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 […]

Entrepreneurship

Understanding startups – Dropmocks.com – Amazing photo sharing tool

The second start-up that I want to talk about in my series of blogs on start-ups is an interesting start-up called http://www.dropmocks.com/. This is a very simple photo sharing application. To share your photos, all you need to do is drag and drop the photos to the webpage and you get a link that you can then share with all your friends for free. All this can be done under 2 minutes! No registration or sign-up required! No advertisements! Now this is simplicity at its best.   Question now is how they will make money. I see the following options […]

Entrepreneurship

3 reasons to start a successful startup

Any start-up which has gone on to become highly successful does fall under one of these criteria:   They found a solution to a problem everyone knew but no one had solved till then. They found a potential problem not known to the market till then and tried to solve it first They found ways to solve a known problem dramatically (5x times) better/faster/cheaper. There are a lot of start-ups which achieve decent success just by adding new functionality to an existing product/service as well. They thrive till the overall market grows and then inevitably stagnate for growth. The one’s […]