door to door Marketing consultant in mumbai

Face to Face Marketing and Door to Door Marketing 

Professional Qualified Sales Experts present products and services, calling on companies using our proven door to door Marketing consultant , door-to-door sales technique and door to door Marketing consultant in mumbai.

We convert potential customers to sustainable clients in the shortest space of time( door to door sales, door to door Marketing consultant ). Our professional teams interact with customers, educating them on our clients’ products/services, as well as generating immediate sales or leads with interested customers.

Marketing and advertising budgets have come under increasing pressure. door to door Marketing consultant and Door-to-door sales is a low cost distribution channel, and is an effective way to gain more return on investment. It secures increased value with minimum spend, allowing access to a customer base which is not always reached by existing marketing strategies.

Through Door to Door sales, customers can choose the most suitable deals, especially because they have a chance to ask questions and have the offering clarified by our qualified sales experts in mumbai

Door to Door Sales Agency 

We believe our experience, our sales ability and the detailed processes we have in place ensure we successfully launch new products to the market. Our sector experience and data insights ensure we are calling on the right outlets to maximise return on investment during the critical launch phase.

We have proven experience in launching challenger brands to the market along with well-established range extensions and completely new products.

We believe Fulcrum is the door-to-door-sales agency in pune best suited to owning the responsibility of launching your new product – why not give us a call to find out if we can help you?

Marketing

Sales & merchandising
Shopper  & Retail Marketing 
Direct sales 
Sales promotion
Consumer sales promotions
Trade sales promotions
Promotions team

Product launches
Product sampling
Free Sampling Activities
Demonstration Activities
Merchandising

I did door-to-door sales for nine years, in hundreds of different cities and towns all across the india. Through long, hard, agonizing trial and error, I eventually developed enough skill that I could take any product into any area on any day and make sales.

In the beginning, I struggled. But when I was about to give up on myself and quit (like 99.9% of people that try door-to-door sales do within their first few days),  experienced salesperson to give me a chance to get on track.

What I saw that day changed my life forever.

I watched as the experienced salesperson drove to an area where he had previous sales success, and listened as he explained to me why he parked his car in the exact spot he did to start his day and laid out his exact plan of attack.
Within the first 10 minutes, I learned a valuable lesson that not only made my door-to-door sales career much easier, but has also been the key to bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for my own companies, and those of thousands of others I’ve consulted to:

A current customer is the easiest person to make a sale to – many, many times easier (and less expensive) than trying to get new customers.

Most business owners operate a risky, day-to-day, transactional business, believing that the reason for getting a customer is to make a sale. That’s their biggest problem: making nothing more than “a” sale to a customer. After that initial transaction, they simply hope that their product or service or location is good enough that they will get a repeat visit from that customer.

On the other hand, sharp business owners (and door-to-door salespeople!) know that the point to making a sale is to get a customer. We have systems put together to maximize the value of that customer by making future offers to them, so that they buy more of the same product or service, or a different version, or even an entirely different product or service.

In other words, we recognize that a current customer is the easiest person to sell to, and a prospect is the hardest and most-expensive person to sell to. Therefore, we concentrate on maximizing the value of every new customer we get.

If you want to grow your business during these challenging economic times (and even during boom times), your time and effort should be invested in working to turn prospects into customers and retain them to market to in the future.
While your marketing is doing its job to get you prospects, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:

Inviting
Informative
Enjoyable

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded “buyer’s remorse.” You want to minimize this as best you can, and if you’ve provided a quality product or service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made, the risk will be lower.

However, returns can still occur. Here are the two most effective ways to deal with this:

Offer to refund money — no questions asked
Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product

These offers alone will also lessen the impact of buyer’s remorse, because the customer will trust you more just because you showed the confidence in your product or service to offer these options in the first place.

There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:

Offer a special price as an opportunity for them to test the market.
Offer a lower price with a legitimate reason, such as clearing out inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s braces, or another tangible reason. (Added bonus: Customers love you for doing this, because it makes you so much more human to them.)
Offer a referral incentive.
Offer a smaller, less expensive entry-level product to build trust.
Offer package deals.
Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
Offer extra incentives, such as longer warranties or free bonuses, if they order by a certain date.
Offer financing options, if applicable.
Offer a bonus if they pay in full.
Offer special packaging or delivery.
Offer “name-your-own-price” incentives.
Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
Offer to let them trade up or upgrade to something better if they want.
Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.

The options are really only limited by your imagination and marketing skill. You can use these or other ideas to discover what works the best for your specific business, with your specific products, services and target market.

Even if you ever find yourself doing door-to-door sales.

 

Marketing company in Rajgurunagar

Introduction to Corporate Communication: Need and its Importance

Why is Corporate Communication Needed ?

With the proliferation of activities that any company does, there needs to be a mechanism through which it advertises its achievements, answers queries about its performance, and has a window to the external world in times of crises and other catastrophes. The corporate communication department of any organization performs the three functions listed above. Before the deepening of private sector activity, companies used to have public relations departments or used to outsource their public relations activities to specialized firms that had the expertise. Even now, many multinationals have corporate communication teams that double up as event management teams in addition to their media interfacing activities. Indeed, companies like Infosys have dedicated spokespersons whose sole function is to liaise with the media because these companies often are in the public eye. Apart from the reactive media interfacing in response to queries and requests for information, corporate communication teams also are proactive in media management, which means that they actively suggest media coverage to the press and set the agenda about what to be written about the company and how it is to be covered.

Yet another Glitzy Function or Value Adding Teams ?

It is often the case that many employees in the companies think that corporate communication teams are all hype and fashion with no substance. This is because of the nature of the work that they do which is glossy and hip. However, it needs to be mentioned that corporate communication teams play a vital role in driving the news coverage about the companies and in these days of 24/7 news coverage, the onus of representing the company’s viewpoint accurately and reliably falls on the shoulders of the corporate communications teams.

In most IT companies, the nerdy and the geeky crowd often downplay the importance of the corporate communications teams. This is not the ideal attitude towards the practice of corporate communications and should be discouraged. Instead, a nuanced appreciation of what corporate communications is all about must be articulated by the management to the employees so that they do not dismiss it as all hype and no substance.

The Advantages of Positive Coverage and the Perils of Misrepresentation

If we start with the disadvantages first, it is clear from the recent downsizing in many IT companies that unless the media are kept informed about the stance of the management, the media coverage would be anything but friendly. Often, there are many rivals with agendas and these translate into poor or negative reporting about the company. On the other hand, if the corporate communications teams proactively brief the media about instances of downsizing and other crises and shapes perceptions that are favorable to the company viewpoints, then the advantages of having corporate communications teams becomes apparent.

Final Thoughts

There is no denying the fact that in this current media landscape where news changes by the minute, having a dedicated corporate communications is the answer to the problem of having the company’s perspective put forward. In conclusion, corporate communications teams are indispensable and any attempt to sideline them as a peripheral activity would boomerang on the company.

 

 

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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

 

 

SALES SOLUTIONS

APPOINTMENT SETTING

Our clients depend on us to connect their top sales people with interested decision makers. We generate the appointment with your prospect, and then use our boutique approach to work closely with your sales team, ensuring it gets attended and the feedback is acquired.

With our pay-for-performance model, we eliminate your financial risk by assuring you receive quality appointments before we are compensated. We have complete confidence that we can help you generate revenue results.

EVENT AUDIENCE AQUISITION

Events establish your organization as a thought leader and accelerate the sales cycle – but only if you have the right people in attendance. Our team can drive that audience, filling seminars, luncheons, workshops, trade shows, road shows, etc. We’ll deliver qualified prospects who want to hear what you’re offering, and are ready to buy.

We can help ensure that you capitalize on the event by following up afterwards, while your sales team are busy closing the attendees.

DATABASE CREATION

A good database is the wellspring for all of your sales and marketing activities; it drives your revenue growth.

Whether you already have a robust list of contacts to validate, a collection of target companies, or simply a set of criteria for the types of companies you want to approach; we can help you create an accurate, contact-rich database that will fuel successful revenue generation.

DEDICATED INSIDE SALES RESOURCE

Utilize our highly trained and proven sales professionals without the risk of hiring. They have all the tools and training to be successful, without you incurring the long-term expenses or regulations associated with full-time employees.

Acting as a seamless extension of your sales team, our professionals are dedicated, employing the very best strategy to accelerate sales without the time and cost of hiring, training, or creating a customized database.

 

 

Are Your Insights Edgy Enough?

 

Insights have exploded for good reason: They can disrupt your prospects’ world and give them the urgency and direction to do something different now.

The problem is, many of the insights circulating in the market today aren’t sufficiently different from the ones your competitors are putting out there. Sometimes they’re exactly the same. Or they’re simply providing information that’s true but ultimately useless in terms of getting your buyers to see their world differently and take action.

Quality insights are the lifeblood of great messaging and content. But if your insights look and sound a lot like everyone else’s, they’re in danger of becoming commoditized. And if your insights are commoditized, there’s a good chance your messaging and content are, too.

Research To The Rescue

As buyers get more discerning about the content they engage with, they’re going to start demanding a lot more rigor and credibility around insights creation.

In other words, if they’re going to carve time out of their day to read or watch or listen to what you’ve produced, you need to give them a payoff. That payoff typically comes in the form of interpretations, data, and perspectives that are credible and that they can’t find anywhere else. Original research—done well, and with the intent of unearthing something new that your customers will care about—has the potential to deliver these things in a bold and unique way, giving you access to insights and information that only you can claim, and allowing you to shape the conversation on terms that distinguish you.

Here are some pointers for leveraging original research and building it into your approach to messaging and content.

Get Edgy And Counterintuitive – One trend that’s both a symptom and a cause of content fatigue is the repackaging of others’ original insights, which some then repurpose without adding anything new to deepen the conversation. That’s a recipe for sounding a lot like everyone and getting ignored by buyers. For your messaging and content to flourish, you need to take edgy, counterintuitive stands that challenge conventional wisdom and run against the grain of “best practices” and popular thought.

And most importantly, to do this well, you need to back your boldest claims with tested and proven research, so that you’re not just touting good feelings and hunches, but you’re getting behind actual principles supported by research that your buyers will find compelling and different from what they’re hearing in other watering holes.

Provide Fresh, Forward-Looking Interpretations – The great thing about original research is that it generates original insights (i.e. data that you have and others can cite). But data points fall flat without a compelling narrative around them—one that’s forward-looking, fresh, and creatively spun. And make no mistake: There is serious demand for high-quality analysis in this vein. A survey from my company revealed the type of insights message B2B marketers and salespeople believe to be most impactful—so-called “visionary” insights, which provide forward-looking market perspectives—is used the least in marketing collateral, while the least effective type of insight—“anecdotal,” which are in-house and best practices-oriented—is used the most.

Partner With A Pro – Developing rigorous, falsifiable research is no small undertaking, and it’s easy to see how the idea of incorporating it into a marketing program might seem daunting. To make that process smoother, my company formed a small research team within our company and contracted with a leading researcher, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business whose research interests—which include persuasion, messaging, and social influence—dovetail with many of the marketing and sales topics that we like to test in a formal environment.

The bar has never been higher for making an impact with your messaging and content, and today, with so-called “content fatigue” setting in, there’s a premium on fresh and original information.

Adding an original research component to your marketing activities is one of the best ways to establish yourself as a source of new insights among your audience. And the best part about it: When you do it well, you get the license to be a little more edgy in your messaging because you’re backing your case up with tested and proven data, not hunches and feelings.

Check out our new eBook, “Good Intentions, Wrong Instincts,” for an example of how to put first-party research into action in your messaging and content.

 

 

door to door Marketing consultant in Pune

door to door Marketing consultant in mumbai

Local Marketing , Advertising, Promotional media, brand promotion,

1to1 brand Activation, Auto Rickshaw Advertising, Analytics Consulting

 

door to door Marketing consultant in mumbai

Face to Face Marketing and Door to Door Marketing 

Professional Qualified Sales Experts present products and services, calling on companies using our proven door to door Marketing consultant , door-to-door sales technique and door to door Marketing consultant in mumbai.

We convert potential customers to sustainable clients in the shortest space of time( door to door sales, door to door Marketing consultant ). Our professional teams interact with customers, educating them on our clients’ products/services, as well as generating immediate sales or leads with interested customers.

Marketing and advertising budgets have come under increasing pressure. door to door Marketing consultant and Door-to-door sales is a low cost distribution channel, and is an effective way to gain more return on investment. It secures increased value with minimum spend, allowing access to a customer base which is not always reached by existing marketing strategies.

Through Door to Door sales, customers can choose the most suitable deals, especially because they have a chance to ask questions and have the offering clarified by our qualified sales experts in mumbai

Door to Door Sales Agency 

We believe our experience, our sales ability and the detailed processes we have in place ensure we successfully launch new products to the market. Our sector experience and data insights ensure we are calling on the right outlets to maximise return on investment during the critical launch phase.

We have proven experience in launching challenger brands to the market along with well-established range extensions and completely new products.

We believe Fulcrum is the door-to-door-sales agency in pune best suited to owning the responsibility of launching your new product – why not give us a call to find out if we can help you?

Marketing

Sales & merchandising
Shopper  & Retail Marketing 
Direct sales 
Sales promotion
Consumer sales promotions
Trade sales promotions
Promotions team

Product launches
Product sampling
Free Sampling Activities
Demonstration Activities
Merchandising

I did door-to-door sales for nine years, in hundreds of different cities and towns all across the india. Through long, hard, agonizing trial and error, I eventually developed enough skill that I could take any product into any area on any day and make sales.

In the beginning, I struggled. But when I was about to give up on myself and quit (like 99.9% of people that try door-to-door sales do within their first few days),  experienced salesperson to give me a chance to get on track.

What I saw that day changed my life forever.

I watched as the experienced salesperson drove to an area where he had previous sales success, and listened as he explained to me why he parked his car in the exact spot he did to start his day and laid out his exact plan of attack.
Within the first 10 minutes, I learned a valuable lesson that not only made my door-to-door sales career much easier, but has also been the key to bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for my own companies, and those of thousands of others I’ve consulted to:

A current customer is the easiest person to make a sale to – many, many times easier (and less expensive) than trying to get new customers.

Most business owners operate a risky, day-to-day, transactional business, believing that the reason for getting a customer is to make a sale. That’s their biggest problem: making nothing more than “a” sale to a customer. After that initial transaction, they simply hope that their product or service or location is good enough that they will get a repeat visit from that customer.

On the other hand, sharp business owners (and door-to-door salespeople!) know that the point to making a sale is to get a customer. We have systems put together to maximize the value of that customer by making future offers to them, so that they buy more of the same product or service, or a different version, or even an entirely different product or service.

In other words, we recognize that a current customer is the easiest person to sell to, and a prospect is the hardest and most-expensive person to sell to. Therefore, we concentrate on maximizing the value of every new customer we get.

If you want to grow your business during these challenging economic times (and even during boom times), your time and effort should be invested in working to turn prospects into customers and retain them to market to in the future.
While your marketing is doing its job to get you prospects, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:

Inviting
Informative
Enjoyable

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded “buyer’s remorse.” You want to minimize this as best you can, and if you’ve provided a quality product or service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made, the risk will be lower.

However, returns can still occur. Here are the two most effective ways to deal with this:

Offer to refund money — no questions asked
Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product

These offers alone will also lessen the impact of buyer’s remorse, because the customer will trust you more just because you showed the confidence in your product or service to offer these options in the first place.

There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:

Offer a special price as an opportunity for them to test the market.
Offer a lower price with a legitimate reason, such as clearing out inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s braces, or another tangible reason. (Added bonus: Customers love you for doing this, because it makes you so much more human to them.)
Offer a referral incentive.
Offer a smaller, less expensive entry-level product to build trust.
Offer package deals.
Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
Offer extra incentives, such as longer warranties or free bonuses, if they order by a certain date.
Offer financing options, if applicable.
Offer a bonus if they pay in full.
Offer special packaging or delivery.
Offer “name-your-own-price” incentives.
Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
Offer to let them trade up or upgrade to something better if they want.
Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.

The options are really only limited by your imagination and marketing skill. You can use these or other ideas to discover what works the best for your specific business, with your specific products, services and target market.

Even if you ever find yourself doing door-to-door sales.

 

marketing companies in pune

7 responsibilities sales managers must own

Shifts in the business-to-business buying process have transformed selling as we know it. In the past, salespeople had a fair amount of control. They were given a territory, a pricing structure, a margin target and a set of products and services they could offer, and then sent off into the wild blue yonder. They were responsible for managing their territory and producing results. Sales management provided oversight, facilitated requests back to corporate to ensure that orders were expedited, and generally stayed out of the way, unless additional support was needed to help underperformers. That’s how things used to be. Now, the role of sellers — and therefore sales managers — is much different.

The “State of Sales Productivity 2015” study by Docurated found that only one-third of a sales reps’ day is actually spent selling, while 31 percent of their time is spent searching for or creating content, and 20 percent is spent on reporting, administrative and CRMrelated tasks. Nowadays, 82 percent of sales reps feel challenged by the amount of data and the time it takes to research a prospect, according to a study by IKO System.

If you want to thrive in this new era of sales, it is now up to you as a sales manager to view territories, customers and products as if assessing a financial portfolio that you are responsible for investing. The people involved, the marketing dollars spent, and the efforts expended are all for you to decide. It is your responsibility to make your investments wisely.

Since the time and attention of your salespeople are part of that investment, it is your responsibility to own their calendar, their workflow and where they spend their time. You may be of the old mindset that this is micromanagement, but in today’s marketplace, the investment belongs to the company, not the sales rep. This means your role as sales manager must adapt if you want to succeed in life after the death of selling as we know it. Your new responsibilities as a sales manager include the following:

Selecting targets – There’s an adage that salespeople talk to whoever will talk to them. In the new world of selling, your responsibility is to make certain that they are talking to the decision makers who can approve about large opportunities that will come to fruition in the near future. Working with sales leadership, you must establish a filter that helps to define the most likely candidates for higheropportunity sales efforts.

Defining priorities – Help your sales force prioritize what opportunities they pursue and how much time and effort they spend on each opportunity. Good sales managers keep key opportunities that are real and relevant to the current circumstances in the crosshairs of their salespeople.

Defining time guidelines – Set and enforce guidelines for how sellers spend their time. They no longer can just meander about a territory or go on a sweep of their current account base with the intention of “checking in and finding out what’s going on.” Rather, they must undertake a strategic and surgical approach to going after identified targets in a prescribed way.

Monitoring compliance – You are responsible for providing data that allows you and other leaders in the organization to monitor what is happening in the marketplace regarding customers, competitors and surrounding regulations and technology shifts. Consistency in the execution of a sales process gives data to the organization that clarifies what works and what does not. We’re not talking about activity management and monitoring for its own sake. Your focus should be working toward compliance in the sales process to protect the integrity of the data captured so everyone has relevant data for good decision making.

Navigating the terrain – Your sales process lays out a map for action, but a map is just a two-dimensional representation of a sequential process. Good sales management also addresses the third dimension – assessing the terrain of what is going on in the marketplace based on the data you’re getting (including variant data) from the sales process. There will be occasions when you will need to send out a scouting team of select salespeople to find out new information. Then it’s up to you to analyze what they bring back and use that information to better navigate the terrain.

Securing resources – There will be occasions when competing priorities of other departments impede progress on landing a big account. It’s your responsibility to make certain that significant sales opportunities are visible to leadership and to secure from less-than-enthusiastic parties inside your organization the resources needed for a successful sales process.

Knowing when (and when not) to expedite – It’s your job to expedite what needs to be expedited — and to know when not to. If you try to expedite every opportunity, soon no one will respond. Salespeople are often viewed as that proverbial “boy who cried wolf.” For the sake of the organization and for the sake of your reputation and that of your salespeople, you’ll need to be the gatekeeper on when an opportunity needs to be expedited, and when everyone should simply follow the normal sales process.

Tom Searcy is CEO & founder of Hunt Big Sales (HuntBigSales.com), a sales strategy consultant. He is the author of several books, including “Life After the Death of Selling: How to Thrive in the New Era of Sales,” which will be published later this year.

 

The Need to Keep Journalism Free from Paid Public Relations

The Media is an Extension of Big Business Now

In recent years, the concept of paid news and advertorials that are a combination of editorials and advertisements have become commonplace around the world. While the media always had a cozy relationship with the advertisers because both depend on each other for sustenance, the recent trends indicate that this relationship has now transformed itself into a full-blown public relations exercise by the media on behalf of the corporates. One cannot deny the fact that the media is dependent on the corporates for advertisements since the media houses have to sustain themselves monetarily. However, the fact that the line between friendly pieces in newspapers and strategically placed interviews and programs on TV and the need to inform and educate the public rather than indulge in advertisement has been breached. In other words, the media is no longer reporting the stories in an objective and unbiased manner. Rather, they have become the mouthpieces of corporates and anyone with enough money to dictate terms to them. The point here is that the media must not forget its primary function of being a watchdog of democracy and propagating the public good. In the pursuit of advertising Dollars, the media seems to have forgotten this cardinal rule of journalism and instead, have become the paid servants of big business houses and political parties.

Media has Abdicated its Duty as a Watchdog of Democracy

In the United States, the media has always taken a pro-business line in its reporting. Inconvenient facts about big businesses have been ignored or swept away under the carpet and to satisfy their conscience, some minor news items have appeared from time to time. However, in recent years, the media in the US has transformed itself into being the dedicated public relations units of corporates and big business houses. This can be seen in the way the media has reported news items related to the big oil, big Pharma, and big financial conglomerates. Indeed, if the media had done its investigative work properly and paid heed to the numerous whistleblowers who were warning about the impending financial crisis, then the readers would have had time to prepare and protect themselves from the impact of the financial crisis. Indeed, the fact that in the run up to the crisis, the media were going all out proclaiming that the economy was doing fine is a sad commentary on the way the media has been co-opted by big business. Though there were a few stray voices here and there warning of catastrophe, they were either ignored or given some minor coverage, which meant that when the crisis struck, the impact was severe because the average citizen did not have any inkling about the severity of the problem.

Advertorials and Media

The next aspect that has become apparent is that in the US and the UK, the media is now focusing on becoming a paid advertiser for the corporate interests. Considering the fact that the media around the world follow the lead set by these countries, in developing countries and the Third World, it has become commonplace for media houses to blur the distinction between news and advertisements. The situation has become so dire that entire segments in TV and entire pages in newspapers are now devoted to covering corporates in a friendly manner without criticizing them or pointing out flaws and controversies in their operations.

Closing Thoughts

As mentioned earlier, this is a worrisome trend as the developing countries like India have long cherished the independence of the media and the fact that the media in India has always been critical of the wrongdoings of the status quo powers. The reversal of this trend and the co

 

 

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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

 

 

A Strategic Guide Through the Perfect Storm for Sales Management

 

Changed customer behavior and increased negotiation power of the customer induced by technology together with the tough economic conditions create the conditions for a perfect storm that hardly can be weathered by sales management with tried and trusted old tactics.

The book “Rethinking Sales Management” by Beth Rogers is,as the subtitle suggests, “a practical guide for practitioners” how to become more strategic to cope with the challenges of these new normal times.

Beth Rogers has extensive practical experience in marketing and sales roles which she has complemented by in-depth consultancy, research and teaching. Her book therefore stands out from most sales and sales management books. Her advise is not of the type “here is how I was successful and I do not see why this should not work for you”. Instead, she provides the readers with strategic models and facts helping them to understand the ‘Why’ of a situation and then deduct the best course of action suited to context they are in.

In the era of customer orientation, Rogers argues, CSOs should have a seat at the strategy table of their enterprises. The first part of the book is an introduction into strategy; enabling CSOs to get familiar with the language talked there . The first chapter introduces well known strategic concepts like the business portfolio matrix (BCG matrix) used to categorize strategies from a enterprise point of view. (inside -out)

In the second chapter, the focus is on the purchaser’s perspective of strategy (outside- in). Rogers suggest the purchaser’s portfolio matrix as the vehicle to analyze this point of view. This concept is probably less known among C-level executives. Understanding it gives the CSO the opportunity to bring added value to the strategy discussion.

The purchaser’s portfolio matrix first presented by Peter Kraljic in an article of the August-September 1983 issue of the Harvard Business review and then reintroduced by Rackham and DeVincentis in their book “Rethinking the Sales Force” recommends that purchasers should adapt their strategy depending on the complexity of the supply market and the financial impact of the purchase on the enterprise.

In the third chapter, the B2B Relationship Development Box is discussed in depth. This box, also a 2 by 2 matrix, combines the enterprise (internal) view with the purchaser’s (external) view. This model suggests that the nature of customer relationships depends on the value the customers bring to the enterprise and the value the enterprise provides to customers (in their view).

The Relationship Development Box is the essential tool for CSO’s to understand how to organize their resources to execute on their strategies. The second part of the book therefore shows how this tool is used. Each quadrant of the relationship matrix is explained in a separate chapter As not all relationships are worth to be maintained, this part also contains a chapter about exit strategies.

The four relationships discussed are:

  • Strategic (value of the customer to enterprise is high and value of the enterprise to the customer is high). This is the quadrant where Key Account Management is the best fit.
  • Prospective (value of the customer to the enterprise is high and value of the enterprise to the customer is low). This relationship is of transitory nature. Business development is the strategy that can elevate this relationship to a strategic one. But one cannot exclude that the value of the enterprise to the customer cannot be increased. In this case, the enterprise should move the relationship to the tactical quadrant in order to avoid continuous over investment in the relationship.
  • Tactical (value of the customer to the enterprise is low and value of the enterprise to the customer is low). This quadrant is often considered as not very attractive. Considering the use of other channels than a direct field sales force (e.g. Telesales or Channel Partners) is though more viable than considering this relationship as transitory and trying to elevate it to a strategic one.
  • Cooperative (value of the customer to the enterprise is low, value of the enterprise to the customer is high). This is probably the most delicate quadrant to handle. The balance must be found between avoiding over investing in the account and risking competitive vulnerability. The cooperative relationship might therefore also be of transitory nature.

The third part of the book entitled Strategic Focus for 21-st Century Sales Management

addresses four weaknesses observed in the management of the sales function.

  • Reputation Management can be seen as a part of corporate reputation management brought to the fore by new regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Rogers though also cites results from own studies where “breach of trust” was quoted as the single most likely cause of the disintegration of a customer relationship. Maintaining integrity of the sales people as a form of reputation management has though also a direct impact on sales performance. Undue internal pressure and variable pay schemes can negatively influence this performance.
  • Working with Marketing can be a source of so far untapped profitability. Kotler, Rackham and Krishnaswamy in their article in the Harvard Business Review of July/August 2006 believe that there can easily be a gap of 20% in profits between organizations where marketing and sales are aligned compared to companies where sales and marketing work independently in separate silos or even worse fight each other. Also this chapter has a link to the Relationship Box. Rogers suggest that Marketing should have the lead for tactical relationships, whereas Sales should be leading for strategic relationships.
  • Leadership: Five tools are discussed: Awareness (incorporating self awareness and awareness of others), Framework (strategy and values), Extensive Communications, Coaching and Development and finally Trumpeting. The last point is probably not readily understood. It means telling and rewarding people for things they have done right. Although financial rewards are the culture of sales, those rewards do not necessarily have to be only in monetary form.
  • Process Management as a necessary prerequisite for continuous improvement is discussed in this chapter.

This book is a great eye opener to sales people contemplating to become sales managers. After having read it, they will understand the kind of strategic thinking needed to succeed in this role. For sales managers and executives, coming to the realization that their current approach will not bring the expected results in the future, it is an excellent source for understanding how they can evolve their role and being more successful with a strategic approach.

 

 

door to door Marketing consultant in Pune

door to door Marketing consultant in mumbai

Local Marketing , Advertising, Promotional media, brand promotion,

1to1 brand Activation, Auto Rickshaw Advertising, Analytics Consulting

 

door to door Marketing consultant in Pune

Face to Face Marketing and Door to Door Marketing 

Nothing beats the reality that one gets when you can interact with potential clients face to face physically moving from door to door within a community or household to household, face to face field marketing is also called personal selling or door to door marketing, customers are met directly in order to sell their products, using this method of field marketing we rely on our skills and persuasive abilities. During the period where we get to interact with the client face to face we get more chance to pass across edible information which would be useful to all our customers at that time and it’s also an opportunity for us to get feedback and to gauge your opinion about our business.

Marketing

I did door-to-door sales for nine years, in hundreds of different cities and towns all across the india. Through long, hard, agonizing trial and error, I eventually developed enough skill that I could take any product into any area on any day and make sales.

In the beginning, I struggled. But when I was about to give up on myself and quit (like 99.9% of people that try door-to-door sales do within their first few days),  experienced salesperson to give me a chance to get on track.

What I saw that day changed my life forever.

I watched as the experienced salesperson drove to an area where he had previous sales success, and listened as he explained to me why he parked his car in the exact spot he did to start his day and laid out his exact plan of attack.
Within the first 10 minutes, I learned a valuable lesson that not only made my door-to-door sales career much easier, but has also been the key to bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for my own companies, and those of thousands of others I’ve consulted to:

A current customer is the easiest person to make a sale to – many, many times easier (and less expensive) than trying to get new customers.

Most business owners operate a risky, day-to-day, transactional business, believing that the reason for getting a customer is to make a sale. That’s their biggest problem: making nothing more than “a” sale to a customer. After that initial transaction, they simply hope that their product or service or location is good enough that they will get a repeat visit from that customer.

On the other hand, sharp business owners (and door-to-door salespeople!) know that the point to making a sale is to get a customer. We have systems put together to maximize the value of that customer by making future offers to them, so that they buy more of the same product or service, or a different version, or even an entirely different product or service.

In other words, we recognize that a current customer is the easiest person to sell to, and a prospect is the hardest and most-expensive person to sell to. Therefore, we concentrate on maximizing the value of every new customer we get.

If you want to grow your business during these challenging economic times (and even during boom times), your time and effort should be invested in working to turn prospects into customers and retain them to market to in the future.
While your marketing is doing its job to get you prospects, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:

Inviting
Informative
Enjoyable

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded “buyer’s remorse.” You want to minimize this as best you can, and if you’ve provided a quality product or service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made, the risk will be lower.

However, returns can still occur. Here are the two most effective ways to deal with this:

Offer to refund money — no questions asked
Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product

These offers alone will also lessen the impact of buyer’s remorse, because the customer will trust you more just because you showed the confidence in your product or service to offer these options in the first place.

There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:

Offer a special price as an opportunity for them to test the market.
Offer a lower price with a legitimate reason, such as clearing out inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s braces, or another tangible reason. (Added bonus: Customers love you for doing this, because it makes you so much more human to them.)
Offer a referral incentive.
Offer a smaller, less expensive entry-level product to build trust.
Offer package deals.
Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
Offer extra incentives, such as longer warranties or free bonuses, if they order by a certain date.
Offer financing options, if applicable.
Offer a bonus if they pay in full.
Offer special packaging or delivery.
Offer “name-your-own-price” incentives.
Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
Offer to let them trade up or upgrade to something better if they want.
Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.

The options are really only limited by your imagination and marketing skill. You can use these or other ideas to discover what works the best for your specific business, with your specific products, services and target market.

Even if you ever find yourself doing door-to-door sales.

 

Marketing company in Rajgurunagar

Introduction to Corporate Communication: Need and its Importance

Why is Corporate Communication Needed ?

With the proliferation of activities that any company does, there needs to be a mechanism through which it advertises its achievements, answers queries about its performance, and has a window to the external world in times of crises and other catastrophes. The corporate communication department of any organization performs the three functions listed above. Before the deepening of private sector activity, companies used to have public relations departments or used to outsource their public relations activities to specialized firms that had the expertise. Even now, many multinationals have corporate communication teams that double up as event management teams in addition to their media interfacing activities. Indeed, companies like Infosys have dedicated spokespersons whose sole function is to liaise with the media because these companies often are in the public eye. Apart from the reactive media interfacing in response to queries and requests for information, corporate communication teams also are proactive in media management, which means that they actively suggest media coverage to the press and set the agenda about what to be written about the company and how it is to be covered.

Yet another Glitzy Function or Value Adding Teams ?

It is often the case that many employees in the companies think that corporate communication teams are all hype and fashion with no substance. This is because of the nature of the work that they do which is glossy and hip. However, it needs to be mentioned that corporate communication teams play a vital role in driving the news coverage about the companies and in these days of 24/7 news coverage, the onus of representing the company’s viewpoint accurately and reliably falls on the shoulders of the corporate communications teams.

In most IT companies, the nerdy and the geeky crowd often downplay the importance of the corporate communications teams. This is not the ideal attitude towards the practice of corporate communications and should be discouraged. Instead, a nuanced appreciation of what corporate communications is all about must be articulated by the management to the employees so that they do not dismiss it as all hype and no substance.

The Advantages of Positive Coverage and the Perils of Misrepresentation

If we start with the disadvantages first, it is clear from the recent downsizing in many IT companies that unless the media are kept informed about the stance of the management, the media coverage would be anything but friendly. Often, there are many rivals with agendas and these translate into poor or negative reporting about the company. On the other hand, if the corporate communications teams proactively brief the media about instances of downsizing and other crises and shapes perceptions that are favorable to the company viewpoints, then the advantages of having corporate communications teams becomes apparent.

Final Thoughts

There is no denying the fact that in this current media landscape where news changes by the minute, having a dedicated corporate communications is the answer to the problem of having the company’s perspective put forward. In conclusion, corporate communications teams are indispensable and any attempt to sideline them as a peripheral activity would boomerang on the company.

 

 

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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

 

 

SALES SOLUTIONS

APPOINTMENT SETTING

Our clients depend on us to connect their top sales people with interested decision makers. We generate the appointment with your prospect, and then use our boutique approach to work closely with your sales team, ensuring it gets attended and the feedback is acquired.

With our pay-for-performance model, we eliminate your financial risk by assuring you receive quality appointments before we are compensated. We have complete confidence that we can help you generate revenue results.

EVENT AUDIENCE AQUISITION

Events establish your organization as a thought leader and accelerate the sales cycle – but only if you have the right people in attendance. Our team can drive that audience, filling seminars, luncheons, workshops, trade shows, road shows, etc. We’ll deliver qualified prospects who want to hear what you’re offering, and are ready to buy.

We can help ensure that you capitalize on the event by following up afterwards, while your sales team are busy closing the attendees.

DATABASE CREATION

A good database is the wellspring for all of your sales and marketing activities; it drives your revenue growth.

Whether you already have a robust list of contacts to validate, a collection of target companies, or simply a set of criteria for the types of companies you want to approach; we can help you create an accurate, contact-rich database that will fuel successful revenue generation.

DEDICATED INSIDE SALES RESOURCE

Utilize our highly trained and proven sales professionals without the risk of hiring. They have all the tools and training to be successful, without you incurring the long-term expenses or regulations associated with full-time employees.

Acting as a seamless extension of your sales team, our professionals are dedicated, employing the very best strategy to accelerate sales without the time and cost of hiring, training, or creating a customized database.

 

 

Are Your Insights Edgy Enough?

 

Insights have exploded for good reason: They can disrupt your prospects’ world and give them the urgency and direction to do something different now.

The problem is, many of the insights circulating in the market today aren’t sufficiently different from the ones your competitors are putting out there. Sometimes they’re exactly the same. Or they’re simply providing information that’s true but ultimately useless in terms of getting your buyers to see their world differently and take action.

Quality insights are the lifeblood of great messaging and content. But if your insights look and sound a lot like everyone else’s, they’re in danger of becoming commoditized. And if your insights are commoditized, there’s a good chance your messaging and content are, too.

Research To The Rescue

As buyers get more discerning about the content they engage with, they’re going to start demanding a lot more rigor and credibility around insights creation.

In other words, if they’re going to carve time out of their day to read or watch or listen to what you’ve produced, you need to give them a payoff. That payoff typically comes in the form of interpretations, data, and perspectives that are credible and that they can’t find anywhere else. Original research—done well, and with the intent of unearthing something new that your customers will care about—has the potential to deliver these things in a bold and unique way, giving you access to insights and information that only you can claim, and allowing you to shape the conversation on terms that distinguish you.

Here are some pointers for leveraging original research and building it into your approach to messaging and content.

Get Edgy And Counterintuitive – One trend that’s both a symptom and a cause of content fatigue is the repackaging of others’ original insights, which some then repurpose without adding anything new to deepen the conversation. That’s a recipe for sounding a lot like everyone and getting ignored by buyers. For your messaging and content to flourish, you need to take edgy, counterintuitive stands that challenge conventional wisdom and run against the grain of “best practices” and popular thought.

And most importantly, to do this well, you need to back your boldest claims with tested and proven research, so that you’re not just touting good feelings and hunches, but you’re getting behind actual principles supported by research that your buyers will find compelling and different from what they’re hearing in other watering holes.

Provide Fresh, Forward-Looking Interpretations – The great thing about original research is that it generates original insights (i.e. data that you have and others can cite). But data points fall flat without a compelling narrative around them—one that’s forward-looking, fresh, and creatively spun. And make no mistake: There is serious demand for high-quality analysis in this vein. A survey from my company revealed the type of insights message B2B marketers and salespeople believe to be most impactful—so-called “visionary” insights, which provide forward-looking market perspectives—is used the least in marketing collateral, while the least effective type of insight—“anecdotal,” which are in-house and best practices-oriented—is used the most.

Partner With A Pro – Developing rigorous, falsifiable research is no small undertaking, and it’s easy to see how the idea of incorporating it into a marketing program might seem daunting. To make that process smoother, my company formed a small research team within our company and contracted with a leading researcher, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business whose research interests—which include persuasion, messaging, and social influence—dovetail with many of the marketing and sales topics that we like to test in a formal environment.

The bar has never been higher for making an impact with your messaging and content, and today, with so-called “content fatigue” setting in, there’s a premium on fresh and original information.

Adding an original research component to your marketing activities is one of the best ways to establish yourself as a source of new insights among your audience. And the best part about it: When you do it well, you get the license to be a little more edgy in your messaging because you’re backing your case up with tested and proven data, not hunches and feelings.

Check out our new eBook, “Good Intentions, Wrong Instincts,” for an example of how to put first-party research into action in your messaging and content.

 

 

door to door Marketing consultant in Pune

door to door Marketing consultant in mumbai

Local Marketing , Advertising, Promotional media, brand promotion,

1to1 brand Activation, Auto Rickshaw Advertising, Analytics Consulting

 

door to door Marketing consultant in Pune

Face to Face Marketing and Door to Door Marketing 

Nothing beats the reality that one gets when you can interact with potential clients face to face physically moving from door to door within a community or household to household, face to face field marketing is also called personal selling or door to door marketing, customers are met directly in order to sell their products, using this method of field marketing we rely on our skills and persuasive abilities. During the period where we get to interact with the client face to face we get more chance to pass across edible information which would be useful to all our customers at that time and it’s also an opportunity for us to get feedback and to gauge your opinion about our business.

Marketing

I did door-to-door sales for nine years, in hundreds of different cities and towns all across the india. Through long, hard, agonizing trial and error, I eventually developed enough skill that I could take any product into any area on any day and make sales.

In the beginning, I struggled. But when I was about to give up on myself and quit (like 99.9% of people that try door-to-door sales do within their first few days),  experienced salesperson to give me a chance to get on track.

What I saw that day changed my life forever.

I watched as the experienced salesperson drove to an area where he had previous sales success, and listened as he explained to me why he parked his car in the exact spot he did to start his day and laid out his exact plan of attack.
Within the first 10 minutes, I learned a valuable lesson that not only made my door-to-door sales career much easier, but has also been the key to bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for my own companies, and those of thousands of others I’ve consulted to:

A current customer is the easiest person to make a sale to – many, many times easier (and less expensive) than trying to get new customers.

Most business owners operate a risky, day-to-day, transactional business, believing that the reason for getting a customer is to make a sale. That’s their biggest problem: making nothing more than “a” sale to a customer. After that initial transaction, they simply hope that their product or service or location is good enough that they will get a repeat visit from that customer.

On the other hand, sharp business owners (and door-to-door salespeople!) know that the point to making a sale is to get a customer. We have systems put together to maximize the value of that customer by making future offers to them, so that they buy more of the same product or service, or a different version, or even an entirely different product or service.

In other words, we recognize that a current customer is the easiest person to sell to, and a prospect is the hardest and most-expensive person to sell to. Therefore, we concentrate on maximizing the value of every new customer we get.

If you want to grow your business during these challenging economic times (and even during boom times), your time and effort should be invested in working to turn prospects into customers and retain them to market to in the future.
While your marketing is doing its job to get you prospects, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:

Inviting
Informative
Enjoyable

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded “buyer’s remorse.” You want to minimize this as best you can, and if you’ve provided a quality product or service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made, the risk will be lower.

However, returns can still occur. Here are the two most effective ways to deal with this:

Offer to refund money — no questions asked
Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product

These offers alone will also lessen the impact of buyer’s remorse, because the customer will trust you more just because you showed the confidence in your product or service to offer these options in the first place.

There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:

Offer a special price as an opportunity for them to test the market.
Offer a lower price with a legitimate reason, such as clearing out inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s braces, or another tangible reason. (Added bonus: Customers love you for doing this, because it makes you so much more human to them.)
Offer a referral incentive.
Offer a smaller, less expensive entry-level product to build trust.
Offer package deals.
Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
Offer extra incentives, such as longer warranties or free bonuses, if they order by a certain date.
Offer financing options, if applicable.
Offer a bonus if they pay in full.
Offer special packaging or delivery.
Offer “name-your-own-price” incentives.
Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
Offer to let them trade up or upgrade to something better if they want.
Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.

The options are really only limited by your imagination and marketing skill. You can use these or other ideas to discover what works the best for your specific business, with your specific products, services and target market.

Even if you ever find yourself doing door-to-door sales.

 

marketing companies in pune

7 responsibilities sales managers must own

Shifts in the business-to-business buying process have transformed selling as we know it. In the past, salespeople had a fair amount of control. They were given a territory, a pricing structure, a margin target and a set of products and services they could offer, and then sent off into the wild blue yonder. They were responsible for managing their territory and producing results. Sales management provided oversight, facilitated requests back to corporate to ensure that orders were expedited, and generally stayed out of the way, unless additional support was needed to help underperformers. That’s how things used to be. Now, the role of sellers — and therefore sales managers — is much different.

The “State of Sales Productivity 2015” study by Docurated found that only one-third of a sales reps’ day is actually spent selling, while 31 percent of their time is spent searching for or creating content, and 20 percent is spent on reporting, administrative and CRMrelated tasks. Nowadays, 82 percent of sales reps feel challenged by the amount of data and the time it takes to research a prospect, according to a study by IKO System.

If you want to thrive in this new era of sales, it is now up to you as a sales manager to view territories, customers and products as if assessing a financial portfolio that you are responsible for investing. The people involved, the marketing dollars spent, and the efforts expended are all for you to decide. It is your responsibility to make your investments wisely.

Since the time and attention of your salespeople are part of that investment, it is your responsibility to own their calendar, their workflow and where they spend their time. You may be of the old mindset that this is micromanagement, but in today’s marketplace, the investment belongs to the company, not the sales rep. This means your role as sales manager must adapt if you want to succeed in life after the death of selling as we know it. Your new responsibilities as a sales manager include the following:

Selecting targets – There’s an adage that salespeople talk to whoever will talk to them. In the new world of selling, your responsibility is to make certain that they are talking to the decision makers who can approve about large opportunities that will come to fruition in the near future. Working with sales leadership, you must establish a filter that helps to define the most likely candidates for higheropportunity sales efforts.

Defining priorities – Help your sales force prioritize what opportunities they pursue and how much time and effort they spend on each opportunity. Good sales managers keep key opportunities that are real and relevant to the current circumstances in the crosshairs of their salespeople.

Defining time guidelines – Set and enforce guidelines for how sellers spend their time. They no longer can just meander about a territory or go on a sweep of their current account base with the intention of “checking in and finding out what’s going on.” Rather, they must undertake a strategic and surgical approach to going after identified targets in a prescribed way.

Monitoring compliance – You are responsible for providing data that allows you and other leaders in the organization to monitor what is happening in the marketplace regarding customers, competitors and surrounding regulations and technology shifts. Consistency in the execution of a sales process gives data to the organization that clarifies what works and what does not. We’re not talking about activity management and monitoring for its own sake. Your focus should be working toward compliance in the sales process to protect the integrity of the data captured so everyone has relevant data for good decision making.

Navigating the terrain – Your sales process lays out a map for action, but a map is just a two-dimensional representation of a sequential process. Good sales management also addresses the third dimension – assessing the terrain of what is going on in the marketplace based on the data you’re getting (including variant data) from the sales process. There will be occasions when you will need to send out a scouting team of select salespeople to find out new information. Then it’s up to you to analyze what they bring back and use that information to better navigate the terrain.

Securing resources – There will be occasions when competing priorities of other departments impede progress on landing a big account. It’s your responsibility to make certain that significant sales opportunities are visible to leadership and to secure from less-than-enthusiastic parties inside your organization the resources needed for a successful sales process.

Knowing when (and when not) to expedite – It’s your job to expedite what needs to be expedited — and to know when not to. If you try to expedite every opportunity, soon no one will respond. Salespeople are often viewed as that proverbial “boy who cried wolf.” For the sake of the organization and for the sake of your reputation and that of your salespeople, you’ll need to be the gatekeeper on when an opportunity needs to be expedited, and when everyone should simply follow the normal sales process.

Tom Searcy is CEO & founder of Hunt Big Sales (HuntBigSales.com), a sales strategy consultant. He is the author of several books, including “Life After the Death of Selling: How to Thrive in the New Era of Sales,” which will be published later this year.

 

The Need to Keep Journalism Free from Paid Public Relations

The Media is an Extension of Big Business Now

In recent years, the concept of paid news and advertorials that are a combination of editorials and advertisements have become commonplace around the world. While the media always had a cozy relationship with the advertisers because both depend on each other for sustenance, the recent trends indicate that this relationship has now transformed itself into a full-blown public relations exercise by the media on behalf of the corporates. One cannot deny the fact that the media is dependent on the corporates for advertisements since the media houses have to sustain themselves monetarily. However, the fact that the line between friendly pieces in newspapers and strategically placed interviews and programs on TV and the need to inform and educate the public rather than indulge in advertisement has been breached. In other words, the media is no longer reporting the stories in an objective and unbiased manner. Rather, they have become the mouthpieces of corporates and anyone with enough money to dictate terms to them. The point here is that the media must not forget its primary function of being a watchdog of democracy and propagating the public good. In the pursuit of advertising Dollars, the media seems to have forgotten this cardinal rule of journalism and instead, have become the paid servants of big business houses and political parties.

Media has Abdicated its Duty as a Watchdog of Democracy

In the United States, the media has always taken a pro-business line in its reporting. Inconvenient facts about big businesses have been ignored or swept away under the carpet and to satisfy their conscience, some minor news items have appeared from time to time. However, in recent years, the media in the US has transformed itself into being the dedicated public relations units of corporates and big business houses. This can be seen in the way the media has reported news items related to the big oil, big Pharma, and big financial conglomerates. Indeed, if the media had done its investigative work properly and paid heed to the numerous whistleblowers who were warning about the impending financial crisis, then the readers would have had time to prepare and protect themselves from the impact of the financial crisis. Indeed, the fact that in the run up to the crisis, the media were going all out proclaiming that the economy was doing fine is a sad commentary on the way the media has been co-opted by big business. Though there were a few stray voices here and there warning of catastrophe, they were either ignored or given some minor coverage, which meant that when the crisis struck, the impact was severe because the average citizen did not have any inkling about the severity of the problem.

Advertorials and Media

The next aspect that has become apparent is that in the US and the UK, the media is now focusing on becoming a paid advertiser for the corporate interests. Considering the fact that the media around the world follow the lead set by these countries, in developing countries and the Third World, it has become commonplace for media houses to blur the distinction between news and advertisements. The situation has become so dire that entire segments in TV and entire pages in newspapers are now devoted to covering corporates in a friendly manner without criticizing them or pointing out flaws and controversies in their operations.

Closing Thoughts

As mentioned earlier, this is a worrisome trend as the developing countries like India have long cherished the independence of the media and the fact that the media in India has always been critical of the wrongdoings of the status quo powers. The reversal of this trend and the co

 

 

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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

 

 

A Strategic Guide Through the Perfect Storm for Sales Management

 

Changed customer behavior and increased negotiation power of the customer induced by technology together with the tough economic conditions create the conditions for a perfect storm that hardly can be weathered by sales management with tried and trusted old tactics.

The book “Rethinking Sales Management” by Beth Rogers is,as the subtitle suggests, “a practical guide for practitioners” how to become more strategic to cope with the challenges of these new normal times.

Beth Rogers has extensive practical experience in marketing and sales roles which she has complemented by in-depth consultancy, research and teaching. Her book therefore stands out from most sales and sales management books. Her advise is not of the type “here is how I was successful and I do not see why this should not work for you”. Instead, she provides the readers with strategic models and facts helping them to understand the ‘Why’ of a situation and then deduct the best course of action suited to context they are in.

In the era of customer orientation, Rogers argues, CSOs should have a seat at the strategy table of their enterprises. The first part of the book is an introduction into strategy; enabling CSOs to get familiar with the language talked there . The first chapter introduces well known strategic concepts like the business portfolio matrix (BCG matrix) used to categorize strategies from a enterprise point of view. (inside -out)

In the second chapter, the focus is on the purchaser’s perspective of strategy (outside- in). Rogers suggest the purchaser’s portfolio matrix as the vehicle to analyze this point of view. This concept is probably less known among C-level executives. Understanding it gives the CSO the opportunity to bring added value to the strategy discussion.

The purchaser’s portfolio matrix first presented by Peter Kraljic in an article of the August-September 1983 issue of the Harvard Business review and then reintroduced by Rackham and DeVincentis in their book “Rethinking the Sales Force” recommends that purchasers should adapt their strategy depending on the complexity of the supply market and the financial impact of the purchase on the enterprise.

In the third chapter, the B2B Relationship Development Box is discussed in depth. This box, also a 2 by 2 matrix, combines the enterprise (internal) view with the purchaser’s (external) view. This model suggests that the nature of customer relationships depends on the value the customers bring to the enterprise and the value the enterprise provides to customers (in their view).

The Relationship Development Box is the essential tool for CSO’s to understand how to organize their resources to execute on their strategies. The second part of the book therefore shows how this tool is used. Each quadrant of the relationship matrix is explained in a separate chapter As not all relationships are worth to be maintained, this part also contains a chapter about exit strategies.

The four relationships discussed are:

  • Strategic (value of the customer to enterprise is high and value of the enterprise to the customer is high). This is the quadrant where Key Account Management is the best fit.
  • Prospective (value of the customer to the enterprise is high and value of the enterprise to the customer is low). This relationship is of transitory nature. Business development is the strategy that can elevate this relationship to a strategic one. But one cannot exclude that the value of the enterprise to the customer cannot be increased. In this case, the enterprise should move the relationship to the tactical quadrant in order to avoid continuous over investment in the relationship.
  • Tactical (value of the customer to the enterprise is low and value of the enterprise to the customer is low). This quadrant is often considered as not very attractive. Considering the use of other channels than a direct field sales force (e.g. Telesales or Channel Partners) is though more viable than considering this relationship as transitory and trying to elevate it to a strategic one.
  • Cooperative (value of the customer to the enterprise is low, value of the enterprise to the customer is high). This is probably the most delicate quadrant to handle. The balance must be found between avoiding over investing in the account and risking competitive vulnerability. The cooperative relationship might therefore also be of transitory nature.

The third part of the book entitled Strategic Focus for 21-st Century Sales Management

addresses four weaknesses observed in the management of the sales function.

  • Reputation Management can be seen as a part of corporate reputation management brought to the fore by new regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Rogers though also cites results from own studies where “breach of trust” was quoted as the single most likely cause of the disintegration of a customer relationship. Maintaining integrity of the sales people as a form of reputation management has though also a direct impact on sales performance. Undue internal pressure and variable pay schemes can negatively influence this performance.
  • Working with Marketing can be a source of so far untapped profitability. Kotler, Rackham and Krishnaswamy in their article in the Harvard Business Review of July/August 2006 believe that there can easily be a gap of 20% in profits between organizations where marketing and sales are aligned compared to companies where sales and marketing work independently in separate silos or even worse fight each other. Also this chapter has a link to the Relationship Box. Rogers suggest that Marketing should have the lead for tactical relationships, whereas Sales should be leading for strategic relationships.
  • Leadership: Five tools are discussed: Awareness (incorporating self awareness and awareness of others), Framework (strategy and values), Extensive Communications, Coaching and Development and finally Trumpeting. The last point is probably not readily understood. It means telling and rewarding people for things they have done right. Although financial rewards are the culture of sales, those rewards do not necessarily have to be only in monetary form.
  • Process Management as a necessary prerequisite for continuous improvement is discussed in this chapter.

This book is a great eye opener to sales people contemplating to become sales managers. After having read it, they will understand the kind of strategic thinking needed to succeed in this role. For sales managers and executives, coming to the realization that their current approach will not bring the expected results in the future, it is an excellent source for understanding how they can evolve their role and being more successful with a strategic approach.

 

 

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