Customer Engagement

Selling is not about selling anymore….

Though everyone around us have been telling us that the we are going through a techtonic shift in how people buy, one does not realize the magnitude of the change until it hits us. So, today, I was talking to one of my friends who sells enterprise software for a living. He was complaining on how difficult life is becoming, with ever increasing quotas and ever demanding customers and prospects. If you feel the same, i believe that you are now affected by this giant shift in the buying patterns of your customers. Now, the question is what does this […]

Leadership, Sales

Role of culture in a sales team.

Culture is what transforms any team to greatness or failure! Sales teams are no exceptions to this. There is a specific culture in each and every sales team, doesn’t matter if someone has carefully instilled it there or it just got there by accident. So, what is the culture like in your team and why is it so important? I met a sales manager recently. He indicated that he wanted to have a high performance culture in his team. When I prodded him to explain what he meant by high performance, he said that he wants everyone in his team […]

Customer Engagement

Future of customer service in a social world

In the good old days, if we had to contact our bank or for that matter any business, we used to reach out to our phones and give them a call. The call would then be routed to a call center (usually, after about 10-15 minutes of listening to some music that would be played while we waited for an agent to get free and take our call). This, of course would be after having had to find our way through the maze of options (which used to be so complicated that it required us to be entirely focused on […]

Customer Engagement

Customer centricity & Chief Customer Officers

In the recent times, we have started to see a lot of organizations pay a lot more attention to their customers and have inducted Chief Customer Officers into their C-Suite. The rationale being that organizations need to be much more customer centric and need to understand their customers better and having someone responsible for this will go a long way in creating the necessary f0cus within the organization to achieve great customer service. However, in my opinion, having a Chief Customer Officer in place does more harm than good! Listening to customer’s and acting on it becomes someone else’s responsibility […]

Sales, transformation

The lure of large deals

If you are a sales leader, working in the software industry, you would know the importance that any organization places on the deal size. The bigger the deal size, the better it is for you. Right? WRONG! In my experience, really large deals (aka, multi-million dollar deals) rarely prove to be a success; for both the parties – buyer and seller. This sounds a bit counter-intuitive, but it really is true. When I think about why this is so, I came up with the following reasons because of which this is not good for the buyer: Typically, once such a deal […]