Year: 2018

How to reject customers without hurting their ego

One of the most ticklish yet interesting moments in sales is to have to tell a prospect – “Sorry – we don’t see you being able to buy our product – and we don’t want to waste our time pursuing the sale with you.” Do it literally & you have a prospect who is an…
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How to keep your salesperson honest!

I was talking with a CEO who said that ‘all salespeople by nature are dishonest – <a choicest Hindi abuse>’. I winced. I told him, Not necessarily. It depends on the traits you hired for & the sales process you have that encourage or discourage honesty. A salesperson’s ‘honesty’ is not just innate – it…
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Some counter-intuitive customer-centricity lessons from Zerodha

Some counterintuitive customer-centricity lessons from Zerodha – the Bangalore headquartered retail broker that has embarrassed many ‘Bombaiya’ brokers:  Zerodha claims that no employee carries a revenue target. Targets are good but lead to pressure & bad behaviour (read that as mis-selling). Happy non-pressurised well-supervised salesmen sell more! If you call their customer service number you…
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Time to apply Vipassana in Sales?

Sales requires a lot of reaching out. And that means a lot of rejection. One of the biggest reasons sales is difficult is we find it difficult to deal with the constant 90%+ rejection we receive when we reach out – and hate/slacken our cold calling & reaching outs. The two biggest tenets of Vipassana…
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You can’t sell into B2B India using digital growth hacking only

My hypothesis is that you can’t sell into B2B India using digital growth hacking only – i.e. without tele or field sales. I have worked with many of the fastest growing tech products & software cos. in India – and my experience says that only when you add people to the country-sales or telesales do…
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