Bedrock

I have used this term a lot of times. My understanding of the term was that it meant a fundamental principle. So for sales in B2B, especially in the technology domain, you need to be making calls on the customer. If you don’t make calls on prospects, you can’t get sales. Investing is the bedrock for financial independence.

However the actual meaning of bedrock is that it is solid rock lying below loose soil.

Why is this important.

It seems a bedrock can give out the history and evolution of that place. So as per National Geographic – the southern part of the state of Indiana in the United Sates has exposed bedrock while the northern part of the state of Indian has metres of soil below which the bedrocks exist. What that means is that it gives the geologists the ability to determine till what point did the glaciers exist in the Ice Age. So when it became warmer, the glaciers started melting and the water started interacting with the rock below and cause the rocks to break over hundreds of thousands of years to create soil. On the other hand since there is no soil and the bedrocks are directly exposed, the glaciers did not extend till the southern part of the state.

When space crafts land on places like Mars or on our moon, they actually collect these kind of samples to see and determine the age, the chemical reactions that the rock/soil have undergone and then determine if there was water , life etc on that celestial land.

I couldn’t imagine that the word which was part of my everyday vocabulary had such a major geological meaning behind it. The whole space program of many countries and now private parties is to find if other planets have life or can be inhabited. For anything to be inhabited, there should be an ability for life to exist. Life exists if there’s water among other things. Studying the bedrock you can estimate if water ever existed and if so how long back.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Ferocity

Energy, Habits, Human Brain, Marketing, problem solving, Sales

This is another of the new words which have got added to my Lexicon after reading Steven Kotler’s book The Art of the Impossible.

The word ferocious is a well understood adjective generally used with wild animals and people who are very savage or intensely angry kinds.

However Steven over here is using the word as a noun and is calling it a habit. Now that is what I found unique.

Ferocious, fierce are all words which are generally used in the negative or wild sense. I have not found them being used in positive sense and that’s why I thought of sharing this with you.

Here Steven has made it an essential habit if you need to have enough motivation to achieve the impossible. If you know the big dreams you want to pursue ( he calls them MTPs and HHGs) then you need to be at them day -in and day – out for a long period of time. The impossible is not something which can be achieved in the short term.

But if you attack your dreams by ensuring you are continuously solving the big problems that come your way, sooner rather than late you keep getting better at it. Then it becomes a habit. Once something becomes a habit it takes less energy. Something similar to what I was talking about in my post a couple of days back. Once the habit gets ingrained into your system the brain goes into automatic mode. It does not need to spend energy. As I have mentioned in my earlier posts, the brain uses almost 25% of the requirement of energy that the body has. By making something a habit you conserve energy.

The advantage of this is 2 fold when you attack the challenges with ferocity and make its a habit – the first is the saving of energy which means you have more energy to handle other tasks and the second is that you save time. If you can solve more problems in the same time than I can, you will be way ahead of me. This attribute of being able to save time in the long helps you target impossible dreams.

The bigger the problems you solve, and more problems you solve, the more valuable you become. The more valuable you become the more people get aligned with you.

This is true in all facets of life. Even in sales / marketing, the more prospects you interact with, the more challenges you handle, the better your responses become, faster. You therefore are able to handle even larger number of prospects. If your sales team has the habit of ferocity to target a large number of prospects in a limited amount of time, success will be with them. We generally use the term fire in the belly of the sales person. Now this is a new term I have learnt to push my teams

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Generating “Trust” with the client – simple steps

B2B, Fear, Habits, Sales, Trust

When you are entering a new account as a sales person, “Trust” is by far the most difficult thing for you to get. If the customer has already been using your company’s product or service, then there’s some amount of trust that gets bestowed on you.

Especially if your company has done a good job or the sales person before you has done a good job, then the customer is more favourable to talk with you. However the customer still has to trust “YOU”

On the other hand if the account is new to your company and you as the sales person are also involved in creating the account then it becomes all the more important that you gain trust with the prospect fast. One of the biggest things which hampers a sale is TRUST. Price, quality of the product / service etc. are all issues which come into [play after the person trusts you.

Some of the simplest things I have observed for building trust are simple old fashioned things

Keep your word – if you say you will do something by a given day or time – DO IT
Arrive before the scheduled time always – No one likes to be kept waiting and that too for a sales person – there will be times where things can go wrong inspite of all your planning – in that case inform the customer well in advance
Communicate every step of the way – even if you don’t have a solution ready for the problem – which will happen many times in your career – keep the customer informed that you have a problem and you are working to solve – the customer is also answerable to someone else and if he doesn’t have information he will get more frustrated. The customer may get angry with you for a little while but after he/she vents their anger, they will still be friends. Most of the time the people get scared of the customer and try to hide. This kind of Fear will only create problems in your long term relationships.
Don’t consider your customer as an adversary – Till you get the order, everyone is very nice to the customer. The challenge starts when they become a Customer. The customer has certain expectations and your delivery folks have their own challenges and any objection by the customer becomes a “me versus you” situation. You have to make your team understand , that in B2B situations especially, the customer has more at stake than you because of her reputation at the organisation is at stake. If you can look at it as a joint effort then it solves the problem.

None of these steps have any technology related issues, they don’t need any hi-tech software or equipment etc. These are just human habits and behaviours which you need to cultivate and slowly you will observe people will automatically gravitate towards you and start trusting you.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Competition is a good thing – Part 3

B2B, competition, differentiation, Marketing, Product Management, Sales, single target market

I had written 2 posts on this topic in March this year. I got a lot of likes for those posts.

For all those of you who are in marketing and sales, you can look at competition in a slightly negative way because they they take your deals away or they feed all the negative news about your company and you.

The first aspect that you need to be clear about is who is your direct competition and who is your indirect competition. For a computer seller who is selling a spreadsheet program in the market – Microsoft and Google resellers could be competition directly. But a paper register and a calculator can be an indirect competition. Depending on the size of the transactions that are done, a paper register can be used to note the transactions and a calculator can be used to do the addition, multiplication etc.

So why is this important. You need to see from a customer perspective – what is the outcome you get for the customer. What are the various ways that a customer can achieve the same outcome using your competition.

So taking the example above you know that you cannot provide value to a customer who can achieve his transactions on a paper register. So that segment of the market gets eliminated.

Now lets look at the other end of your competition which is direct. For example purposes we said its Microsoft and Google. So if you are in marketing , product management or sales, your first agenda will need to be to identify the specs on how your product performs on non-Microsoft platforms. Put another way, you would like to enhance the qualities of the product on non-Microsoft platforms.

Which makes your target market segment that much more well defined.

Its always better to dominate a small segment of the market than to be a nobody in a very large market.

Whenever you are entering a market, I have always maintained, you have to start with only a well defined Single Target Market only. Only after you dominate that, should you look to expand.

Till next time then…..keep looking out for competition from all directions.

Carpe Diem!!!