Strategy

Its time for Celebration and Some Introspection

Celebrations: My last blog post was the 250th post on this blog. When I started this blog, I had not realized that this would be such a long, fulfilling and an interesting journey. Thank You: Along the way, I have met a lot of people who have shared my beliefs and those who did not share my beliefs. Irrespective of us agreeing, I have gained many more friends.  In order to write a blog post, I have read many different perspectives that have already been shared by other bloggers. This enabled me to stumble upon some of the best content […]

Customer Engagement

Burger King (Norway) Gives Away BigMacs to test the Loyalty of their Fans!

Burger King has attempted a coup of sorts.. Their Norway operations decided that they wanted to identify and engage with their true fans who would not trade their whoppers for anything.  They decided to test the loyalty of their facebook fans (~ 38000 of them). All their fans on Facebook got an offer, the “Whopper Sellout”:   Burger King gave their fans an option to get a free “BIG Mac” (a product of McDonald’s, their biggest competitor) and get banned for life on their fan page or to stay a fan and join the new facebook page for the true […]

Sales

How Can Children help Sales Executives Regain Control On their Sales Process (B2B)

In the past couple of months, I have had the opportunity to interact with sales leaders in India, China, Singapore and Australia. One thing that everyone agrees is that selling, and more importantly, B2B selling is getting more and more challenging.  Buyers are getting more and more intelligent as they are able to do all the research even before inviting any sales teams in for discussion. This also means that most of the interaction tend to lean towards order fulfilment or what I call “Selling to Specs”. This is a zero sum game with no clear winners at all. The […]

Innovation

The Curious Case of Amazon Coins

Amazon Coins debuted among much fan fare in May this year and have mysteriously kept a very low profile since the high profile launch. I am not sure if this is a deliberate strategy on part of Amazon or is it that no one noticed its presence (or maybe absence) in the past few months. The only time that i heard about Amazon coins is when they launched a promotion to give out 20 free coins if one downloaded a certain set of apps. Really? Are these coins being used at all? If yes, how much is their usage? Or […]

Leadership

So, What Drives You?

Last week, I completed 3 years of blogging on wordpress. When I started on this journey three years back, I did not realize where this will take me. However after 3 years and 246 blog posts, I feel that I have only started to warm up. There is still a lot to talk about and a lot to learn and discuss. As each milestone that passes does, this one made me to sit down and think about what keeps me going. I would like to think one of the most important thing that keeps me motivated to keep writing blog […]