Early on in an entrepreneurial journey, one may encounter some pitfalls that are seldom discussed. Here are some to keep an eye out for: 𝗜𝘁𝘀 𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗲𝗹𝘆 – Surrounded by advisors, cohorts & peers but nobody will have as much skin in the game as an entrepreneur. The implications of the decisions – success or…
Like a lot of American kids in the early 1980s – Michael started selling subscriptions to a local newspaper. While selling he discovered: #1 Pick up your prospects’ tone: If you sounded like the people you were trying to sell a subscription to, they were much more likely to buy from you. He would talk…
Very important skill for a founder & leader is – the ability to hold yourself back! Which business leader doesn’t admire Elon Musk? He’s a highly accomplished individual, business leader, and innovator, who pushes the boundaries of human achievement through SpaceX & Tesla. Now think of what will you advise him to change? To hold…
Lessons from B2B Founders on selling to the US: 🛫 Every Venture Capitalist/Angel Investor/Wellwisher worth their salt will sooner rather than later ask: ‘When are you going to the US market?’ – Have a well-thought-out reason or ‘Why not?’ and if you can’t find the reason – have a plan. 😔 Selling to the USA…
Imagine a new salesperson, selling door to door in 45-degree heat. It’s the first day – who has received zero training. How do they prospect? Chris Beall, a Sales enablement leader, faced this challenge when he started his career nearly 40 years ago. In just two weeks, he went from a ranked rookie to a…
How to get honest-to-goodness genuine confidence back? Are you feeling a bit down? Everyone has been a bit over the blues in the last couple of years. How do you bounce back? Some wonderful pieces of advice by Martin Zwilling, founder & CEO at Startup Professionals, Inc: 🎯Convince yourself of what you want most in life,…
1. Curiosity- the most important thing If you see da Vinci’s sketches, you will see an exuberant & playful mind dancing across nature. He asks & answers 100s of charmingly random questions. Leonardo did not need to know these things to paint the Mona Lisa – it helped! 2. Create a reality distortion field When…
Imagine you are a David (a small startup) fighting established Goliaths 10X your size to win a customer 1000,000X your size. As a salesperson – you should make it as smooth as possible for your customer to buy from you, right? No – disrupt their buying patterns to increase your chances of a sale! All…
With Covid starting as a pandemic & on its way to becoming pandemic, and business rolling out work-from-home policies – it is the season of the webinar – and rightly so. Webinars are the best way to reach out to your B2B (and at times B2C) audience. Here are 3 things to consider while organizing…
Every sales leader loves looking for that ‘fire in the belly salespersons’ (FIBS). Unfortunately, FIBS is often a lazy substitute for not building a great product that is differentiated well, marketed well but to be magically sold so well that it rakes in all the revenues in spite of the product-market mismatch or past ku-karma.…
Startup sales enthusiasts are hell-bent on trying to connect with a Fortune 500 CXO to sell. Here is some advice from the LeadStrategus’s get meeting manual: 1. You don’t need to chase the biggest! Find accounts that are buying your category. Using LinkedIn Insights & a bit of analytics pixie dust you can find them.…
Ditch the Budget & Timeline – focus only on Authority & Need! The one thing that all growing companies look for is to have frictionless & authentic conversations with prospects with a ‘searing pain’ that marketeers could solve. But what is the thing that derails marketeers and demand generation firms as they try to help…
In the early days, Mr. Gopinath was a successful agriculturist. And he decided to move into micro-irrigation turnkey consulting. This is what he had to say: “For 2 years, I loaded all the agri-equipment that I set out to market in the car boot and hit the road. While on these forays, I combined the…
One of the most difficult jobs in the world is that of a salesperson. The salesperson who is trying to reach you is your friend, your buddy, making the wheels of commerce & life turn. Whatever you do- as an investor, a manufacturer, or even as a volunteer- the success depends a lot on the…
1. Skills to hone? Marketing is rapidly morphing. No two experts will agree on whether Digital Marketing includes Social Marketing or Growth Hacking or not. It doesn’t matter. Develop ‘T’ shaped skills – brilliant in 1/2 but knowledgeable of the others. 2. Rock at all! Look at Sales, Marketing, Customer Success as a continuum & not in isolation. Be…
In 1975 executives at Hindustan Unilever Limited & Pond’s were closely following a newly launched local talc brand making a serious dent in their market share in the Kolkata market. The founders were two passionate Marwaris who had zero naya paisa (funds) to spend on advertising. But their packaging was lovely. It was an ivory…
Strategic & tactical content must be made available where it is needed the most – in lockstep with your GTM & sales stage. What better than seeing all sales & marketing assets properly sequenced, mutually exclusive & collectively exhaustive – helping the big cause?This is why making the must-have content available to the right folks…
5 lessons from Microsoft go-to-market sales transformation that no sales leader can afford to miss: 1. Retraining & Hiring Cutting sales-overlay roles & hiring salespeople who could code along with their customers. 2. Customer Sucess In the consumption economy of the cloud – you need non-billing Customer Success folks to get customers to adopt &…
Is your sales team struggling with ‘water water everywhere not a drop to drink’ – when it comes to having actionable intelligence & contextual conversation with prospects? Here’s how your sales team can navigate easily through an era where 360-degree prospect research is vital for sales success: 1. Sales-persons should read daily.They can flick through…
The legendary ad-man, David Ogilvy, went through a laborious 12 step process for his masterpieces. Here they are: 1) Never write content at a place with too many interruptions.2) Study the precedents & view all the past ads/content.3) Keep searching & researching for ‘motivational’ content.4) Pen down the problem & purpose of the campaign. Don’t…
Is your marketing budget disappearing in events/webinars that generate ‘senior’ CXO meetings that never close? The best way for a B2B CMO to keep her stakeholders – the CEO/VP-Sales happy is by doing events (& webinars) where they get to pump the flesh of prospect CXOs. Today’s version of the event is the webinar. Typically,…
We are all in Inside Sales today. How do you succeed in selling now? 1) Understand the new age conferences & VIP rooms where buyers are talking- Linkedin, private Whatsapp groups & G2/Capterras 2) Are your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter & WhatsApp Business profile & company Pictures professionals? Elevate your brand so buyers can find you.…
There is a 100% chance that your prospect checks your LinkedIn profile / your website before they agree to talk with you. And so many times you face rejection – because your website was too generic- Yabbadabbadoo! And your prospect needs to be a detective or worst a mind-reader to really find why they should…
One question that every sales leader has to face now & then: why are marketing-generated leads numbers trending up but the real opportunities coming down? Some real & uncool reasons no one told you: 1) Someone downloading a well-produced infographics/cat video doesn’t a lead make. Ease of marketing automation & increased volume of marketing activities…
Many celebrate “entrepreneurship as jumping off a cliff & assembling the plane on the way down”. Bollocks! Maybe that’s Russian Roulette or a Kamikaze mission – but that’s definitely NOT entrepreneurship! Today’s impressionable teenagers think ‘taking unnecessary risks’ is entrepreneurship.Here are some thoughts: 1) Understanding the passion early & having the guts to chase it…
The elegantly suited, smart-talking, Caucasoid American CEOs giving perfect speeches seem to be so lucky & privileged. Isn’t it? However, nothing is further from the truth. People often tend to ignore their struggles. The true story of Howard Schultz, his stories & his journey to success: 1) He was born in 1 bedroom public housing…
In sales cycles, a common situation is of customers agreeing on everything but postponing the signing. Everything is there- the budget & the need. But just making up the mind is the biggest issue. In such a situation, as a salesperson should one feel like a jilted lover & walk off or keep chasing?Well, neither!The…
It was 1983, Guy travelled across the US with two Macs. His learnings from his evangelism captured in his book #WiseGuyLessons: “𝘐 𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘐𝘛 𝘶𝘴𝘢𝘨𝘦, 𝘤𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘩, & 𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘴-𝘵𝘺𝘱𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘪𝘥 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘐𝘉𝘔. 1 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 3 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘶𝘴𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳…
Introverts are described as quiet & reserved, who are scared or don’t want to speak with strangers. So, how can an introvert, eager to make a mark in the world, work on their introversion, go out, impress & seek approval? Getting into a networking group, forcibly pumping hands- the nine yards really doesn’t work. Dale…
One question I have been getting all thru my 20+ years of smarketing career is why are marketing-generated leads numbers trending up but the real opportunities coming down? Some real & uncool reasons no one told you: 1. Someone downloading a well-produced infographics/cat video doesn’t a lead make. Ease of marketing automation & increased volume…
Why we should embrace & celebrate stoic struggle – the most important mental model for today! Today’s elites were all yesterday’s strugglers. The VC with the Midas touch & board member with a tiny apartment in Malabar Hill was burning the midnight oil to complete his CA in rural Rajasthan; that Bangalore software A-lister was…
How do we build one of the finest institutions in the world? One day at a time – with intelligence, aggression, patience, & risk mgmt. Today is the first day in 25 years Aditya Puri will not be going to the bank he built – HDFC Bank. The day one registers their co., their email…
How should a startup (not) sell to other startups? One of the harshest but most practical advicefor a startup could be: “Don’t waste your time on startups. They aren’t worth it.” We need not follow this advice in toto.But it does help to define some boundaries & have some clear rules of engagement – for…
Facing headwinds in business? Maybe time to consider pivoting? Even the most household name cos. started out as something radically different!#Airbnb started out for conference participants only before going retail? #WIPRO was a vegetable oil co. before getting into IT Services. #IBM was a calculator company that got into mainframes & then to Services &…
How meeting the top decision-makers has become easier & more difficult at the same time and what should we do about it? Legend has it that if we wanted to meet the Chinese emperor we had to hunt many a dragon & wine & dine his inner circles for a lifetime before you got invited…
Facing headwinds in business? Maybe time to consider pivoting? Do we know that most household name cos? started out as something radically different? #Airbnb started out for conference participants only before going retail? #WIPRO was a vegetable oil co. before getting into IT Services. #IBM was a calculator company that got into mainframes & then…
3 tips for doing a startup sales commission right Companies careen from ‘we are all bros & sistas’ 0% sales commission to ‘we are all buccaneers’ 50% model come back to a middle-of-the-road mix & match as they grow 100% CAGR. Probably the biggest elephant in the room for a sales leader in a startup…
One question I love talking as much to founder/CEOs/ mid-career professionals/those who are starting out is how do you stand out in a world of shrinking opportunities? Guy Kawasaki is quite an inspiration. In his autobiography ‘Wise Guy – Lessons from a Life’ he talks about his early days. He learned old-fashioned sales in a…
4 Lessons that apply equally well to early-stage startups & freshers seeking to make a career from Zerodha’s Nithin. Nithin Kamath’s posts are highly authentic & straight from the heart. When he talks about how his learnings from Zerodha’s growth we should listen. Some lessons derived from his posts: #1 We shouldn’t try to cut-copy-paste…
A decade back the ERP ecosystem (SAP+ partners) was the largest. Today ERP has been vanquished by the CRM ecosystem (Salesforce ++). Proportion of a company’s resources spent on marketing + sales has drastically overshadowed all other expenses. How did this come about?? The continuing evolution of mass production has made it more easier to…
If there is one movie one wants to see with their sales team, it should be Lawrence of Arabia! It’s a story of independent thinking, persistence, & fightback under difficult circumstances. It’s set in WWI. Lawrence is a Brit solder with a vision of uniting the feuding Arab tribes & driving out the Turks from…
How to (& not to) send Diwali – & other festive greetings to your prospects. Our Whatsapp is groaning under the festive messages we sent to all our prospects but hold on- did we just send a canned non-personalized Diwali greeting to all? We must spare a thought for the very important buyer who would…
Do you know what is the biggest thing missing for success as a CMO/Growth lead?Certainly, it’s developing a KPI orientation (KPIOr) for one’s marketing team. Most marketeers are busy doing multiple campaigns & end up looking at KPIs at the end. By KPIOr, we are talking about the ability to break down their targets into…
Why its time to be unscripted, honest, & raw – & dare one say a bit ‘bitchy’ in your Social media communication? It probably started in 2013 when the then T-Mobile CEO John Legere junked his written down script at the CES show when the audience asked what was on his mind. In the heat…
KPMG estimates that there is a 39B$ market for Indian brands going global. Is #digitalsales the missing link preventing us from that market? A video that has stuck with me since my intl. MBA days for over 20 years is a black-and-white grainy video of a James Bond type CEO getting into a British Airways…
3 bugaboos SAAS founders should avoid when planning for Sales: As we get ready for a month-long SAAS GTM & Sales Engineering exercise for a client, we should get reminded of our first SAAS sale that happened 12 years back. While our world is getting SAASified SAAS founders are often flying dark on key sales…
We live in an era where wanting to be a freelancer/founder is natural. Some lessons from to live by: #1 Relish the freedom! When we can work from anywhere, why be a slave to an expensive home EMI? #2 Started earning now? Put 1.5 lakhs in PPF today. Our future selves will thank us for…
SAAS is eating the world. Lots of entrepreneurs are tackling unsolved business problems or ‘so far solved by using services’ – into SAAS products. Plus if you have a background & have traction – getting funding is not that difficult. Here’s the answer: #1 Demand generation is what we can enjoy doing most & believe…
Checklist for a Founder/ Sales VP pivoting their B2B startup to sell in the US market: Many B2B founders are thinking of avoiding the home market (India) – the size & efforts are not worth it – & directly going to the largest market (US). Some of the bravest sales leaders jump up to this…
Sales has evolved over the years and today – what worked 6 months back, does not work anymore! Here is the story of how we pioneered the Digital Only Sales Funnel (DOSF) and what it means to selling in the new normal. The Evolution of Marketplaces and Sales: Since the early 1900s, the marketplace has…
Digital Only Sales Funnel: To us, Digital Only Sales Funnel(DOSF) is a combination of ideology, techniques and 3rd party sales tools that help move the sales funnel digitally. Ideology: Today, the need to build all elements of Research, Discovery, Pipeline build & acceleration digitally is the need of the hour. If you have lived in…
Here’s our 9-point checklist: #1 Welfare of team, customers & partners #2 Prioritising & deprioritising all initiatives & budgets in consultation with CEO, CFO, & CMO #3 Sales pipeline – what can we do to save/enrich the pipeline in today’s environment? #4 Customer success in the real sense of the word – ensuring current customers…
Who should receive the ‘inbound enquiries/leads’ – Marketing, Sales, or ISEs? One of the biggest sources for leads is ‘inbound inquiries’. Everyone loves them – the prospects know your company and your solution and have a pain. These leads invariably close the fastest. The Sales leaders initially get this inbound leads source. But as the…
Are the boundaries between B2B and B2C sales blurring or are they moving farther apart? There are some signs that B2B is getting nearer to B2C: #1 Consumerisation of IT makes B2B selling and buying more human and humane #2 Millennials are injecting much more personality in B2B selling and buying. #3 Sales isn’t controlling…
How do you differentiate your B2B Services in a crowded maturing market? If you have already been sharpening your USP, carried out your STP exercises, attended design thinking workshops and are still not making any progress, perhaps it is time you changed the goalposts. You can try attacking customer experience! CX comes from the B2C…
We never sell “socially”! Social Selling is not about selling. Not unless we are getting someone to buy something using a credit card online – and that falls under the purview of Digital Marketing. Social Selling is about researching, writing, reaching-out and nurturing buyer personalities on Social Media. It is about making the relationship so…
Nothing is more sacrosanct in B2B sales than closures. However, through bad habit and client conditioning, closures invariably get pushed to the last month, last week, last few hours of the quarter. Here are some tips to overcome this scenario: 1) Having weekly/monthly closure targets and reporting rather than quarterly targets. Many PAAS & SAAS…
At LeadStrategus, we have the privilege of working with a few AI, Analytics & RPA companies on their GTM strategies and Sales effectiveness. One of the biggest challenge is in convincing the founders/CEOs to not overhype the impact of their solution. Stop selling AI, RPA, and Analytics as the ‘deux ex machina’ – Gods out…
Why do Indian tech companies have an aversion to sell to the Government of India (GOI)? Indian services giants have been export-focused and grew their fortunes by ignoring domestic the domestic government market. It made sense 20 years back – but wouldn’t be logical now. In the last decade, the Indian government spent significantly on…
What is the most important thing for a salesperson to do in the last weekend of the year? If you are not doing the last weekend dash – and have achieved your numbers OR don’t see any chance of meeting your numbers – now is the time to meditate. Meditate – literally – to release…
Are you an SAAS founder conjuring up an awesome pricing model that will get you a foot in the door and give you recurrent revenues for life? Hold on! One of the biggest enemies of sales is a complex pricing model or a TCO that is too difficult to calculate by your buyers. Spare a…
What is the secret to prepare your marketing team for results? As long as the cat (marketing) catches mice (build sales-pipe) for sales – in an era of shrinking budgets and agile organisations – nothing else matters. Having said that, results follow structure – and here are 3 principles to make your marketing team even…
As a CEO, you may be missing out on a trick to use the #1 Salesperson you have access to. Who is this salesperson? It is you! How can you generate pipeline and awareness through Social Media for your company? While the sample size was relatively small, the research done by LeadStrategus – (Disclosure -…
Here are 5 tried-and-tested lifehacks for founders and marketers to get the word going with no expenses involved: We are living in the sharing & DIY economy. How many of these tactics are you using? 1. Sign up to be a ‘source’ free of charge on Help a Reporter Out (HARO) – to get a…
How can you understand your company’s SMarketing culture and move the needle? B2B companies end up being one of these 3 – outbound, inbound, or ‘statsis’-bound. They may try balancing but usually end up having a culture that tips towards being either inbound, or outbond, or god-forbid – stasis-bound. Inbound – led by thought leader-CEOs,…
The path of generating a sales pipeline from Social Media was never easy. There are 6 things you need to do to get Social Selling to work: 1) Research and do your Account Based Marketing2) Like /comment/ share sincerely before connecting3) Send highly personalised connection requests4) Start sharing content that the prospect can use5) Like/comment/share…
Here are some tips to make your Account Based Marketing work (and no – you don’t need any fancy ABM software for that)! In Large Account Selling – ABM is the golden key that opens the revenue vault. Here is our take on how you can succeed in ABM:1. If LinkedIn is not front and…
Dale Carnegie said something on these lines: ‘the person you are pitching to doesn’t even have 1% of his mind occupied by your pitch the second after she/he has met you’. She/he has his job to keep, her stakeholders to please, and his family to get back to. Here is our take on how you…
How can you combine sales and marketing tactics for success? One of the biggest mistakes that CEOs who are starting out make is over-reliance on a star salesperson or solely on digital means. They may also resort to spamming their way to infamy. “There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of…
When we were training our internal Sales and Telemarketing teams in selling large ticket ERP, we had a joke: 1. Target companies that are doing quite well – they have the cash flow to afford your solution. 2. Target companies that are doing very badly – their management will need to do something drastic to…
In today’s scenario, a Sales leader should possess a strong heart, mind and muscles to excel at their job. You need to travel a path that hasn’t been traversed. The ablity of the company to survive depends on how fast you bring in the revenues. Most markets are getting commoditised and others needs a crazy…
The 5 most important takeaways on how CEOs should orchestrate their company in getting social selling right- from our first Social Selling Event: 1. Social Selling will revolutionise selling. 2. Social selling is NOT ‘selling on social media’. It is influencing prospects, building/ nurturing relationships socially, and then taking conversations to the real world. 3.…
Here is why shameless self-promotional content is OK once in a while but not too often!One of the most important rules of content that is often forgotten is the 70:20:10 rule. -70% should be own Thought Leadership content – 20% should be other’s content – 10% – and not more – can be self-promotional content…
Here are some worrisome trends from CMO priorities in a Marketing dashboard from a Gartner survey – Gartner surveyed CMOs across 600+ companies and asked them ‘the most important metrics on their marketing dashboard’. First the good news:Share of wallet is # 2, competitive benchmarks got high ranks. Here is what’s worrying:1. Priority being awareness;…
Did you think quota crushers, hunters and lone wolves make great salespersons? Guess what – radically different skills are in order! Technologists, delivery experience, highly analytical, problem solvers and storytellers are as important as ever. Graham Hawkins, blogging on a Salesforce state of sales research identifies the following skills as most important:1) Teachers – ability…
Nothing gets the adrenalin flowing more than organising a good event that generates million-dollar opportunities for a B2B. The highs are very high & lows are quite low! Here are some tips on how to maximise success with an event: 1. Agenda drives speakers which drives attendance. Don’t waste too much effort on food and…
Some of the fastest growing B2B companies in India are building their entire pipeline through LinkedIn. What’s your excuse if you are in B2B sales whose buyers are on LinkedIn – and you are NOT into social selling? Here’s how to get started: 1. Create content that you feel excited to write about. It should…
More than 2/3rd of a salesperson’s time goes in follow-ups. Selecting the right prospect to go after is vital. Going too mass-market will result in you chasing buyers without budget or authority; going too narrow will entail you chasing ET 500 CIOs who already have 100s of vendors behind their backs! How can you decide…
Peter Drucker famously said, ‘The art of marketing is to know the customer so well that the product/service fits him & sells itself.’ In B2C, ‘perfect’ marketing indeed makes the job of sales easier, simple and more non-strategic. If you look at the way Kia Seltos and MG Hector have been priced and positioned in…
There’s something in the buyer psyche that’s part feudalistic, part inability to say NO, and part pester avoidance behaviour. These are contributors to a buyer’s act of going silent. However, this doesn’t need to be the case. The golden rule to foster and sustain lasting relationships is to treat customers the way you want to…
What is the Secret tool for SAAS success? Simply creating is not enough – selling is required. However, selling alone is also not enough – customer usage and engagement is needed. Most multi-user B2B SAAS products are priced cheap, as opposed to their selling effort required. This is done with the fond hope that once…
How should sales leaders plan for the Oct-Nov-Dec quarter – where potentially 25% of the days can be holidays? October 2nd is one of the first days of Q4 – the birth anniversary of Gandhiji – this is a time to relax, lick one’s wounds and enjoy the laurels of the previous quarter’s exertions. Most…
How can you conquer the art of Social Selling?Here are a few golden rules:1) Compliment your prospect’s post before you like it2) Like your prospect’s post before you connect with them3) Connect with well researched and highly personalised messages only4) Provide some sort of help before you ask for business Keeping these few rules in…
What is the hardest part of social selling? – It isn’t coming up with great content that resonates with your audience– It isn’t carrying out research to find the right companies and the right buyer personas– It isn’t making the first connect seem like it isn’t related to sales– It isn’t reading and responding to…
The more you converse with your prospects in a situation that doesn’t involve you trying to sell them something, the more they will remember you when they need to buy your solution. How do you talk with prospects? It is a function of developing a natural curiosity and empathy – an ability to strike a…
5 of the most important learnings from the panel in the first “LeadStrategus Sales Conversations” event with panelists Amit Agarwal, Irina Ghose, Nitin Bhatia, & Arun Krishnan – 1)Amit – Prof. Seshadri of IIMA helped us calculate & compare Value/Price of Option A vs. B while dealing with the Indian customer’s obsession with Value-for-Money. You…
6 ideas on SMarketing interactions that can’t be ignored! 1) In B2B, Sales and Marketing are getting tied to the hip with joint accountability & joint execution. You are jointly responsible for each other’s targets! Learn to understand & work together even if you’re not BFFs. 2) Try experimenting and reinforcing whatever works. Don’t get…
Did you know that ‘McKinsey’ recently opened a Lingerie store?You read that right – this is not fake news. The only way you can get respect and facetime from your prospects or customers is if you can share perspectives, insights and wisdom from their prospects. McKinsey wanted data and insights for their retail customers. What…
Aspiring to be a sales leader? One essential lifehack would be to spiff up your General Knowledge! As a sales leader, how can you be motivated to take an active interest in gaining knowledge? Here is a hypothetical scenario: In a leader discussion, the speaker can ask the attendees to subscribe to the Economic Times…
Using a sales channel or resellers for selling a SAAS can prove to be quite cumbersome. We live in the golden age of the Internet, which allows you to directly reach your customers without having to use a channel. Paired with a customer success team to renew, this is a recipe for success. Thus, why…
Do you know what is the biggest timewaster for salespersons? What can you do to overcome it?Endless prospecting? Nope.Perhaps it is the excruciating ‘deal closure’ chase or customers who love making you go round-and-round? Try again!No – it isn’t even updating your CRM! (although this comes close to the biggest) The biggest contributor towards wasted…
Do you really need a Salesforce/SAP/Oracle if you are hitting the coveted 100 crore turnover? Or would a Zoho/Hubspot /SugarCRM suffice? It may be shocking to know that CEOs of rapidly developing companies will be advised to go for the most expensive CRM solution just to be ‘future-ready’.If you are a CEO, do not get…
Salespersons are always taught to accelerate and maximize opportunities. Does it ever make sense to slow down, take a step back and drop opportunities?In some exceptional circumstances, the answer could be – YES.However, there must be a concrete reason for this. Here’s when you can consider dropping opportunities: 1. It shouldn’t be simply because you…
How you can be a sales partner and sell a solution to your CXO network?This is the most common ask from many CEOs of Tech SAAS/Service/Product companies. Many people who offer Sales as a Service and Outsourced Sales Services know that business isn’t exactly booming for them.There is a reason for the disparity between demand…
What is the middle ground of the intense discussions between CMOs and VPs of Sales on the number of leads that Marketing should give Sales? Face it – decreasing number of well qualified leads is a prevailing trend across countries, companies and industries. You will have less leads today than you had 3 years back…
How to keep your salespersons honest?A common opinion that is prevalent among CEOs is that all salespeople are dishonest by nature.However, this is a misconception. It all depends on the traits that the salesperson was hired for, and the sales process itself (whether it encourages dishonesty or discourages it). A salesperson’s honesty is not innate…
Some counterintuitive customer-centric lessons from Zerodha – the Bengaluru-based retail broker that has embarrassed many ‘Bombaiya’ brokers: 1. Zerodha claims that no employee carries a revenue target. Targets are good but they lead to pressure and disruptive behaviour (read that as mis-selling). Happy, non-pressurised and well-supervised salesmen sell more! 2. If you call their customer…
Sales require a lot of reaching out. This entails a lot of rejection. One of the biggest reasons sales is difficult is the difficulty in dealing with the constant 90%+ rejection we receive when we reach out – and hate/slacken our cold calling & reaching outs. Here’s where Vipassana comes in: The two biggest tenets…
Here are 10 pointers for a newly minted salesperson which will help you get over the initial hurdles of sales:1. Respect yourself. Don’t beg, oversell or sell short – however high the pressure may be. 2. It is okay to have self-doubts – but try and fake confidence a bit – soon it becomes real.…
That’s because you don’t treat them right. You treat them like a member of your list to be incessantly called till they pick up your phone; recipient of your vomit of a pitch; or a sales-message the moment after you connect with them on LinkedIn. Respect is not doing ji-hoozuri /”yes sir / no sir”.…
Sales is the oldest (or second oldest?) profession known to humans. Sales process & the ecosystem of sales – sales culture – the way of doing sales – had been locally developed in the past. And now we borrow a lot from the centre of the business world – the United States of America.It need…
If you are a CEO/Marketeer/ new Sales Manager looking at helping your sales team – one of the most important things to do is to enable them to move fast! Sales is a contacts sport. The more qualified prospects a salesperson connects with 1-1 – other things being equal, higher are the chances of sales…
If you are selling to SME India – it makes sense to hire from NCR whereas if you are selling enterprise India/overseas, you would be better off in hiring from Bangalore /South/Mumbai. Nothing hardens you up more than coming from small town India and studying in the NCR. You see great abundance, great destitution and…
There could be 3 scenarios while you are selling: a) You are growing @1000% CAGR & you can’t find/train sales-people fast enough to fulfill the market demand. Congrats! Its a good problem to have. b) More likely – you are struggling to sell yourself. You don’t have the sales muscle or you haven’t explored what…
CEOs are unanimous that finding & managing good salespersons is one of their biggest challenges. You need a person with extraordinary motivation, persistence & discipline; an ability to understand & explain its stuff; superlative research skills & even bigger influencing skills – and that’s not enough! They can never be born – you have to…
You may be unimpressive, may not understand customer needs, and communicate poorly. You may still survive in sales. But there is one thing that will spell doom for your sales career. It comes in three alphabets – EGO. PRINCIPLE 1: The prospect is allowed to hurt your ego – but you can never hurt theirs!…
For success in sales we need passion. And when we get rejected after passionate efforts – which we invariably do – we feel the pain. Different people deal with rejection differently. We typically either ‘bottle-up’ or ‘brood’. The better way to deal with rejection is: 1) Radically accept all the emotions that come with rejection.…
One big learning we get when talking with international peers is – we see the world of B2B marketing converging worldwide. Ruth Stevens talk about US B2B marketing trends: 1. marketing priority by far – increasing sales leads-CHECK 2. Millenials enter the buying group & influencing buying-CHECK 3. Number of decision makers increasing – CHECK…
Even in North America – which is at the peak of inflated investments’ when it comes to digital channels, in-person events were rated as: #1 ahead of the others by a significant margin of the other channels. Imagine the scene in India which is an even more face-to-face & touch and feel demography than USA?…
Sales leaders become CEOs because they are adapting to hunting the elephant. When they become CEOs they need to do radically different things. They need to know & get things done in multiple areas: be it cutting & cleaning the meat, cooking it, and then distributing it to the right people and ensure that they…
3 key takeaways on how Indian CEOs look at Social Selling from my workshop “CEOs: Get Social” 1. CEOs need to address many stakeholders beyond the customer(s); employees, media, extended community, potential employees, peers & competition – & want to do that through Social Media. 2. A CEO can’t just afford to be a Superstar…
Are you a Sales leader asking your team to turn to LinkedIn to generate pipeline- read this! In the early days of Amazon, once a wrong promotional email went to a prospect & the customer complained. Jeff Bezos wasn’t happy and is believed to have asked “what do we lose by stopping sending these emails?”…
In today’s SAAS world it is so easy to yank out a product that doesn’t work or make user’s life easy. Selling too high in the hope that bosses override users’ choice may result in a sales but will quickly lead to the eventual abandonment of your product. There are always three parties in a…
Are you a salesperson looking for some inspiration to make the dreaded prospect calls? Here is a true story for you… Many years back a 23-year-old joined a Canadian bank as a rookie salesperson. He began each morning with two jars on his desk. One was filled with 120 paper clips. The other was empty.…
There is a joke in Tech & Marketing circles about the proliferation of IT events. A Mumbai based CIO / IT Director/ Senior Manager can have his three times daily bread (breakfast, lunch, & dinner) taken care of 6 days of the week 250 days in a year – if s/he keeps attending IT vendor…
Here are 10 most controversial & common-sensical rants & tips for B2B Sales & Marketing in India: 1. Tele is the best channel. 2. Inbound principles & digital marketing are the icing & cherry on the cake. 3. I worry about seeing so many customers who substitute the words ‘Sales & Marketing’ with ‘Growth Hacking’…
You don’t get a lead by pushing, begging, or requesting a meeting. You get a meeting by enchanting the prospect enough to pull them to a meeting! How do you enchant? Either your company is like Amazon Web Services or a Tesla when they launched – a new solution with ‘magic powers’ that everyone wants…
If you are in Market Research, you might envy the creative storytelling of Advertisers If you are in Advertising, you might envy the power of the Brand Managers If you are in Branding, you might envy the freedom your Sales colleagues have If you are in Sales, you might envy the power the CEO has…
India is probably the most value-conscious market in the world. Selling in India – we can’t but avoid the great Indian general – General ‘Value For Money’ – like the great Russian General ‘Winter’ that Napoleon encountered while invading Russia. Maybe we should learn from Picasso while selling in India – A woman strolling in…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Tapzo – the Indian app-of-all-apps announced that they are closing down. Partha B., my Linkedin buddy had this question: why are Chinese Taibaos/ WeChats surviving but Indian apps not. I’m reproducing my answer for those who missed it. Three reasons: India is India – not China 5 years back or USA X years ago. Most Indian…
Welcome to the first day of the financial year! For may Indian companies & companies across other countries in the world, the financial new year begins on 1st April 2018. For a salesperson it means recovering from the hard-driving ‘close at all cost’ stressful days of the last few weeks. Sales planning is key. Here’s…
Time to obliterate the artificial differences between Sales & Marketing? They are the Korean ‘yin & yang’ – whose forms may be different – but the objective is the same. Both the functions are about thinking & executing on bringing profits & revenues for the company. ‘ Smarketing‘ is a way to integrate sales & marketing…
Yesterday as I was purchasing groceries from a vending machine, old thoughts of the dot-com bust came flooding back. As one of the earliest e-commerce analysts in the world – working for Gartner, I have been observing this sector since 2000. I am bearish of the sector as I come from ‘show-me the positive cash-flow…
Dr. Aniruddha Malpani asked about the efficacy of Social Media Marketing in a post. I posted the answer there – but am putting that here for wider circulation: I was skeptic about Social Media Marketing before I made it work. Its OK to begin with doubt so that you can end with confidence! Its a…
A shout-out to all my friends doing Sales Enablement. Enabling Sales is one of the most difficult jobs in the whole wide world. You have to be a friend, advisor, supplicant, policeman, judge & enforcer – to many all at the same time. You run the risk of being the fall guy if they fail…
Ankur Chaudhary asked an awesome question on LinkedIn – How do you go about establishing trust with buyers? It’s difficult but possible. You need to do three things to reach there: First, you get your product-market fit right. Second, you build features in your solution that stand out & are difficult to replicate. Third, you become an…
How to get your Product Go To Market swift & right! My top 10 tips from an impressive article by Alok Soni at YourStory Media: Developing a product to solve your real life problem is still the best epiphany. Spending more time on conceptual solutioning is better than quick launch & trying to sell – a…
My lessons on sales+marketing for SAAS founders from multiple ongoing conversations: Cash in hand always beats future revenues. Discounting for cash- upfront long-duration deals is the way to go. SEO is good-to- have. Thought leadership content, hungry but non-pushy inside sales agents and a well- tuned sales process are necessary & sufficient. Social Selling is…
LinkedIn is one of the most powerful sales & marketing tool crafted since the telephone. It works in 6 dimensions. Learn how to maximize all! 1) DATABASE: Contact + prospect database 2) MESSAGING: Never missed with timestamp 1-1, 1-many messaging 3) PUBLISHING: Publishing platform with 100% targeting 4) INTELLI: Ultimate market, prospect & competitive insights platform…
You want to be a Social Selling Superstar? Follow the step by step journey of being one! Start by imagining the Japanese concept of ikigai. You need to bring in four different characteristics – very difficult to find in a single person – and meld them into your persona. How? Start with being a professional. …
Sales pipeline weak? Leads not converting? Waiting for high quality leads that never come? Don’t WAIT! Be a Swami Vivekananda – drink the ocean – take charge of your destiny by taking charge of your sales funnel! Do a social selling blitz. Here’s how to do it: Revisit your STP – your Segments, your Targets…
Now is the time to be a young jobseeker, entrepreneur & activist! Traditional power structures & patronage networks based on affinity, language, region never had it so bad! The biggest power of LinkedIn + Twitter & Customer Response technology is dis-intermediation of traditional power network – dis-intermediation of networking itself! Go back 5 /10/15 years …
You are a hotshot sales exec. who exceeds his quota every year and get the variable comp. and the glory for your wins. Do you honestly heart-of-heart need to thank anyone for your success OR is the glory yours & yours only? Your job is on the line every year / and winning business doesn’t…
I consult with SAAS founders and my throat has grown hoarse telling them: Your Sales + Marketing + Alliance model is a function of your Product not the other way round. So always start with your Product when creating your Go To Market! Channels will not touch you with a barge pole till you become…
The amount of literature available & discussions on effective sales & marketing is mind-boggling. Someone says cold calling doesn’t work; someone says it works; someone says SEO is dead; someone says its alive. There are as many discussions as many people. Mid-week morning philosophy: Debates on what works in B2B sales & marketing will never…
Aditi Chaurasia asked for recommendations on top sales books to read. Here’s my ‘fab five’ list: Start with ‘Predictable Revenue’ – Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler wrote a book based on Salesforce’s enterprise sales success with real life examples of how to setup sales teams & make them effective. Another must read book is ‘Lead Generation…
What would you do if Amitabh Bachchan were to follow you on Twitter? This is not a clickbait. The Big B who has 32.9 Million followers is suddenly following 1487 profiles on Twitter. Majority of these additions are believed to have happened in the last week. If you are a tweep of some standing and…
Framework Summary Are you convinced that Social Selling is the way to go – and want your entire sales team upto speed & enabled in Social Selling? Some ideas & a basic framework to enable Social Selling in your sales organisation: Understand 4 stages of Social Selling journey at a personal level: Beginner => Professional…
Don’t go barking up the wrong tree while selling SAAS! 3 pieces of advice on target market selection while marketing/ selling tech. Dont sell ‘only SAAS’ or ‘naked SAAS’ to large enterprises. Even if they buy – the selling cycle will be long & customization & integration will make it very difficult. Sell SAAS +…
Are you searching for that elusive rain-maker salesperson to bring in multi-million dollar deals, for your company to survive? That person who has a high power rolodex and magically pulls deals from nowhere that takes you on the path of prosperity & million dollar bank accounts? Sorry to break your bauble – but such persons…
Many SME founders have their worldview limited to Website, SEO, & Email when they think about planning for Marketing. That’s a pity. Marketing is much more than Digital Marketing. And Digital Marketing is much more than the tactics of SEO, Website, & Email! When planning for Marketing for our clients – we at LeadStrategus insist…
HBR recently carried a provocative article ‘Why So Many High Profile Digital Transformations Fail’ talking about the digital transformation initiatives at GE, Lego, P&G, Nike, & Ford and why (in their opinion ) the initiatives didn’t work. The reasons they outlined: Digital Transformation shouldn’t be the last straw of a disrupted firm/industry – extraneous factors…
What is the biggest must-avoid trait of a sales-person? You may be unimpressive, may not understand customer needs, communicate poorly. You may still survive in sales.But there is one thing that will spell doom for your sales career. It comes in three alphabets – EGO. PRINCIPLE 1: The prospect is allowed to hurt your ego –…
I was just reading Jyoti Bansal’s interview in The Economic Times. And guess what did he say was the #1 challenge for Indian startups? There is great engineering talent, product management, UX design talent – all the ingredients to build great products – but one thing is missing. What is it? No prizes for guessing –…
One of the biggest challenges in many Delivery leaders transitioning into CEO /Startup founder roles is that they often believe that sales is someone else’s job. They ‘intellectually’ understand the importance of Sales & Marketing; but invariably avoid the hurly burly of lead generation/ cold calling. The biggest reason for CEO turnover /startups going belly…
The biggest challenge thatSAAS software creators face – after getting customer need(s) right & selling – is design. Beyond the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – what features does one keep & leave out to make a ‘whole product ‘ appeal to a large number of users. The answer? Create a product like a Russian matryosha…
What goes into a blog post? Helpful, industry-specific content that: 1) gives readers a useful takeaway, and 2) shows you’re an industry expert. Use your company’s blog posts to opine on current industry topics, humanize your company, and show how your products and services can help people.
