Effective Sales Strategy

A lot of salespeople focus on themselves- their product/ service, their company, how big and great they are etc. They tout the features & benefits of their offerings and talk more and listen less.

Professional and effective salespeople on the other hand, do the opposite- they focus on the customer- they try to identify the client's business pain and what the client needs. They LISTEN more and talk less. They ask targeted and specific questions, to uncover and quantify the pain the client is facing. They understand that its not about them or their product- its about their customer. Its the 80/20 rule- in any sales meeting, the client should be doing 80% of the talking and not the salesperson. They attentively listen, ask questions and let the client speak. No Pain- no Sale.

It is five times more expensive to acquire a net new customer than it is to cross-sell and up-sell to an existing client. Yet, most amateur salespeople sell their product/ service to a customer and move on- they DONOT build the relationship with that particular client- they DONOT stay in touch- they DONOT offer demonstrable VALUE to the client. They DONOT understand the concept of Lifetime Customer Value (LCV).

When you walk into a Mercedes dealership, they are not looking at selling you a car today and then forget about you- their goal is to sell you multiple cars over your lifetime and to sell your children multiple cars over their lifetime-The Net Present Value (NPV) over 40-50 years of revenue generated from your Eco-system for Mercedes is HUGE. They like professional sales people get it. Do you ?
More on this in the next post-stay tuned.....

@value2020 & posts

Hello all

You can follow me on Twitter @value2020.
Also you can read my posts at: http://value2020.wordpress.com/

Please keep in touch!

Farming Analogy to startups

If you're still trying to make sense of why some start-up firms really take off, some don't make as much money as they should and some become a part of your DNA...here goes - it's all to do with farming. A practice nearly as old as humans (except hunting, sex and prostitution), farming is where the answer lies. Or so believes Varun. Nice article. 
Read Varun's article here.

Keep up with the Blog please

Hi all

I know the final papers are in for all. Thanks to all who've been actively writing on this blog. This is a request to all of you to keep contributing to this blog...please keep writing. It's a great way of collectively cull info, share it and get others' views on it too.

I'm going to try...hope you will too.

Thanx again


Anuj

Are Consumers Ready for Mobile Marketing?

Smart phones means that marketers can develop a wider range of pull strategies. For example Smartphone applications such as Amazon price check and Google Shopper allow consumers in a physical retail to access promotional offers, reviews and price comparisons. With the use of Bluetooth and location based marketing there are real opportunities to improve the consumers shopping experience and it’s more timely and relevant for consumers. This helps to reduce “search costs” for the consumer. However, do all consumers want this?

Recent research in Canada on consumer attitudes to mobile marketing via Smartphones found:

-          Consumers want some level of control over the interaction. Consequently brand trust and consumer control via permission are necessary conditions of consumer acceptance. The more control consumers have the deeper the involvement. It should be a mutually beneficial relationship without being intrusive.

-          Younger consumers (18-24) are more open to receiving several marketing messages per day, regardless of whether incentives are provided or not. The majority would proceed cautiously and spend only small amounts (about $20) on mobile purchases.

-          Consumption patterns differ across age groups. Consumers 13-24 use their smart phones more for texting, taking photos, social networking and viewing videos. Older consumers 35-54 use their phones for email, maps, news and banking.

-          Not all consumers want discounts and are less price sensitive, some are more brand conscious and do not value price comparison information. Some consumers are impulsive and don’t care about reviews and price comparison information. Price sensitive consumers will find comparison shopping more beneficial.

Recognizing these differences will help to develop a more informed marketing strategyand applying many time tested marketing segmentation and targeting principles.

Persaud, A and Azhar, J (2012), “Innovative Mobile Marketing via Smartphones: Are Consumers Ready?” , Marketing Intelligence and Planning, Vol 30. Iss: 4

Sentiment Analysis of Internet Opinion

The past few years have seen an increase in the "sentiment analysis" industry, which is made up of different types of internet companies who specialize in tracking, monitoring, analyzing, and reporting internet activities, popular topics of the moment, key opinion leaders, as well as opinion trends over time. This type of information is valuable for companies concerned with managing the perceptions of their brand(s), for public relations and advertising firms, as well as for politicians and even for countries to gauge news and popular sentiment.

This Forbes article highlights how recent advances allow for more real-time monitoring of current sentiment, such as by monitoring activity on Twitter. Another recent article argues that businesses need better sentiment analysis. One of the challenges of sentiment analysis is training internet crawlers and bots to understand language tonality as well as nuance. In mining all the enormous amounts of data on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, news comments, blogs, etc, a great deal of interpretation takes place which may not be easy for a computer program to easily decipher.

Marketing Attribution -- assigns value to each channel

In our course we learnt about many online and offline channels to market. Number of channels keeps growing and marketing is becoming more and more complex. When a conversion happens which marketing channel gets the credit? For example, a consumer who is in the market to buy a camera, s/he viewed few TV commercials of Nikon, viewed few times display ads while reading Yahoo email, searched Google to research for Nikon models and clicked on few links and advertisements and discussed with friends on Facebook and saw advertisements on Facebook and then bought it on Amazon. For this sale, how to attribute which channel(s) influenced consumer sale? There is no accurate way to come up with an answer. But when we look at these data points across more customers, we can derive patterns of influence and attribute value to the channels. In the industry different attribution models and techniques are evolving to solve this complex problem. Using market attribution techniques marketers can optimize usage of their budget for greater ROI. I will give an example just to give a flavor of how a simple marketing attribution model works. In this simple example, say we have only 5 customers who converted and got exposed to four different channels that the product got advertized. In this table value 1 indicates customer has seen the advertisement in that channel and value 0 indicates customer hasn’t exposed in the channel. Here by looking at this table, which channel you give most credit? Most likely we say Google as most converted customers exposed to Google.

	TV	Google	Facebook	Display Ad
Customer 1	1	0	0	1
Customer 2	0	1	0	1
Customer 3	0	1	1	0
Customer 4	0	1	1	0
Customer 5	0	1	1	0
Total	1	4	3	2

Table-1: Converted Customers only data points

In Table-1 we just looked at converted customers data points. In table-2 we combine all people who are exposed to the advertisements. Just to simplify say we have only 10 people who are exposed to the advertisements and 5 of them converted customers that we already looked in Table-1 and 5 non-converted. When you see both the records, now which channel advertisement you think has more influence in buying our product?

	TV	Google	Facebook	Display Ad
Customer 1	1	0	0	1
Customer 2	0	1	0	1
Customer 3	0	1	1	0
Customer 4	0	1	1	0
Customer 5	0	1	1	0
Not Converted	1	0	0	0
Not Converted	0	1	0	0
Not Converted	0	1	0	0
Not Converted	0	1	1	1
Not Converted	1	1	0	0
Total exposed to Customers	1	4	3	2
Total exposed to non-customers	2	4	1	1

Table-2: Converted and non-converted customers data points

Answer is Facebook, because even though only 4 customers got exposed to Facebook ad, out of 4 three of them got converted. So facebook advertisement seems to have more influencing in converting the customers than other channels based on these data points. So we attribute more value to Facebook channel than other channels.  

In real world the marketing attribution problem is much more complex and data intensive and there are products specialized in solving complex attribution problems. These products use complex modeling techniques to calculate attribution to different channels and helping marketers optimize their usage of budget and gain higher ROI. 

For more details you could refer to

http://www.inc.com/casey-szulc/why-you-should-care-about-marketing-attribution.html

http://www.visualiq.com/wave-report-pdf-download