Selling-An Art

"An incredibly busy social life, full of free meals and days on the golf course. That they get to travel to all sorts of interesting places and stay in great hotels, eat in fancy restaurants, and get to meet and entertain all kinds of interesting people. What a wonderful life they lead!"


Yes, here I am talking about our sales force who acts as the pillars of the company. Isn't the life they lead sounds interesting!!!!!!!

Young Talents - Embrace Happiness

The budding managers are the fresh victims of the hard faced, tight scheduled, target oriented work life. They are not acclimatized to handle work stress thereby tending to forget happiness or when they laughed last. They become the prey of alcoholism and other injurious habits. Why can't they be oriented towards the quality of life through enlightening them towards the perspectives of happiness? Once they imbibe the spirit of being happy, they would tend to put the worries out of their mind and start loving the targets and deadlines. They would embrace happiness and lead the life of complacency.

Mentoring!!!

"Trust is not a matter of technique, but of character; we are trusted because of our way of being, not because of our polished exteriors or our expertly crafted communications." --Marsha Sinetar

Companies are looking for better ways to develop the talents they owe while simultaneously creating value. Companies can optimize their social capital through a robust system of thought partnerships, which have as their goal shared learning and collaborative problem solving in the service of the enterprise.

One technique for supporting thoughts partnerships and developing leaders at every level is Mentoring. It's a technique in which a person wishing to learn (Protégé) accompanies observes and collaborates with the Mentor, while mentor is employing their expertise on a value producing assignment.

Presentation is an ART

Presentation is an integral part of the practicing as well budding managers. The practice managers have to present their project to the top management through PPT. The utility of the  ppt is not limited with in the organization only but the executives have to use it external stake holders like customers, clients or vendors also.

Branding Challenge in Today's Scenario

The battle for a share of the consumer's wallet and cut throat competition for every bit of market space has resulted in search for a powerful weapon that delivers sustainable competitive differentiation. In the beginning itself it is of great relevance to quote Philip Kotler, marketing guru about his perception on brands, "Branding is expensive and time consuming and it can make or break a product." But even then, today, branding is such a strong force that hardly anything goes unbranded. No one had thought that commodities like "Aata", & "Rice" would be branded. Today, one does not go to the shop and ask for just salt but will ask for Tata Salt or Captain Cook Salt or Annapurna Salt. These brands have become part of our daily life. Developing of an effective brand allows the organization to create a distinctive presence in the market and compete more effectively by leveraging its organizational strengths. In the current competitive market, brands are identified as an intangible asset that can be revenue generating in the long run.

Branding-An Overview

An Overview"
A brand is a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the descriptive verbal attributes and concrete symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme that convey the essence of a company, product or service. Brand recognition and other reactions are created by the accumulation of experiences with the specific product or service, both directly relating to its use, and through the influence of advertising, design, and media commentary. A brand is a symbolic embodiment of all the information connected to a company, product or service. A brand serves to create associations and expectations among products made by a producer. A brand often includes an explicit logo, fonts, color schemes, symbols and sound which may be developed to represent implicit values, ideas, and even personality. The key objective is to create a relationship of trust.

Why Do We Need Different Selling Approaches for Larger and Smaller Sales?

According to the Principle of Pareto, "Twenty percent of your time generates 80 percent of your results." And this 80% of results are from major accounts. Selling a fan to an individual is quite different from that to an institution.  Smaller sales are the ones which involve less commitment in terms of time, money and effort by the customer. In larger sales such parameters are more and the people involved in decision making are also more.

When one understands the key differences that a sales person would face in the selling process between larger and smaller sales, he would not deny the need for different selling approaches to them.

Key differences between Larger and Smaller Sales

	SMALLER SALES	LARGER SALES
1	Decision making is fast and may happen before the sales person for which he acts as an assurance.	Decision making is time consuming and decision making may happen even in the absence of sales person. The importance of the centers of influence is more critical in this case. It is therefore essential that a sales person has a spokes person who can do the selling on his behalf even in his absence.
2	Needs more exploration of Problems. E.g. Lack of calculator in the class may give rise to several problems to the student.	Needs more exploration of the serious implications of the generic problems. E.g. Lack of a vehicle to a student can create problems such as poor time keeping for which the other implications are poor image among friends, not able to concentrate effectively due to additional physical effort, poor impression with the faculty which ultimately has an impact on the marks awarded, not able to use time effectively like his counterpart etc.
3.	Needs through product knowledge to impress customers	Sometimes mere product knowledge may backfire on the effectiveness of the call. It might prevent the sales person from getting into the shoes of the customer.
4	Product Demonstrations are more powerful and influential at the time of delivery. Research says if 8 key benefits are presented all of them would be remembered till the next day before which the decision is normally made.	Demonstration effect fades away slowly after delivery. About 5.7 points remembered after a week and 2 points remembered after10 days. As large sales proceeds for a longer time pure reliance on product demonstration might not help.
5	Customers are less conscious of the value of the solution.	Customers are highly sensitive towards the perceived value of the solution. So they should understand the various ways in which the solution would be of use to them.
6	Features based selling : More features all at a lesser cost is the selling point.	Benefits based selling: Matching the solution with the specific need of the customer and thereby enabling him to understand the benefits of the solution offered is the selling point.
7.	Closing techniques such as   alternative close, standing room close etc. might be required to finish the deal.	Closing techniques might invoke doubt in the minds of the customers about the credibility of the solution offered.

It is therefore apparent from the above points that a company has to necessarily distinguish between its larger and smaller sales and clearly adopt suitable strategies to enable success to the sales call and the Sales People.