Strategy

Follow-ups

One of the most important activities in the sales process is the follow-up process post your discussions with them. This critical steps can at times help you move towards a closure or take you away from the deal. Critical questions that one need to address in this process are :- Share new information: Is there any new information (read new offers, whitepapers, references, etc) from the time you had the last discussion. If so, it provides us a good opportunity to contact the prospect and check with them on the current status Timing: How often do you want to follow-up […]

Sales

Lead Generation

One of the most common ways to generate leads for B2B scenarios is Email campaigns. Are these effective ? I have done email campaigns as well and my experience with them has been mixed. There were a few campaigns that generated a lot of responses and some which were real duds without even a single response. This made me analyze both the campaigns to understand the difference and the cause for such in-consistent results. The crux of the analysis is as below: Successful campaigns were those that were targeted at my current/past customers for new products or services. These usually […]

Sales

Selling via packaging

The importance of right packaging and branding can never be under-estimated. A product/service when packaged (including the branding) well, can be a big differentiator by itself. One can create an instant connect with prospective customers with the branding and packaging. One such example is being illustrated by Seth Godin in his blog “Telling a story on the label“

Customer Engagement

Relevance of our products/services to customers

I received a comment on my previous blog on sales process that if there is no demand for a product/service, improving the sales process might not have any benefit. True. But how do you know if the decline in sales is due to lowering demand for your product/service or is it due to some other reason. My belief is that as long as your product/service is able to solve a key challenge for your customer, the demand for your product/service should not decline. If it still declines, the culprit lies in the process. A follow-up question is, how, when and how often do […]