Author: animeshjmathur

Prioritizing the top 2-3 in sales

B2B, ideal customer, Methodologies, prioritizing, Sales

The 80/20 rule works even in sales. As I have said before the best thing about this rule is that its fractal, which means there’s always an 80/20 within the 80/20 also.

So within all your customers 80% of the complaints about you or your product or your service would come from 20% of the customers. However you could go one step further and identify 4% of the customers who are actually responsible for 64% of the problems. If you eliminated these 4% your life would be much more easier.

Similarly there will be few customers who would be responsible for more than 64% of your business. You need to ensure that you are constantly doing everything possible to not only keep these customers happy but to also ensure that you are growing your business with them.

As a sales person you also need to analyze which 20% of the products get you 80% of your incentives or commissions and then analyze which 20% of your customers account for 80% of the sales of those products. That will give you a clear indication of where you have to spend your time and prioritize your day.

While you’re supposed to sell all the products that are assigned to you, by following this mechanism to prioritize your day, you will also hit your financial goals faster. The only constraint for a sales person is time. If you can focus 80%of your time on these 20% customers you would get a massive boost to your achievements.

Its always how you can leverage your time for the most productive use. After all small hinges move big doors.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Segment Profitability

Product Management, Profitability, segmentation

As a product manager you look at creating extensions to meet needs of different markets. However not all segments are created equal.

While it’s good for the ego to know that our product is present in multiple segments, some segments are more profitable than others. As a product manager you need to be aware of it because otherwise some finance guy may draw up his own conclusions and shut down your product line.

There could be various ways of doing an analysis of each segment. One method that I have found easy and quick to use & keep me aware is suggested by Richard Koch in his seminal book The 80/20 Principle. If you have not read this book, I would recommend you stop doing everything else and pick it up at the Kindle store.

His suggestion is to segment your market by competitors. The segment where you face the same competitors you club together. Whenever the competitors change you account as different segment. Now fighting different types of competitors in different market segments requires bandwidth of all kinds of resources.

If you know against which competitors you win more easily and also make more money because of scale or whatever else, then as a product manager you should do everything to win even more so that the absolute profit that your product line creates grows.

On the other hand if there are segments, where you find it difficult to win against other types of competitors then you should avoid.

There was a time when I was carrying a product line of an operating system . Now I could sell services to end customers for managing their operating systems, I could sell them training on those operating systems for corporate customers and individuals who wanted to pick up the skill.

While it was easy to sell services and training to companies, when it came to selling in retail our systems were failing against dedicated retail training companies. So even though my product remained the same, in the retail market my competitors were different and I had to leave that segment. Till that time I had not read this book. Now I like to keep evaluating on regular basis how my different product lines are doing in different competitive segments.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Small interventions with charity – big impact on society

charity, Karma, Leverage, prioritizing

If you follow my blog you would know I am a big fan of 80/20 – small causes which can create big impact. I am all about using leverage- in the positive sense.

I am also big into doing charity because it is good Karma.

But I think not all charity is created equal.  In my opinion if you do charity to solve a problem at the grass root level then in the long run it can have a major impact on the society. Its all about prioritizing how your funds can have the biggest impact.

In India one of the big challenges we face is poverty.  So poor people don’t send kids to school because they get additional hands to work,  earn money and therefore feed the family.

Since the kids don’t go to school they also spend their life in poverty-stricken situations. This also leads to an increase in crime,  drug abuse etc.

A simple solution that was found,  was to feed kids in schools so that the kids get one good meal.  Now the incentive for the parents to send the kid to the school is not educational but the lunch that the kid will get. On the other hand for the government and society the long term benefits are better,  healthier citizens who may eventually come out of poverty and the crime rates will also be lower.

The challenge is how do you feed so many kids. That’s where NGOs come in. They take donations from people like us.

A lot of NGOs do good work. However I support these kind of charities because the small interventions of feeding say 25 kids for a full year, every year will ensure that 10 years from now I know there will be 25 less people who will be on the road living in poverty. The amount needed to feed one wholesome nutritious meal to say 25 kids for a year would be just USD 500 but the long term impact could be so amazing.

Mohnish Pabrai runs a similar program where he helps kids get trained for higher education and sponsors their education.  The Grameen Bank founder and Nobel prize winner did a similar thing by giving micro loans to the poor people so they could do their own business.

While all charity is very good, give wherever and whenever you can, however if you can also do some focused charity it can have major long term benefits for society.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Personal differentiation- what’s the Value, You get to the table

differentiation, differentiation, Habits, Positioning, Sales

In any relationship and more so in sales, it’s the value that you bring to the other side which makes people want to be connected to you.

When you are doing marketing, the agenda is to create a relationship between the company’s product and the customer. But when you are in sales, it is all about the personal brand of YOU.

That brand of You gets created with the Value you bring to the table specifically. If the prospect does not find you knowledgeable on different aspects of his business and requirements, he will consider you a waste of time. So even though you may have the best product or service in the market, they will not buy from You.

As a sales person today, its table stakes to get to know about the person you’re meeting, about their business, industry challenges, regulations etc.

You also need to be able to challenge the assumptions that the customer is making and showcase the same to them. Most professional customers today like to interact with equals. When you create a differentiation with Value, you become the trusted advisor. That’s how you also improve your personal “positioning” in the market.

Gone are the days when salesmen could just wing a conversation about the weather, the photo frame in the customer’s office etc.

Its getting more and more difficult to get an appointment with a customer for a meeting these days. Get better prepared, figure out Why should the customer even talk to you. That “Why” will then help you create your Value.

Till next time then, create your own differentiation with the Value you bring to the table.

Carpe Diem!!