The biggest competition for you is Inertia of the customer

B2B, competition, Customers, Decisions, niche, Sales

One of Newton’s laws of Motion is – Law of Inertia – Nothing moves unless a force is applied on it.

As a sales person, for you the biggest competition you will face, is with the customer, not wanting to change the status quo. The customer always has a choice

Buy from you
Buy from your direct competition
Buy something else which can solve the problem – albeit not the same way – but solve it does
Remain with the status quo

It’s very nice when the customer buys from you. All the hardwork put up by you and your team, during the sales cycle, pays off for you and your company. In case of the second situation, where your direct competition is involved, you can take steps to pre-empt the competition, from taking away the sale. But to be fair to them, they may actually be better than you, in some cases. Either their solution is more apt for the customer or the sales person involved understands the customer better or she has a better relationship with the customer.

If the customer solves the problem with a different method, then you could be caught off-track. When I was involved in selling single and dual loop process controllers, a lot of times , after, SCADA systems became more affordable in India, I found, customers thought it better to go in for the complete SCADA system, rather than buying a controller for 2 processes. In other example, a person may prefer to travel by road instead of taking a flight. So the airline company lost the deal while the petrol/gas companies and hotel companies got business. In either of these situations the customer did go for a solution, it may not have been the solution which was being sold by you.

The worse situation is when after putting in months of effort, you realise that the customer is not willing to change. This is more painful in case of high value B2B sales, where multiple teams have to be involved to create a solution for the customer.

In B2B situations, the easiest situation for the customer is to not change anything. If it ain’t broke, why change. Change can mean that the new product/service will not work. If it doesn’t work, the peer level pressure that the manager will face will be enormous. It will be the manager’s failure, which will be highlighted to her forever, until and unless she works in an organisation which likes to try new things to succeed.

Sometimes it is easy to find out if your solution is moving forward or not. At other times you have to question the assumptions at different levels of the company’s hierarchy to identify if there’s any chance that your solution will be held back to maintain status-quo. It sometimes happens that you may have a sponsor at the lower level of the organisation, who wants to adapt your solution, but her manager may disapprove because she is scared of failure.

It may also happen that the benefits that you believe your solution will bring to the customer, is not what the customer believes. In that case it is your responsibility to showcase the benefits. On the other hand if the benefits are only going to “move the needle” marginally, then the customer may not be interested in moving forward and taking the risk.

The best way I have found, though not always successful 100% of the time, is to question the customer(s) on why they want to go in for the solution. What is the benefit they are assuming the solution will bring for them and why is the benefit(s) important to them. And then check this same thing at different levels of the hierarchy. If at any time you notice a dilemma or a “Re Flag”, you need to get cautious and keep digging till you find out.

If you focus on any niche in the market, then this becomes a lot easier to handle, because 80% of the issues that companies have will be similar and you can learn to unearth the issues in advance.

Till next time then ….. identify if your customer has any inertia holding them back.

Carpe Diem!!!

Time flies

Affirmative action, Decisions, life

Due to the way the pandemic is playing out one never knows when the next lockdown will take place. I have started looking at time more like Before Covid (B.C) and After Covid (A.C).

These days I become nostalgic quite often (maybe it has to do with my age or maybe with restrictions in place I don’t get time to spend) and tend to keep going back to the journeys we took as a family because now taking national or international vacations has become almost impossible due to new variants of Covid coming up all the time.

While I had visited the US many times, I took my family for the first time to the US exactly two years back. We entered the US at Washington DC and had the opportunity to see the lovely celebrations and decorations around the White House with the Christmas tree and the toy trains criss-crossing each other on the lawns between White House and the Obelix. We also visited Capitol Hill and took the tour, which was an eye opener.

I wonder if I had delayed taking my family during that trip, given the Covid situation, I may not have been able to go, till I don’t know when.

The critical thing here is time – it waits for no one – and there’s never an “opportune” time. Time is what it is. You need to grab whatever comes your way and put your best foot forward.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Gratitude – it makes your more resilient

Decisions, Fear, Flow, Gratitude, Habits, Happiness, possibility thinking, problem solving

This was news to me. I have always spoken about being grateful for whatever we have in life instead of bothering about what we don’t have. This habit has held me in good state, because God has genuinely given me a lot to be thankful for. That doesn’t mean I don’t have aspirations, but I definitely don’t get anxious about things which don’t come my way.

What I learnt over the last few weeks is that gratitude gets more dopamine into your brain. That spike in dopamine helps the brain feel good. Since the brain is designed to make you safe always, it is always looking for the next point of danger. So the brain is always looking for the next negative item.

When the dopamine enters and the brain feels safe, it does not have fear. When it feels safe it is willing to think of more possibilities. The moment you get into a possibility mode, you tend to solve problems better, you take better decisions and better decisions help you get better in life. You get into flow state faster because negative things are not bothering you.

When you are able to solve problems, then your brain does not get frustrated with the impediments that come your way.

When impediments come your way, your brain goes into negative mode trying to visualise all the negative situations in a snowball effect. When that happens, your ability to think of solutions goes down. And you get further frustrated, which leads to anxiety and most health related problems start from there.

Therefor being gracious, having gratefulness, is extremely good for your health. when you have good health automatically you become more resilient handling tough situations physically also.

Till next time then, be grateful for all that you have.

Carpe Diem!!!

All roads lead to Rome

Decisions, History, Uncategorized

This is an old saying which we learnt in grade 5 or 6. And I am a little sheepish in claiming that I didn’t know the actual origin of this term.

At the height of the Roman Empire they had built about 13000 km of roads in the Gaul region(the Western European region) now part of France, Belgium etc. and about 4000km of what is now considered Britain and in other areas of Europe.

One of the core principles of the Roman doctrine was to build roads so that the Roman armies could move fast and was the reason for their undisputed might.

All the central or key roads used to terminate in Rome so that the transportation of the army from the central location to any direction was quick.

So why did I decide to look at the roads of the Roman Empire. It started because I was delving into railway line gauges- the width between the inner ends of the railway track.

Globally most railway tracks are built on what is called as standard gauge. In India we now follow what’s called the broad gauge network for all our railway lines. Initially we also followed the standard gauge or what was known in India as meter gauge.

We had to convert to broad gauge because the only way to carry a large population cost effectively in a developing country like India was to accommodate more people per journey.

So if there’s a broader track, you can have broader bogies and when you have broader bogies you can accommodate more people in a bogey.

However now most of our metro and high speed trains that are coming are coming with standard gauge. Which led me to research the size of the standard gauge -Its 4feet 8 and 1/2 inches. This is a very odd figure.

That led me to the history of the development of the standard gauge to Britain, in a town which had coal mines. Which had old remains of roads of the Roman Empire of that width.

Till then I didn’t know that the Roman Empire had extended all the way to Britain. Which made me research where else it had gone. And that brought me to the way the Empire had constructed its road network.

You see how a search for one item led me all the way back to an Empire which existed more than 3000 years back but which still impacts the diameter of the engine of the space shuttle – 4ft 8 and 1/2 inches.

Till next time time then look out, history impacts our decisions today.

Carpe Diem!!!