – the hard decisions are put off because the next election is round the corner.

As a result, it is almost as if the Union government in India stumbles along. Because of these state elections, the oil companies haven’t increased the price of petrol and are losing hundreds of crores daily. Key reform bills are stuck because of either lack of initiative or because some regional alliance partner doesn’t want it to disturb the equation due to elections.

As a result, the engines of India’s growth have now become the states. With a central government that is paralysed and almost seems to be working on auto mode, the states are where the real innovations in policy and service delivery are taking place. We are seeing many states now starting to focus on better policies – for them, they have five years of clear runway to deliver.

This week’s links:

• Mary Meeker 2012 Internet Trends
• On Robots: from The Economist. “From reconnaissance to bomb-defusal to launching attacks, military robots are on the march, raising knotty ethical quandaries.”
• The Segmentation Century: by David Brooks. “How do you govern a diverging world? The answer to that question might help in dealing with the economic crisis in Europe.” Possible pointers for India, too.
• India’s Economic Mess: by Niranjan Rajadhyaksha. “The Sonia Gandhi-Manmohan Singh combination has made a mess of things. A billion Indians deserve better.”
• Political Sentiment Survey: by Atanu Dey. “What the survey did for me is to give me reassurance and hope at a time when I am on the verge of giving up all hope for India’s future…among the educated, connected, middle-class English-speaking population, there is at least a (possibly small) set of people who can help steer the country in away from the poverty of socialism and towards a market-liberal order.”

The actual presentation is perhaps the most important part of the sales process. This is where I see errors galore. More often than not, the slides prepared are not well thought out and follow a set pattern irrespective of the audience and the context. Also, presentations tend to be long-winded and often leave the most important points too late leaving limited time for discussion on them.

This is what I told my sales team recently. Our presentation should not take more than 20 minutes. The first segment should have 2-3 slides that establish the credibility of the company – through our history, lines of business, and the customers we have, with a special focus on the customers in the same segment as the company to which we are presenting.

The next part should showcase the solutions from the customer’s viewpoint, rather than a tech-centric view. In our case, these should centre around helping companies with customer engagement and enhancing their relationships, new customer acquisition and internal communications. This helps give an overview of what the company’s solutions are.

The last part should focus on the solutions to the problems that the company has – as discussed in the Pitch. In this case, we need to have case studies if we have done something similar. It should end with a clear set of actionable ideas that can be taken up immediately after the presentation.