Monday 27 July 2015

5Qs that spell Success

In a research , it was revealed that the role of IQ in success is limited to 20% and rest is due to EQ. But, there are three other Qs which are as important as EQ. In my attached article , I tried giving some insight on it.

Friday 17 July 2015

People Pay for Satisfactory Responses to perceived Problems or Opportunities

Different customers and various products together give a complex matrix to deal with by selling people to change and fine-tune their selling behaviour. This is the catch generally being faced by organisations & fail to understand their falling sales. Distinctions in selling behaviour therefore is of paramount importance to understand to succeed in selling.

In a research done by McKinsey on more than 1200 managers who were ‘Purchasing Decision Makers’, a big gap was found in what managers ‘said’ was important , generally it was price and product features and what actually drove their decisions about vendors.

The study clearly identified that the Attitude Scales & Responses thereon do not come out to be positively effecting buying decision. It means, factors like Eco-friendly products, green products although being talked about a lot, but study shows that in reality, such attitude does not influence positively buying decisions.

Another factor which came out of the McKinsey study is that ‘not having adequate product knowledge and contacting customers too frequently by a sales person’ undermines selling. The study clearly come out on that customers look for fewer but more meaningful interactions.

In short, it can be said that ‘People pay for satisfactory responses to perceived problems or opportunities.’ Eg. Theodore Levitt said, people don’t buy 2 inches drill bits but 2 inches hole. Levitt has said that Organisations are infected with ‘Marketing Myopia’ i.e. focussing on product features than benefits. He said that marketing myopia makes organisations fail to understand - Market Scope, Product Substitutes and Customer motivations to buy or not.  He said, customers ‘hire’ products to get their jobs done.

It therefore can be concluded that organisation should have a product or service with benefits, relevant to customer. A clear distinction between features and benefits.


The MARKETING STRATEGY should focus on driving relative importance of FEATURES and BENEFITS.

Sunday 12 July 2015

Mindless experience to mindful actions




It is a fact that 'experienced' people emphasize on their experience rather on the content they gathered when they were being experienced.. Getting old, no one can stop. Watch keep ticking. The said article focus on how mindful actions make a difference and not the mindless experience.
The article published in the magazine HUMAN CAPITAL, JULY -2015

Monday 6 July 2015

All customers are not same


Products manufactured has no value, until sold and money due realised. Conversely, selling if not tuned to a product, it remains a heroic act. It can therefore be said that it is the alignment of selling behaviours with sales tasks i.e. critical to managing performance of the organisation.

Selling behaviour alignment has come into prominence as research conducted to find out reasons of failure of start-ups. It is found that nearly 44000 companies were founded in the year 2000. Out of them, fewer than 6% achieved more than $10 million in revenues by 2010 and fewer than 2% more than $ 50 million.

Companies generally begin with the ‘Product Performance Advantage’ – advantage that product drives into the market, finding a gap in a product category. This advantage is diluted slowly as other products or even new products in the same category start filling in the gap and companies first fail to comprehend reasons of their product failure and eventually not able to build on their initial product performance advantage by translating their strategy into business development initiatives. In other words, failure at the end of a leadership team to define core competencies of the organisation and their core customers.

Business development is driven by selling skills tuned to buying behaviour of core customers.

There are lots of ways to sell but an organisation has to choose a specific way, appropriate to the organisational strategy and core competency. Here comes the rule of ‘understanding target customers and their buying behaviour’.

All customers are not same.



Saturday 4 July 2015

Outsider CEO in as cos think out-of-box

Growth generally stunts due to lack of ideas. Homogeneity builds up in ideas & thought process when a set of people lives for a longer time, together. Therefore, there is no other option but to bring someone from outside to take care of business growth through heterogeneity.