Customer Engagement

How easy is it to do business with you?

Today I visited a private bank in Bangalore. There was a person who wanted to open a savings account with the bank and deposit some money. The bank manager went on to inform him that the bank can open a savings account and accept his deposit only if an existing customer of the bank recommends. Here is someone who walks up to your office offering business and the manager almost refuses the business or is willing to do business on conditions. I think this is what happens to a lot of other organizations as well. As the organization gets more […]

Sales

Sales Compensations

An effective sales team is always highly motivated. Most important way of motivating your sales team is through their compensation plan. This is also one of the most important aspects of the sales strategy that can have a big impact on the morale of your sales team and also to the sales they clock-in.  We need to consider different aspects before deciding on the compensation plans. Competitive landscape and the compensation offered by competitors Position of your product on the product lifecycle on the Profitability of your product Sales cycle time for your product Complexity of the sale involved Is […]

Customer Engagement, Sales

Double digit revenue growth

With the global economy showing signs of recovery, most of the organizations are looking at revenue growth. Most of the large organizations (like SAP, Uniliver,etc) are looking at achieving double digit revenue growth for 2010. The questions to ask are :-  Should these large organizations  be happy with a double digit revenue growth (read 10-12%) ? Is this the best that they can do ? If yes, why is that so ? Is their size restricting them from doubling their sales every 2-3 years or are there other reasons ? Is is possible for these large organizations to achieve 25-30% year-on-year growth in their revenues […]

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 […]