Author: animeshjmathur

Leverage – Sales

Leverage, Sales, Time

For a sales person, the biggest consumable she has is time. If it’s gone or wasted on worthless prospects or prospects who are only out there to take “gyan” or knowledge then your income reduces by that much.

For most people who work for someone else, they sell their time for money. With sales people the advantage is that they can get incentives which can really multiply their earnings. So there is a lot of leverage on their time. And the more leverage that they can build, the more they can get rich.

So one is clearly identifying the accounts you want to work with. Sometimes the company would decide this and you have little options. Sometimes the company that you work for may also limit the products/services that you are allowed to sell. That makes life a little more challenging.

In that case the other big leverage that you can get is by using referrals. If you can create happy customers and they can refer other customers to you, then you can get an amazing amount of leverage on your time. Happy customers are always the best source of new business because then there are less hurdles to cross even with the company you are referred to.

Most sales people however feel scared to ask for referrals because they think the customer is doing them a favour. I also used to feel the same way and used to ask it in a very apologetic manner. However, has a friend asked you for help identifying a good “Chinese” restaurant. You have felt happy to recommend a restaurant, if you have had a good experience. This thought was brought out to me by Dean Jackson and Jay Abraham and since then I keep thinking about various ways to be in front of my customer when they are having a conversation where I can be of help. Think from this angle.

Everyone has a time constrain, but for sales folks it has direct impact on their earning capability so choose your customers well and figure out ways that you will create happy customers and then create ways to get a steady state of referrals.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Selling – Products versus Services

B2B, Sales

When I was younger and people would ask me what I did for a living – my typical answer would be – I get out of the house on my rounds and sell whatever I have been asked to sell that day – some times its potato chips, sometimes its computers. That was in a lighter vein but over the years I have been involved in selling so many different products and services that I don’t actually see too many differences.

I fundamentally believe that selling is selling. Irrespective of what you are selling and to whom you are selling. Whether you are selling a product or a service, at the end of the day, the customer is buying a result that the purchase will give her/him. So you need to figure out the result that the customer is looking for and how you can get them the result. However there’s a lot of academic discussions which talk about why they are different.

My two cents on this topic are as follow

  1. Every thing that you sell has a nuance to it. Even within products – different products would have different kind of audiences , different price points, different results, same would be the case with different kinds of services
  2. The orientation of the consumer sale would be different from the business sale, in terms of the complexity involved in the business to business sale (i.e. number of people and steps) and the time involved.
  3. The way you showcase the result could be different – in consumer products you use advertising, while in B2B you might use a direct sales team.
  4. The way you solicit the business may vary – but some consumer products are also sold to businesses and what was once considered a business product (like computers) could soon become a consumer product.

Inspite of all the above points – one distinct difference is that , generally, products have well defined boundaries while it is tougher to put boundaries on what is constituted as a service because humans are involved in the delivery. So standardisation is much tougher.

In most cases today, the product and service get intertwined – do you go to a restaurant because the food is good or because the ambience and service is excellent or all of them.

Till next time then – it doesn’t matter what you are selling as long as you know the result you get for the customer – rest of the things can be managed.

Carpe Diem!!!

Getting AMAZED

curiosity, travel

I have a child like curiosity and get amazed with so many different and unrelated things. If you follow my blog you would notice how I made it a point to go and visit the space museum near Dulles airport near Washington DC, to go and see the space shuttle in reality because I was amazed at the human engineering to send something in space and then bring it back.

Similarly I have had the curiosity to physically go and visit the place where the Tropic of Cancer crosses (its a place near Bhopal the capital of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh) in our country.

How did the Tropic of Cancer come into my mind today. Its actually because today in India we celebrate the festival of Makar Shankranti which showcases the crossing of the Sun on the Tropic of Capricorn in its Northward journey when the tilt of the earth is slowly changing direction to move towards summer in the Northern hemisphere.

Nothing amazing about this….except that there’s a mention of this event even in our texts which are more than 8000 years old. Can you imagine that without satellite imagery, without telescopes, people so long back had perfected the science of astronomy to describe this movement of the earth. I came to know about this and other facts, about couple of weeks back, when I was reading books by Nilesh Oak who is a professor in the US and has mathematically back traced the events of Mahabharata and Ramayan. He was able to do this because of the specific positions of the stars and constellations mentioned in these texts some of which are more than even 15000 years old.

Human engineering and knowledge amaze me the most so I have specifically gone to see things like the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Taj Mahal because I wonder how people would have carried the stones or iron frames when there were no lifts or cranes and then put them together such that they are still standing tall.

My problem however is that, like a child, I don’t go deep to find the details, because there’s another amazing thing waiting for my attention.

Till next time then…stay amazed

Carpe Diem!!!

80/20 for digital consumption

Focus, Leverage, Marketing, Product Management, single target market

I write quite often about leverage, using the 80/20 principle or its other fractal dimensions 64/4 etc. I am regularly trying to figure out more points of leverage so that I can become more effective and see how it plays out even in my practice of marketing.

I consume a lot of content through podcasts and I subscribe to a considerable number of them. Today while seeing my pattern of consumption of content from these podcasts, I realized that I predominantly end up with only 3-4 of them and within those also the primary ones are the Ilovemarketing.com podcast with Dean Jackson and Joe Polish and the Morecheeselesswhiskers.com podcast with Dean Jackson.

This is the true fractal nature of 80/20 where just these two podcasts are utilized by me for a major portion of my listening even though I subscribe to 15 or 16 of them.

If I look at at my consumption of digital entertainment platforms – Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney etc. I have a subscription for maybe 10-12 of these platforms but I end up primarily on just Netflix or Prime.

Again concentration on consuming through a few platforms for a majority of the portion of my time.

The internet has created a level playing field in a lot of areas and the “long tail” impact exists where even small players get a chance to play.

On the other hand from a marketer’s perspective for you to be able to dominate a market therefore you have to be able to choose a very fine niche so that, for that category you can become the top player so that by default people have to use you.

There’s massive leverage in choosing a very small niche and then moving into other adjacent categories. As a product manager if you operate in the digital consumption category, you should be leveraging on this instead of trying to be everything to everyone.

Till next time then

Carpe Diem!!!