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How to hire a Good Sales person?

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How to Hire a good Sales Person. Sales is the oxygen of a product marketing company. Organizations succeed when sales and revenue targets are met. When sales aren’t firing from all its cylinders the organization is saddled with lower capacity utilization and higher fixed cost, higher inventory of finished goods / raw material and fully utilized working capital limits. In such a situation the sales team end up attributing the weak results to (m)any of these - Aggressive competition, Higher market spends & promotion schemes, Better advertising and spend, Superior competition product. Under these circumstances, crafted strategy often ends up with recommendations such as redesigning sales incentives, increase the sales head count, increased advertising spend, higher discounts and attractive payment terms. All of these are usually the right levers to play and might yield results but end up draining the organization resources when the “Sales team” is weak. A weak sales team e...

Planning to consult for an SME or looking for a Consultant for your SME - Expect these

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Are you in the business of Consulting? Are you looking for a Business Consultant to scale your SME business? If you are an SME, the framework below gives you an insight into what are the non-business challenge that a consulting company would face when they come on board. Be aware and don't let these affect your consultant. Your results will come faster. If you are a consulting firm, expect these challenges depending upon what kind of SME is your client. SME in India contribute to 45% of Industrial output and 40% of India's exports. As India marches to the $5 trillion economy by 2025, major impetus is given to SME sector in India. So SME are likely to create more employment opportunities and business opportunities.                   Enterprise Evolution / Management / Proof of Concept (P0C) Promoter’s problem in scaling up Promoter’s mindset in engaging a Management Consult...

What's the role of your Website?

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What's the role of your Website? Designing a great website – A primer. A great design starts with a great purpose. Let’s first answer the question “What’s the role of your Website”? Digital is an important element of any business growth story. Entrepreneurs form their company and immediately want their Digital platforms like Website / LinkedIn / FB / Twitter account to be in place. Among various Digital elements, this blog will focus on the Website, its role and what constitutes a successful one? Let’s answer the two questions. What’s the role of a website? Is it to have a digital identity, provide information to seekers (your Customers / Employees / Potential hire / Vendors), or is it to grow the business by generating leads, transact business? As you notice, it can be (m)any or all and more. Having this clarity is important as the user can be different. What a customer may look for in a Website is different for what a potential hire is looking for.   A custom...

Uber - Who is happy and Who is Worried

Uber - Who is happy and Who is worried? During my business trips to other cities in India, I rely on UBER and it hasn’t let me down. For starters, I average 10 UBER rides a week minimum (no pooling). I have traveled in the best maintained cars to the ones where shock absorbers do a role reversal of giving you back, cars with AC vents that can leave you infected. Being a Business Consultant, I often engage the drivers / owner cum driver, curious to understand the economics and their satisfaction of partnering with UBER for their earning. This conversation with a random set of drivers may not make sense statistically, but my understanding is gathered over talking to at least 300 drivers over the last 1 year. All of them concurred gingerly and unanimously, that their trips per day have reduced owing to the large fleet of UBER and OLA on road. Couldn’t find a better example of the investment guru WARREN BUFFETT’s prophetic statement, “When everyone gets greedy - you get cautious a...
What a SME can learn from an MNC to scale up India is undergoing a startup revolution. Every decade is characterized by unique business revolution and this decade belongs to ecommerce, fin-tech, startups & VC firms. The business journals and dailies are busy and never tired of covering news from startups / SME owing to their valuation, attracting investments, flight of human capital, technological breakthrough and innovations. This pace of Indian revolution augurs well for the country and it has come at an important time when successful SME’s are fueling their vision to become more successful. As an SME grows, it reaches an important intersection of being successful yet unable to scale up. Many SME go through this phase of wanting to scale up and they can learn a lot from successful Indian companies and MNC. “Scaling up” is often referred to replicating the business model across geographies or introducing more variants in their core product offering.   At this...

Customer Centricity

A successful brand assigns certain weight to manage defectives replacement strategies from its Marketing budgets. Its because they realize that this cost outweighs the  cost of acquiring new customers . Successful companies spend on improving customer ownership experience and reap the rewards that come through reference. Every customer has a LTV (Life Time Value) and successful companies harness this metric by focusing on customer delight. Along the customer lifecycle, his experiences with the brand determine whether he would be a terrorist, indifferent or a fan of the brand. In today’s world of digital connect, a dissatisfied customer’s voice is heard louder and can wreck a brand.  The dominant sound of that dissatisfaction stems from lack of or a tepid response to their problems and / or an ineffective solution provided by the brand. Today companies are investing in technology and solutions to proactively engage customers to gain insights and earn trust. Many CEO ar...

Hiring Curse

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HIRING CURSE Good is the enemy of Great! Successful organizations are created when mediocrity is banned, average is shunned and above average is discouraged.  Successful organizations have iconic leaders  who are revered by the investors, employees and vendors , who mature into a brand internally.  In today’s world, companies need to hire for attitude and give them the skill than the other way. A good leader when hired doesn’t need an induction, handover, job description or process exposure.  He will discern and transcend them quickly to work on results. Unfortunately such successful people are already in great jobs and are taken. Hence spotting and attracting talent is paramount to building a fine institution. Many organizations  today suffer without proper leadership and languish in mediocrity. When the investor decides to hire the leadership team, he entrusts it to specialized hiring firms. Often hiring firms start without a proper brief about...