Leadership, Sales

Three Key Skills All Great Leaders Share

Everyone at some point in time of their career aspires to become a leader and hence the abundance of research and literature about leadership, different kinds of leadership styles, roles of leaders, skills and tasks of leaders and the list goes on and on. In this vast sea of leadership literature, I want to share my pearls of wisdom as well. In my opinion, every one of us need to be working on ourselves to become a good leader, like everyday. This is not only beneficial when we become a leader, but will enable you to do well in your […]

Sales

“SIMPLE” Framework for Sales Effectiveness – 3 Ways You can Use “Surprise” to Engage Your Customers

In an earlier blog post, I had introduced the “SIMPLE” framework to increase your sales effectiveness. The first step in the process is to be able to “Surprise” your customers with an insight or point-of-view that they are not yet aware of. This step is essential in improving the sales effectiveness as this enables the sales teams to initiate the process rather than wait for their customers to come to them with a requirement. There are three ways that sales teams can come up with insights that can truly surprise the customer. Some of them are as below: Network: One […]

Entrepreneurship, Strategy

Could Online Retailers Be Profitable and Grow?

Most online retailers are not profitable yet and the industry estimates are not looking good either. The online retail industry has so far been competing with each other on price and costly customer acquisition, which in combination does not auger well for profitability. The prevalent belief is that only at scale (aka, a billion dollar or more in revenue) can these retailers believe to be able to amortize their customer acquisition and marketing costs. This belief stems from the assumption that you need to pay (or offer a hefty discount) for people to shop online and to market (aka advertise) […]

Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Shift from Competing Organizations to Competing Networks

In the past few years, I have started seeing a definite trend that is shaping up and one that can have an immense impact on all of us and how we do business. There is more competition between networks of organizations competing with each other rather than individual organizations competing. This was prevalent in the B2B space in the IT industry, where software vendors would team up with hardware vendors and implementation partners and go to market together. They win the deal together or lose the deal together to a different network. Airlines around the world always had these networks […]

Sales

Are You Measuring the Right KPI’s for Your Sales Teams?

  Jason Jordan, recently published a post on HBR Blog titled – In Sales, Can You Manage What You’re Measuring. In this post, he talks about the KPI’s that sales teams have and if they are the right sets of KPI’s. He also talks about the fact that it far better to measure the lead indicators – “Sales Activities” to better predict and influence the result – “Sales Revenue”. This is a very interesting blog post and brings to focus a very important topic in sales management – How can a manager hold his sales rep accountable BEFORE there is […]