Author: Mukesh Gupta

Customer Engagement

How to increase customer loyalty? First, Stop annoying them !

Everyone in sales knows the importance of customer loyalty and the importance of repeat business. Still, we go out and make it difficult for the customer to do business with us. Worse still, we downright annoy the customers. I had one such experience with a start-up: myPNRstatus.com. They had a novel idea which they are trying out. You can enter the PNR number of the railway ticket and they claim to send you SMS’s on the status of the PNR (if wait-listed, they claim to send you an update everytime there is a change in the status) and also keep […]

Sales

Measuring sales-force effectiveness

One of the key challenges that I have seen in senior leadership is to measure the sales-force effectiveness. This becomes even more important if we are in an environment where revenue growth is difficult to come-by. So how does one measure the effectiveness of their sales-force. I think there are a few key indicators that show if the sales force is doing a good job or not: Revenue growth: The easiest and the most measured variable is the revenue growth. If the revenue is growing month-on-month, quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year, the sales-force is considered to be doing a good job. This shows […]

Sales

To sell more, stop selling

This may sound counter-intuitive but if you want to improve your sales, you need to stop selling and start to solve problems – known and un-known. The following process has really worked well for me: Listen to your prospect or customers. Ask them some probing questions around what is troubling them now or could trouble them in the near future Listen to what they tell you. In my experience, customers usually start by telling you that everything is great and there is nothing troubling them. Once this is finisher and still you do not interrupt them, then they will come […]

Ideas

Google on it’s way downhill?

Google has had a great run till now what with their innovations on monetizing their biggest strength – Search. There also has been a lot of talk on how the last slew of products coming out of Google have not hot the bull’s eye (maybe with the exception of Android and Chrome). We also have seen an exodus of talent from Google to its rival FaceBook and the lengths Google has gone to stop it. Does all of this indicate the start of the decline of Google as the internet superpower ? Is there someone already in the making who […]

Strategy

Building great products

I have been thinking about a lot of great products that have now become an integral part of our life aka Google, iPods, iPads, SAP ERP, Zappos, Facebook, Twitter, Intuit, Amazon, Mitticool, etc..  When I think about what is common across these products and their growth to super-stardom and i found these common traits: Great products are highly focused in solving a particular need of a particular customer. No product ever succeeds if it tries to solve a lot of problems for a lot of people.  Great products are very simple to learn & use. Great user experience can make the difference […]