Relationships make a difference

When I was starting out in sales I read a book – What they don’t teach you in Harvard Business School. It was authored by Harvey McCormick. I was very impressed with the achievements that he mentioned in the book.

I have forgotten most of the book, but one sentence that has stayed with me has been – All things being equal people buy from friends, all things Not being equal they still still prefer to buy from friends.

That one statement keeps ringing in my mind from time to time. It has been a guiding statement whenever I interact with anyone.

I try to ensure that I make long term relationships by being straight and upfront in whatever interaction I have with people. Not only with prospects and customers but even with vendors and everyday people.

When you build these kind of relationships you can be sure that you can pick up the phone and call people when you want and they will also answer your phone. Also because you have dealt straight with these people you aren’t scared when connecting with them.

Its also similar to the philosophy of giving first that Joe Polish talks about. When people trust you and know that you will be transparent in your interactions, they are also open to interact

Does that mean that I have not been tricked and taken advantage of because of this philosophy, absolutely not. But the amount of times I have been duped is way smaller than the amount of times the relationships have helped.

My advice would always be to play the long game and build relationships which can last you a long long time.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Root Cause Analysis – in product management

Assumptions, Marketing, Product Management, Sales

Most engineers and technical folks would understand Root Cause Analysis, RCA in short. People use various tools like the fish bone diagram that the Japanese developed or the 5 Whys to figure out the root cause

The root cause analysis as the name suggests, helps you get to the key constraint, the main reason , instead of just monitoring the effects.

How that helps, is that once you rectify that specific cause, the problems which are related to that cause would not surface again. It does not mean that no other problems will show up. It just means that you will then need to work on the next root cause and so on. In effect over a period of time your whole system will become better and better.

In operations, manufacturing, production, there’s a lot of numeric data which keeps coming in, which can be useful in running analytics and analyzing the causes.

In product management the analysis of root cause becomes a little more difficult. First, you generally end up doing RCA only when something has failed. Which means there are already emotions running high with everyone from finance to sales to production looking to find the scape goat.

Second, marketing has a lot to do with markets, which means people – the buyers – are involved. When you have people involved the psychological aspects are also important.

So when doing the root cause analysis of why a product did not make it in the market, you need to ensure that even trivial things related to inputs of people are not missed.

These small subjective things can change your analysis to help you identify the key reasons why your product didn’t do as well as expected. Sometimes you will come across multiple causes which all seem to be equally important. Generally this means somewhere in the analysis there are assumptions which have not been substantiated clearly.

Once you have called out the assumptions then generally you will end up with only one or two causes.

Once you handle those, chances are you will recover your sales again.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Using reverse psychology in our daily life

mindset, possibility thinking, psychology, Sales

When we are in school we are taught to follow a rule book and solve problems in a given manner. If you don’t solve it that way the teacher may actually deduct marks. There are benefits of this system, because it helps the teacher grade her students on a fixed set of parameters. It’s not good for the students because when they do go out in the real world they find moving targets with no method to directly use.

Since we get so used to being spoon fed through the school system, we are not able to think different possibilities.

One method which I use is to let people experience the challenge of the straight jacketed way of solving a problem. If I try telling people the challenges in their solution then they resist my ideas. So I tell them how I would go about it and then I ask them.

I ask them of how they think they would like to solve the problem. Once they tell me the solution and if I don’t think it might be a workable solution, I ask them to proceed with solving the problem their way. But I put a low risk milestone. Only if the low risk milestone can be realized, are they allowed to move ahead otherwise they have to find another way.

This way they don’t feel that I don’t listen to their ideas and I am also ‘not betting the whole farm’. In addition if their solution works then, I have learnt a new way to solve the problem. On the other hand if it doesn’t work, I can then tell them the reason why doing it my way has its benefits and they get to learn from me.

As we grow older, we get more and more fixated with our ideas and resist ideas from others. So if you try to push something , it doesn’t work . On the other hand you let them try their idea with a low risk outcome and then show the problems , they may be more willing to listen to your ideas.

Professional negotiators have a complete arsenal of these kind of techniques to get people to come to a win – win solution. Sales is another specialized negotiation. In yesterday’s post I had written about how you could use the same concepts.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Mapping all the steps to acquiring a customer

B2B, Marketing, Sales

Depending on the how you have structured your sales and marketing, these could be two independent functions and chances are that they both work independent of each other, often blaming the other for the non-performance.

However a customer does not see this as two functions. She is a seeing every single touch point as the company and you make an impression – good or bad based on that.

However if you can think of the whole journey a customer takes from the first touch point to the way the sales order comes in , you can iron out a lot of glitches.

By mapping this journey, you will also be able to identify the gaps between, how you think a customer should come versus how your systems are working for the customer to actually come.

During one of our marketing launches we covered multiple steps as to how the campaigns will flow, what will be the sequence of mails that the team will send out, how will the follow-up happen, till we get the prospect to come for a presentation. since we did not map the whole process backwards, we failed when a prospect asked us to share some content before coming for a presentation and in another case asked us for a justification document after we had given a demo. Now in both these cases we had not anticipated that a customer could need these because they were looking at a new technology.

If you go to sites like Gartner, they have a very nice item for their conferences, “documents to justify to your management” which are all the reasons why attending any of the conferences would help the company. This way they are helping the manager who wants to attend, get documents easily, instead of expecting him to justify by himself, in which case he could fail to justify properly and therefore not get the approval to attend. Which would be a loss to Gartner. So they have thought through the possible steps which could stop the sale from happening and put the data in place to help.

In B2b sales , where multiple levels of approval and justifications are needed, mapping the complete journey can help iron out the creases in both your marketing and sales plans.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!