Search Results for: management

Customer Engagement

New endangered species – salesmen

“What can be digitised, will be digitised” – unknown The continuous growth of e-commerce and cloud solutions is creating a new problem of sorts – dwindling breed of salesman! Imagine the following scenarios: I can buy any books that I want to on Amazon.com without any talking to anyone at amazon. I can buy clothes or shoes or accessories from Zappos without talking to anyone. I can buy an insurance from ICICI Lombard General Insurance without talking to anyone. I can re-charge my mobile phone online without talking to anyone from the phone company. I can buy any consumer durable […]

Customer Engagement

Why Dan Pink’s radical prescription for sales could be misleading

In his blog on HBR, best selling author Dan Pink argues that paying commissions to sales people has  a counter-intuitive effect of undermining enterprise profitability. You can read his post @ http://hbr.org/2012/07/a-radical-prescription-for-sales/ar/1. I would agree with him on most of his arguments. However, as with most theories, this theory has its limitations as well. In my opinion, sales commissions work if the following conditions are true: The sales process is simple and involves only the sales person with no dependencies on any other colleague. There is no upper limit on the commissions that he/she can receive. Earnings via commissions (as a […]

Customer Engagement, Ideas

Step by step guide for success with social media

In the past week, I have now met three people who head marketing functions for their organizations and all three have complained about how their foray into social media has received such a lukewarm response. They all indicated that they are not sure if this is something they should continue to support or just let it die their natural death. They were not the only one’s who were finding it difficult to sustain the initial rush of getting on to social media. So, clearly there is a need for a detailed framework or a step-by-step guide which organizations can use […]

Ideas

Next generation of digital books

TED recently announced the availability of TED Books. I quote from their site: Shorter than a novel, but longer than an article — a TED Book is a great way to feed your craving for ideas anytime. A TED Book is to a book as a TEDTalk is to a lecture: It’s shorter and more personal, more direct and engaging. And the new TED Books app (coming soon) lets our authors blend their words with multimedia extras that enhance your understanding. Look for rich images, audio, video and social features, along with links and documentation to provide a broader view. […]

Ideas

Why promoting your people is a bad idea

It is that time of the year, when most of the organizations are conducting their annual performance review and hand out the rewards (promotions, bonuses, share options, etc). Employee promotions play a very important part in the entire cycle. This is how, companies recognize and reward high performers. This is how people move up the ladder in organizations. Early in the 20th century, most of the labor was physical and repetitive and was individual in nature. It was in this era that rewarding individual performance was a way to improve organizational productivity. Then came an era where team work started […]