Entrepreneurship

What did you ship in 2010?

Inspired by Seth Godin’s blog #YearInReview What did you ship in 2010?, I decided to do a little retrospection and list down all that I “shipped” in 2010. The list that I could come up with is the following: Achieved all the goals set for the year at work Started blogging in 2010 and I have 38 new blog posts this year Helped 3 start-ups decide their business model Somehow, I get the feeling that this is just a small peck of what I shipped in 2010 and that there were much more that I did but could not remember. […]

Sales

Overcoming the 5 basic obstacles in every sales transaction

As Zig Ziglar said, every sale has 5 basic obstacles that need to be overcome: No need No desire No hurry No money No trust I consider the most important of all the objections is the trust. Everything else will fail if there is no trust established between the sales person and the buyer. One of the best ways to build trust is to listen to the prospect; understand his business, challenges and competition. Show them that you understand their world. Be honest about what your product/service can or cannot do for them. If required, even introduce someone who can […]

Strategy

Fueling growth from existing customers

It is a well known fact that it is much more expensive to acquire a new customer than retaining an existing customer. But as they say, common sense is not so common. We find that businesses are going out of their way to attract new customers by offering them great deals. I do not think there is anything wrong in this, but when you exclude the offer to your existing customers, you are inviting trouble.  This is a very important reason for customer loyalty to become so rare. There does not seem any  benefit for customers to remain loyal anymore as […]

Sales

Social Media strategies for business

There has been a great hype around social media and how businesses can benefit from them.  As with everything else, one needs to decide the purpose for which the business wants to use social media and how will it measure the impact on business. A few strategies that have worked well are: Social media sites as an additional sales channel: Providing specific deals for a specific period for customers who follow your posts on the social media sites (could be twitter, facebook, linkedIn or any other such sites). Dell has been highly successful in using twitter to get additional sales […]

Customer Engagement

How to increase customer loyalty? First, Stop annoying them !

Everyone in sales knows the importance of customer loyalty and the importance of repeat business. Still, we go out and make it difficult for the customer to do business with us. Worse still, we downright annoy the customers. I had one such experience with a start-up: myPNRstatus.com. They had a novel idea which they are trying out. You can enter the PNR number of the railway ticket and they claim to send you SMS’s on the status of the PNR (if wait-listed, they claim to send you an update everytime there is a change in the status) and also keep […]