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How to warm up your prospect’s cold feet

You’ve labored for months with a prospect who seemed interested in your services. She returned calls and replied promptly to emails. Everything was moving right along and then … nothing. Nada. Radio silence. No more returned calls. No more email exchanges. And no explanations.

Frantically, you mentally retrace your steps and re-read email threads to find clues behind this maddening silence. Finally, she calls…but only to explain that she’s had second thoughts, looked into alternatives, and is now leaning toward a competitor.

Sound heart-breakingly familiar?

While it’s not uncommon for a prospect to second-guess a big decision, it’s also relatively common for top-notch sales professionals to persuade the prospect to revisit their initial interest and seal the deal. The key is to help your prospect come to their own conclusion AND stick with you.

A ValueSelling Framework® core principle is that “people need a reason to change.” Change is difficult for many people because of the risk and uncertainty that is attached to it. In order to find the source of apprehension, have a conversation that includes well-placed anxiety questions. Anxiety questions, asked correctly, will lead a client or customer to understand the unique value of your offerings.

Consider one or more of the following anxiety question tactics. Ask questions that:

  • Develop a reason to change from the prospect’s perspective by uncovering their key business issues
  • Help cast doubt in the prospect’s mind about the value of a competitor’s products or services
  • Create a sense of urgency

For example, “How do your company’s products stack up against the competition in terms of reliability?” or “Does your company’s service record trump others?” Ask your prospect if they have considered the consequences if a machine is out of service. Make sure you phrase it so that they momentarily experience the anxiety they would feel if their system shut down. This way, you’re challenging their current thinking without insulting their intelligence or damaging the connection you’ve established.

As a salesperson, you can’t force a customer to change. But you can help people fully understand their business issues and realize, on their own, the need to change direction. If you can lead conversations to uncover conditions and reveal consequences the prospect may not have considered, you create opportunities to steer them back around to your solution.

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Connect your digital resources from inside to outside the company to stay ahead in digital race: Digitalized Customer requirements

In this global digital world new digital services are raising the bar of enterprise offerings. Customer behavior is rapidly shifting as more people use digital devices and platforms intensively. Customer is slowly changing into ‘e-customers’ with the use of internet, mobile devices and social media on the rise.

To survive this digital world enterprises are becoming customer centric and the most efficient ones are leading the race. The approach for customer experience must be re-mastered; highly interactive, personalized and consistent communication across multiple channels is the key for enhanced customer experience.

Enterprises are digitally transforming rapidly not only their products but also their workflow. Enterprises are investing heavily in their own customer data and data from external sources like social media, where people comment freely about products and companies. Data analytics then plays a vital role in transforming this data into meaningful information that again decides on what has to be offered to the customer to improve experience.

Digitalizing processes would connect the sales team, marketing team, customer care, management and other departments together to share information for better customer experience and loyalty.

Enhancing customer experience with

Unified Platform – existing legacy processes should be transformed to a single application catering to multiple users for consistent communication. Single application will reduce operating costs. Communication will be consistent across all customer communication channels.

Email – engage customers with interactive documents for a two way interaction and reducing the numbers of calls to CRM. Customer appreciates communication through a digital copy rather than CRM.

Mobile – today’s mobile mind shift requires enterprises to communicate on the go with digital customers. By 2017, 88% of the US adult online population will own smart phones and 54% will own tablets*.

Print – in this digital age there are customers who prefer communication through physical copy, provided it is personalized and relevant.  Physical documents are one of the strongest ways to communicate with a customer.

Self-care – give a personalized self-care portal to customers for a two way automated communication and a greater control over communication.

We have moved to a digital era and companies are trying to match with the customers digital expectations. Enterprises will start transforming business support system in a digital way to make a first step towards digital revolution.

 

 

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When it comes to selling, you’re as good as your word(s)

EmoticonToday’s slangy emoji text culture may have you thinking that formally written communications are a lost art. Don’t believe it. When it comes to professional communications, poised and precise prose rules over the casually misspelled messages passing between colleagues.

This is especially true for sales professionals, since selling is fundamentally a communication process. No one wants the strides made during sales calls to be undermined by weak writing skills.  Properly crafted follow-up emails and formal proposals provide a planned opportunity to recap and confirm discussions, establish mutual plans, and remain connected between talks with the underlying benefit of staying at the top your prospect’s radar.

Yet, there’s not a single formula that works for each sale; your choice of words and how to present them will depend on who you are addressing.  Here are some writing tips to support – and not sabotage – your sales efforts:

Keep the customer in mind. Words help build relationships, so choose them carefully. Use words and concepts familiar to your prospect or client. It’s important that as you draft the correspondence, you are capturing your client’s point of view.  Use less “I hope…” and “I believe…” and more “you will realize…” and “your benefits will be…”

Be concise. Sometimes more isn’t better. After you create a draft, edit it down to the essentials. The clearer your message, the higher probability your customer will remember it.

Make it attractive. People appreciate copy that is attractive to the eye – that is, shorter paragraphs instead of long, rambling ones.  Busy people often scan longer documents, so bullet points are an effective way to break up copy into bite-sized, easily digestible pieces.

Don’t trust spell check. Programs to double-check spelling and grammar are great, but they are far from perfect. For instance, homonyms such as they’re, their, and there will pass the spell check but still be used in the wrong context. And we’ve all read hilarious, embarrassing autocorrects. Don’t let the joke be on you: Carefully read what you write before you hit “Send”.

Don’t be an illusionist: The single biggest problem in communication is that “we listen to reply and not to understand” , so its all the more important to be extremely clear in what we want to communicate.

Remember, carefully written messaging is a continuous effort that deserves proper attention. After all, if your written communications aren’t working for you, they could be working against you and impact your ability to advance your sale. Make sure your choice of words speak highly of you.

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Airwoot – Revolutionize customer support on Social Media


Airwoot is a social customer service helpdesk, using a sophisticated filtering and priority engine that separates social chatter from relevant support queries, which enables brands to deliver real-time customer support on top of social media.

On April 3rd, Avinash and I had a telephonic chat with Saurabh Arora on the story behind Airwoot, their current customers and future roadmap.

Q. Could you give our readers some background about Airwoot and how you started the venture.

[Airwoot]: We were a bunch of PhD guys who got together in December 2011 to experiment different things on social media and extracting intelligence out of it. One of the things that we tried was to find who was reading what as this will give insights on who is purchasing what kind of books. While on it, we realized more consumers were found complaining about the product than accepting and endorsing the product. Then we turned our focus to figure out how companies and brands were responding to such complaints.  We started tracking some of the active international brands on Twitter and realized that they were not able to handle the social engagement appropriately with often slow and ineffective responses. We studied the tools which these brands were using to do social customer support, and realized that there was no optimized solution out there for brands. We came up with Airwoot to solve this problem. Airwoot uses the combination of data science and user experience offering a smart customer service helpdesk which enables brands to deliver effective and real-time customer support on top of social media.

Q. Please tell us a bit about what your product does.

[Airwoot]: Airwoot uses sophisticated natural language processing and machine learning techniques to pick out the actionable conversations in real-time. It automatically identify people who need engagement in real-time. The more brands and marketers use it the smarter it gets. Airwoot captures your social etiquette and creates a social priority inbox for you.

The Airwoot team has built tools and framework from scratch to understand the new language of social media and how a brand interacts with these messages. Basically, brands sign up on Airwoot and connect their social channels Airwoot listens in real-time each time users mention brands on social channels. It then identifies customers who need help from the brand and collaborates with the company team in real-time in order to provide support. It sets and tracks measurable social goals such as service levels for responses and customer satisfaction. It also manages complex workflows with a brand’s multiple social media channels.

Which social media platforms do you cover?

[Airwoot]: We cover Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. We are not there on LinkedIn and we do not intend to cover it in the recent future.

airwootWhat kind of analytics support does your tool provide?

[Airwoot]:Airwoot’s philosophy is to find deeper insights about social traffic and figure out trends from this traffic.

For example, if a user has complained about delivery more than once, there could be a potential trend. Our algorithms than figure whether others are having similar complains and how often it is happening. Brands can dive into details of different metrics and also generate reports such as pivot tables on the fly.

We are also doing a lot of analytics on the performance side. Companies can view how their team is performing and set social goals on Airwoot. E.g. companies can view the response time and assess whether their goals are being met.

What kind of sentiment analysis does Airwoot do?

[Airwoot]: We get this asked a lot. We are not just doing sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis is about saying positive or negative about something. We go into actionable analysis. At Airwoot, we have built a powerful semantic engine which filters and classifies each social media mention in order to figure out if it requires the brand response or not. The tool tells brands whether there is any actionable item for them, and when they take an action, the tool learns from it and adapts accordingly.

What kind of results are your customers able to see after using your product?

[Airwoot]: Different brands are able to see different results and improvements by using Airwoot.

MakeMyTrip is among the fastest online brands while responding to customers on social platforms.  Earlier, their response time was 3.5-4 hours and this has now come down to less than 17 minutes.

Jet Airways is successfully using Airwoot to talk to disgruntled flyers. A lot of celebrities use Jet Airways and a social media post by any of them about a bad flying experience can be a disaster for Jet Airways. Airwoot provides them with real time crisis alerts telling them whether the conversations could go viral and that they should contain them.

Jabong on the other hand is using Airwoot to delight their customers when they face repeated problems. E.g. if a customer has faced delivery problem twice, send them a coupon or something.

Airwoot seems to use advance Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning algorithms, which form the core of the product. How are you protecting your IPs related to this?

[Airwoot]: Patent filing is both a time consuming and costly affair. We are beginning the process for it. Also, we have also believed in going for 10x improvement rather than 10% improvement. This means that our algorithms are constantly upgrading and ensuring that we stay ahead of our competitors.

How does the roadmap for Airwoot look like in the next few months?

[Airwoot]: We are going to go deeper into analytics and devise diagnostic algorithms that will also tell brands why certain metrics are going down or not performing as envisaged.

What are some of your biggest challenges?

[Airwoot]: The biggest challenge that we face is the lack of understanding of social media among marketers. While everyone thinks they are a guru, but most brand managers are not clear about what they want to achieve on social. Hence a lot of our effort goes in educating customers.

How did you manage to rope in big brands in such a short span of time?

[Airwoot]: Our investors helped us open the doors to some of the brands. However, they can only open the door, it’s the merits of the products that help decide whether you stay inside the door or not. We received good feedback about our product from our initial customers and the word of mouth took us further ahead.

Are you going to go international soon?

[Airwoot]: Yes, we are going for an international launch soon and you would be soon hearing about it.

 

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Move vs Hire – establishing a beachhead in the US

I have written many posts on what it takes to enter the US market. Most of my past posts have been around sales and marketing. However, there is a much more fundamental, one might say visceral, approach to entering a new market. How committed are you to it? As the famous anecdote goes of the hen laying an egg (the hen is involved) vs the chicken that gets cooked (the chicken is committed). Does the commitment involve time and resources spent in building an overseas organization by remote control i.e. while the founders remain in India or does it involve at least one of the founders moving to the US?

This is a tricky one and a dilemma that many startups deal with. On the one hand, we live in a highly connected world where it should be theoretically possible to build organizations remotely. On the other hand, one really does not get a good flavor for a market unless one is immersed in it. So what is the right model?


In my experience I have see three different models in place. Two work and one mre often that not, doesn’t. The one that is a waste of time and money, in my opinion, is one where the founder travels frequently to the US to try and make a sale and build an organization. I have found that this model takes an immense toll on the individual without actually achieving much since the commitment to the US market is lacking

The two models that seem to work reasonably well are ones in which either one of the founders moves to the US and builds an organization or the founders make a key first hire in the US and get that individual to build out a US organization.

So with that said, should one of the founders be US Employee #1? The answer is a qualified yes. However, there are clearly some things companies should think about before having one of the key executives move.

Known quantities – There is tremendous comfort in knowing who you are working with. If your first hire in the US is somebody you have worked with in the past, then the case for one of the founders moving to establish a beachhead is somewhat diminished.

Established support eco-system – If there is an existing eco-system of individuals in the US that the company has worked with in the past, it is a huge benefit and could outweigh the costs – both in terms of resources and time, of a founder moving to the US. The eco-system can be leveraged for initial growth.

High-touch vs low-touch business – Whatsapp made major inroads into geographies outside of the US and India even though they were not physically present in most of the geographies. If your product is high-touch, complex, high-dollar and requires evangelizing, you need a strong champion in the US – a founder moving to the US is usually a good bet. If not, think hard about it. Can you do it more smartly, remotely?

Business Objectives – This is critical. A company really needs to look at the short-term goals and figure out what is the most effective way of getting to them. If, for instance, a short-term goal includes raising a large sum of money from a Silicon Valley VC, well then one of the founders better high tail it over to the Bay Area sharpish.

Entering a new market is not for the faint-hearted. It takes time, patience and commitment and there is no guarantee of success. However, you can improve your odds being smart about it. So as to whether or not a founder should move to the US – I’d say “Probably, but it depends”.  So what IS the right model for you?

Agree. Disagree. Or have another viewpoint. Would love to hear your thoughts.

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Behind the scenes of the new FusionCharts website – A step by step account

On 1st Feb 2014, we launched a new website for FusionCharts after 7 months of intense work. And two months after launch, now that we are done fixing all the bugs and optimizing the important touchpoints, I thought it might be a good idea to share everything that went into the new website – right from the objectives we set for ourselves to the tech and design choices we made to the SEO and analytics strategy we implemented.

I am going to set the context by interviewing myself after which we will jump right into the slideshow having the detailed process.

(Sanket – interviewer): 7 months for a new website, huh? Don’t you have better things to do?

(Sanket – guest): No.

(Sanket – interviewer): Why don’t you have better things to do?

(Sanket – guest): Because the website is our main shop, so it’s very very important for us.

Interviewer: Ha! So why did you need a new website in the first place?

Guest: Because I felt like it.

Interviewer: Being cocky is my job.

Guest: Sorry.

Well, we needed a new website because there were a lot of pain points we had with the previous one and also because we wanted to build for the future.

The previous website we had had started looking old, wasn’t particularly fast, could not be SEO-d properly because of architecture limitations, and had also gotten clumsy with all the additions we made to it over time.

Also, we wanted to have a responsive website given that 10% of our visitors are from mobiles and tablets (and will only increase in the future), move to the LAMP stack (from IIS6), integrate a CMS into the website, build measurability into everything we have on the website and most of all, have a great experience across all touchpoints which in turn would improve our conversion rates.

Interviewer: Still doesn’t sound like a lot. Why did it take 7 months?

Guest: Yeah 7 months is a long time but we really wanted to get our website right this time. It has over 400 pages of content (or 1400 if you were to count our complete demos section), so it was a massive project. We also redid all our demos, which are very comprehensive themselves. And the biggest reason why it took so long is because we did all of it in-house with a 4-person team – me, 1 designer, 1 front-end developer and 1 back-end developer (excluding the demos which had a separate team).

Interviewer: You talk a lot.

Guest: Didn’t you call me here for that?

Interviewer: What was the process like?

Guest: And then you say I talk a lot.

We started right from setting the objectives, putting together what success would look like in the end, define the journey users would have on the website, get the information architecture in place, write content, design, develop and launch it. And of course, there are things like choosing the server hardware, incorporating the SEO strategy and building analytics into every action we wanted to measure. I have detailed all these steps in the slideshow below.

And even after we launched it, we are constantly optimizing and improving the experience on the website by looking at the data coming in and the feedback from our users.

Interviewer: So you are still not done, huh?

Guest: You could say that.

Interviewer: Are you happy with the results? Did you achieve everything you set out to achieve?

Guest: Wish I could say that.

Interviewer: So you wasted your time?

Guest: No, never said that. I would say we have achieved 70% of our objectives and are still working on the others – constantly experimenting, optimizing, keeping what works, documenting what doesn’t.

Interviewer: Not too bad then?

Guest: Yeah, not bad at all.

Interviewer: One last question. Do you like interviewing yourself?

Guest: Absolutely. I will do it again.

The complete process – Slideshow

And now without further ado, here is the slideshow that captures everything that went into revamping our website. I hope you will find it helpful when you decide to revamp your own website, either entirely or in part.
And of course, if you have thoughts on what we could have done better, please let me know in the comments.
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Where to use Animated Video Content

Animated MickeyWalt Disney drew the mouse in 1928. That’s 86 years ago ! And until recently, cartoons were for kids.

Pixar made adults fall in love with Animation. And pay for it.  Pixar

It started in 1995 with Toy Story and recently evangelists like James Cameron and Steven Spielberg have set new standards with content like Avatar and Tintin.

Of course – these productions are expensive and are designed for a different purpose. But when it comes to Animated content – we all love them because they are harmless.

Lovable, memorable, actionable – as we call them at the factory.

Here are 5 places where your animated video stories can impact your sales conversations.

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wheretousevideos_events

You’ll meet people. Prospects come to your booth. They don’t know you – you don’t know them. Always open with a joke.

Animated films like this will pique enough curiosity that they’ll want to ‘know more’. That’s your cue right there.

“We used these videos at our HiTec booth last year and they were great. They worked well for us to engage our customers at the booth.”

Neha Singh, Senior Marketing Manager, Knowcross.

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wheretousevideo_stores

Before you show them your software UI – tell them a funny story. Tell them what catastrophe will befall upon them if they don’t use your software !

Okay that was a bit extreme – but videos like this are perfect for any webstore.

“The video worked well to attract people to download Keymails and try it out. Without the video we’d have to show screens and the core concept of why we made the tool would have been lost.”

Pankaj Kulkarni, Founder Keymails.com

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wheretousevideo_sales

We’re all busy. So are your prospects. Instead of spending time writing long emails – which also take time to read and comprehend – make them smile. And wrap your promise inside that smile.

Investors, prospects, employees – we are all stressed at work. No one wants to meet you without a purpose. Give them one – inside 100 seconds.

“We want to point and shoot – not spray and pray. Its easier to start a meeting with a premise set – and this video will help us do exactly that.”

Aniket Thakur, Marketing Manager, KPIT Technologies Ltd.

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wheretousevideo_journos

They aren’t techies. Don’t expect them to understand your tech. Just give them a use-case. And they’ll write about it. All journos are looking for cool stories.

“There was no better way to explain Planned Departure to Journalists. The video worked perfectly there.”

Komal Joshi – Founder PlannedDeparture.com

Content is always supposed to start conversations. And nothing gets a conversation going faster than Audio Visual content.

Where have you used your animated content recently? How has that worked – tell me in the comments below. If your data is verifiable  – I’ll build an infographic around it and promote your product for free.

Disclaimer – all videos in this post have been produced at the GVT factory.

 

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Key Takeaways from the 25th #PlaybookRT at Bangalore – Sales for Startups

The 25th playbook roundtable held last week (01 March 2014) brought together about 14 startup practitioners to discuss and gain insights on some of the challenging aspects of Sales in product companies. This roundtable was hosted at Accel Partners office in Bangalore, and was led by Aneesh Reddy, from Capillary Technologies. In a span of about 5 hours, a diverse set of topics were discussed. Prominent takeaways from the roundtable were insights on approaches to pricing, decision making during sales cycles, dealing with resellers and partners, setting up a sales team for the first time, how to plan for your Sales team when you are scaling up and dealing with Sales in new geographies. The following paragraphs detail the key learning from each of these above aspects.

When to setup your first sales team?

Entrepreneurs should be selling themselves till they achieve repeatable revenue streams, irrespective of the sector and nature of the offering. One should start looking at a dedicated sales team only when the founding team cannot anymore respond to leads / queries in a time bound manner.

If the founding team does not have deep skills in selling, it may be useful to involve a consultant to setup the team and the processes and learn on the way. Firms such as Gosonix have helped setup the sales processes for startups as they began to address increasing customer interest.

There are also organizations that provide inside sales services to startups. A few startups such as Freshdesk have benefited by use of such extended inside sales teams.

Inside Sales Operations and Management

Based on the target geography that you are working on, one should use the qualification criteria to build a sales pipeline. Macro parameters such as number of employees or revenue of the enterprise in the segment and country that you are targeting to sell provide good starting points to develop the qualification criterion.

Inside sales activities have yielded good results in English speaking countries such as US and Europe, however, has been very difficult and non-efficient in UAE, South Asia and non English speaking parts of Africa.

Accent training is a must if you are reaching out to customers outside India. Training partners are available to help you with accent training needs of your sales team.

For markets such as South Asia, cold calling does not work – since language barriers and culture is not very assimilative. Field business development operations are cheaper than inside sales operations if the target market of focus is on South Asian countries.

Sales Best Practices

A 30 second script consisting of factoids describing who you are, what you do, which customers have you dealt with, how has it helped them is a must for any startup Sales – irrespective of whether you set shop just today, or if you are scaling your startup.
Have a clear separation of duties amongst your lead generators and deal closers. Usual practice is to hire a deal closing guy for about 5 lead generators.

Ensure efficiency in your Sales operation by tracking the conversion of calls to meetings to actual leads and finally to conversions or drop-outs. Expect about 1 lead to come for qualification from about 10 calls on an average.

Once you have a lead, qualify the lead using the B.A.N.T or the more comprehensive S.C.O.T.S.M.A.N technique to ensure you spend the optimal time on that lead.

Differentiate and track marketing generated leads and inside sales generated leads. Provide visibility to the Field Sales personnel on the source of the lead to ensure they have the right context to qualify and initiate a discussion with the prospect.

Indian customers – especially in the SMB segment take a lot of time to decide to buy. Keep them engaged continuously with good marketing content after initial contact. They will get in touch with you and buy when they decide to go ahead.

Pricing

Pricing is the trickiest aspect in Selling. For offerings where the value added by your offering / solution can be calculated directly or indirectly, pricing conversations is a lot easier – since you have data to back your discussion. However, in other cases, one has to use all available information and work on a range to begin with.

For startups that are in their early stages, back calculate based on your expenses to decide on pricing. Another approach for SaaS based early stage startups is to price based on the CAC (Customer Acquisition Costs). General agreement is that a CAC of about 5-6 months is ideal, and a CAC of upto 1 year is tolerable for early stage startups.

A barebones calculation of pricing should be based on the product of revenues, gross margin you want to derive and customer lifespan for your offering. David Skok has good articles on these topics.

Complement your Sales efforts by your Marketing efforts

Use marketing as complementary aspect to sales – apart from leveraging it for various aspects of building your brand and communication etc. Nurture your customers by segmenting them based on the previous interaction by your company and send relevant content that could be of use to them.

For startups targeting global customers, ensure that you generate adequate content by means of customer acquisition stories, case studies, announcement of new customer wins, participation in events etc. This will help build the initial set of opportunities from the marketing side.

Use the rental lists of magazines that are widely read in the field of your offerings to increase mindshare. Blog or write regularly on Industry trends in some of these magazines to offer a good discount. Engaging with a PR agency based on the geography in the early stages of market entry also can pay off.

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Customer Acquisition Models for a SaaS businesses

Software-as-a-Service is paradigm shift for the software industry. The most profound impact of SaaS is on the software businesses revenue and cost models and therefore the cascading impact it has on the way the business is organised.

Customer Acquisition for a SaaS business therefore requires a complete re-think. Since you are not going to get your money up-front,  how are you going to fund the costs of acquisition? The  conventional customer acquisition model where these costs are a manageable proportion of the cash generated up-front works fine in the old on-premise software business but will bleed you in the SaaS business. As a SaaS business you need to ensure that your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) remain under first year revenues (and even less if you are not adequately funded).

CAC starts with the cost of creating awareness and includes the sales effort costs. But what very often is not added to the CAC is the cost spent in getting a new account to revenue (aka implementation) as well as the cost of retaining the account right up to the period to which you calculate your LTV (Life-time Value). Depending upon the nature of the product this could be a few months or a few years. Given that you have signed up an annuity based revenue stream, your cost rightfully must include what you need to spend to ensure the tenure of that annuity.

So what sales model should you adopt? The choices range from a pure web-based one to a the tried and tested feet-on-street model and a hybrid one where you use the web to generate leads and feet-on-street to convert those leads. There is also the option of building a channel partner networks and selling through them.

The choice of the sales model to be adopted must take into account two key dimensions: The complexity of your product and it’s price point. A complex one enterprise application for instance will require substantial sales and pre-sales consulting support to sell as opposed to personal productivity app. Selling the former through a web model may not lead to much sales while trying to sell the the latter through a feet-on-street model will lead to a very high CAC and a drain on cash flows.

Channel partners can be a substitute for company sales reps but only when the product is in a category with a well established business need and the product brand is recognised with some degree of pull.

If the strategy requires using low-price as a differentiator or the market is unable to accept a high price-point for a new entrant, it will be foolhardy to try and build a direct sales model. At least it will be struggle to scale the customer acquisition.

A way out of this is to remove the complexity from the sale and switch to a substantially on-line sales model. In my next post I will talk about the challenges in creating an on-line sales model for a more complex product that is generally expected to be sold through a direct sales model. Meanwhile, I would be waiting to hear from you what you think needs to be thought differently when considering Customer Acquisition for SaaS businesses.

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If a picture speaks a thousand words, a video does that 24 times per second.

Video advertising is increasingly becoming a necessity for a business in today’s fast paced world. Gone are the days when you would pen down tons of text in the “About Us” section of your website. A crisp video about your start-up can definitely make you go a long way in explaining what you offer to the right set of target audience. There are lot of tools like Powtoon, GoAnimate, Wideo etc available online where you can create your own awesome videos. However, always remember that a Video is not just yet another creative asset, it’s a packaged marketing message and if carefully drafted, can make a lot of difference to your business. So, spend your thoughts and time generously to get this right.

Here are 5 tips to keep in mind to ensure that the impact of your video reaches its maximum potential.

1: Get the Narrative Right

Should the video be humorous, informative or emotional? It is very important to think about the target audience thoroughly. If humour can connect to some people, some prospective customers look for a straight-forward problem-solution approach. You should always put yourself in a customer’s shoes and try to understand whether the video would appeal to him or not. While it is important to depict the salient features of your product or service, the video should not be overloaded with information. Demographics such as age, geography, gender, profession etc along with the kind of product/service offered by you should be well considered in choosing the right appeal for the video.

2: Pay Attention to the Building Blocks

Narration, music, visuals and voices are the building blocks of a video. It’s very important to choose a right combination based on the appeal you want. While a product video might look good with a strong and engaging narration about the features of the product, an emotional video with just background music and a strong visual story could go viral on social media.

3: Say It Quick

Brevity is the soul of wit. With so much happening on internet, your audience will switch tabs as soon as you start stuffing them with information they don’t need. Ideally, a video of not more than 90 seconds should be able to tell your message to a prospective customer.

4: Call to Action: Convert those Views into Leads

This is one of the most forgotten, but crucial elements: Focus your message on the task or action you would like your viewer to do. Whether you are getting them to visit your website or download your app from the play store, get the message out clear and simple, and tell them how to do it. Remember, the aim of the video is not just to get appreciation, but to also get more leads and customers.

5: Campaigns can Capture Minds

If you are looking for brand retention in viewer’s minds, you can consider circulating a series of really short videos (20-30 seconds) with different use-cases about your product/service, but keeping a unique appeal and structure. The advantage in this approach is the anticipation among the audience who have already seen your previous videos. This also creates an imprint of your brand deep inside the viewer’s mind and will definitely help your business in the long run.

So stop writing long documents about your brand and ‘Videofy’ your idea. A video of 90 seconds is all you need to tell your story to the world.

Guest Post by Jatin Rastogi, co-founder of WildBeez, a video solutions start-up that has produced corporate videos for brands such as OlaCabs, Fabmart, InMobi and more.

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Sales Wisdom from Million Dollar Product Companies

Why Buy Mine? This is the question I have kept asking myself ever since Pallav and Paras did their “Global Lean Sales” session at the #PNCamp in November. I used to send a long email before and often had to explain a lot to why we charge higher. Now I just use the below message and it does the job. There is nothing different from what we were doing earlier. But our message to our market is now very different and converts them into trusting buyers faster .

“Industry Leaders like Freshdesk ( Customer HelpDesk ), WebEngage ( On-site Customer Engagement), Flipkart’s Payzippy ( Online Payments) have chosen MyPromoVideos for their videos because we were able to consistently deliver “magic” to our client’s brands, not just videos.”

I was so much in love with two of their slides from their presentation that our team here decided to do a beautiful “Info-Graphic” around the same. If you are not satisfied with just 10% growth every month and want to grow exponentially on steroids, you need to build your sales team. This is the infographic to keep by your desktop.

Sales Evolution - Wingify and FusionCharts (1)Thanks to Pallav, Paras and the Product Nation for helping Entrepreneurs succeed.

Guest Post by Gopal Krishnan, MyPromoVideos. Gopal is the Co-Founder of www.MyPromoVideos.com and takes care of Sales and Marketing. He builds trust with his Sales Systems and brings in the customers

for MyPromoVideos
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Is negotiation a strategy or a skill?

When it comes to a successful negotiation, which is more important: strategy or skill?

The definition of the verb, negotiate, is to “deal or bargain with others, as in the preparation of a treaty or contract or in preliminaries to a business deal.” In a sales context, the key definition is to “bargain in order to create, or culminate, a business deal.”

Sales professionals are often negotiating with both prospects and clients. We bargain with prospects for access to key decision makers or in our own organizations for additional resources. We make tradeoffs with ourselves in an effort to improve productivity and improve time management. And we negotiate the final terms and conditions of new contracts in order to close business.

At ValueSelling Associates, we are often asked to help our clients negotiate more effectively. We have observed that there are consistent, common traps that torpedo negotiations.

1. Timing: When companies offer incentives to their customers in order to create urgency and persuade prospects to expedite signed contracts. These incentives may be pre-announced price increases, introductory offers, or embellished deliverables. Whatever the incentive, how and when it is communicated becomes critical.

We advise sales professionals NOT to negotiate before the prospect is a fully qualified opportunity. In our Framework®, the qualification process is multidimensional. There are four questions a sales executives should have the prospect answer to determine if they are a qualified opportunity:

  • Should they buy this?
  • Is this worth it?
  • Can they buy this?
  • Are they convinced?

Offering incentives to a prospect before the qualification process is confirmed will diminish your credibility as a sales professional and potentially devalue your offerings in the prospect’s mind.

2. Authority: As a sales professional, are you aware of your negotiating parameters?  Every organization draws a line in the sand for what is considered negotiable. To be a successful negotiator, it is critical that you understand what your organization allows to be included in negotiations with your prospects.

Negotiation Components:

  • Deliverables
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Price

While many prospects attempt to focus the negotiating conversation solely on price, a smart sales professional only talks about price after they’ve exhausted deliverables and/or terms and conditions.

  • Do you know what authority your organization has given you to negotiate?
  • Do you know how you can include your sales manager, and their greater authority, in an upcoming negotiation?

You should know the answer to both questions before attempting a negotiation.

We’ve seen sales professionals make over-commitments to prospects, only to have to go back when they could not honor what they promised, then try to re-negotiate. It can be very embarrassing! When you understand what you can authorize, your negotiations have a better chance of succeeding.

Is negotiating a strategy or a skill? It’s both. Successful negotiators have a plan, use the authority they have, and are very purposeful in their negotiations with prospects.

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The Ad Business

Saikrishna Chavali posted the following question on my blog post about Data & UX being two ends of the product spectrum:

I’ve got a question: how did you understand the user when you were in the ad business? Did you ever meet real users? In PM theory, one is instructed to empathise with the user by actually “getting out of the office”.

Since it’s quite an important question, I thought I will take a shot at giving it a detailed point of view, and provoke some conversation.

While building the Ad Network at InMobi, we had 3 key stakeholders to take care of and deliver value to:

  1. Advertisers & Agencies – who had ad budgets, setup and ran the campaigns, and looked at reports & analytics to measure ROI of their ad spend
  2. Publishers & Developers – who had lots of traffic from mobile phones – mobile web, apps etc, and wanted to generate revenue by advertising
  3. Users – who were primarily using these mobile web sites and apps to get their work done, or for entertainment.

When Publishers or Developers say

I want to monetize traffic

they’re basically saying

I have users who use my sites and apps, and I want to make money from them, so that I can sustain my business, and grow it

As an ad network, you have business relationships with Advertisers, Agencies, Publishers & Developers. And as product offering, you build user interfaces and APIs for these people to use. So, by definition, you have to have ongoing dialogue with users from these customer segments. I believe products are for users, and have blogged earlier about it.

At the same time, an ad network makes money when the users (consumers) engage with the ads in some applicable manner – Viewing, Clicking, Playing etc. The effectiveness of the network is increased if we can understand the consumers well enough that we deliver the right kind of ad experiences to them in every context. That bodes the question

How do we understand the consumers effectively?

For a large part, we understand consumers from the data generated by them in our system. Ad businesses typically talk of metrics such as requests, impressions, clicks etc. If these metrics represent a user’s intent in some form, here is how they would play out.

  • Ad Requests – “There’s some space in the screen, can you show me an ad that I might like and click on?”
  • Clicks – “This ad seems really cool and helpful for me. I want to see what the product/service it is showing.”
  • Play (a video) – “I am curious about what this video is, and hence going to watch it.”
  • App Download – “I want this app.”

 

Remember, for every advertiser that wants to run a campaign on your network, the campaign will certainly reach a bunch of publishers (say 50 or thereabouts) who each have access to a few million users (say 1 million each). Assuming there’s a user overlap of about 50% (multiple publishers’ sites or apps being seen by a user), that’s an overall reach of 25Million users (50 x 1M x 50%).

Now, how many days or surveys or phone calls or chats will it take for you as the product manager, to be able to talk to 1% of this target user base?

Come to think of it, the Ad is really the “product” of the “Advertiser” that’s targeted at a “User”. On the other hand, the Advertising System / Interface is the product of the Ad Network for the Advertiser. So, in the strictest sense our loyalties should lie and stop with our customers (Advertisers, Publishers etc).

Clearly that’s not good enough, because the effectiveness of any advertising business is based on the consumers engaging with ads being shown by the advertising system. So, we have a clear objective to improve ad effectiveness with the consumers. Here’s how that gets done.

Let’s say there’s a campaign with 1 ad in it. When these campaigns get setup, and the ad starts getting served, pretty soon, the ad servers start computing answers for questions like

1. How many times did this user click an ad that was shown a few times

2. How many times did this ad get clicked when it was shown a few times, across many users

The first question gives you an indication of whether a particular user liked this ad or not.

The second question gives you an indication of the percentage of people that liked this ad, from the overall population of people who saw this ad – CTR for the ad.

With these two metrics you’re able start understanding if specific ads work for specific users or not. You then architect and instrument your systems to iterate on what ads to show a given user, based on the expected effectiveness of the ad for the given user. So, while on one hand you can design your systems for your customers, based on meaningful real world interactions with them, on the other hand you end up being highly data-driven and experiment-driven to design serving systems that deliver some kind of content to millions of users. No wonder folks with data+tech chops are in high demand among tech companies.

What do you think? What other experiences have you had?

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Dear Marketers — Let’s create more value, not more marketing

Yes, you are going to lose weight, stop smoking, learn a new language and spend more time with your family next year. And while you are in the make-a-bunch-of-resolutions-to-be-totally-awesome-next-year phase, there’s another resolution I want you to consider. As a marketer, do not create more marketing. Create more value.

[Warning: This is going to be brutal. So come along only if you are not afraid of pain.]

7 things to learn about business from a stripper doesn’t really have a lot to learn from, neither does Lady Gaga’s hairstyle. x ways to do y like z where x=7 or 10; y=business, marketing, sales or customer relationship; z=stripper, drug dealer, Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber is done to death. Stop. Now.

Cut down on the sensational headlines and link bait posts. 10 secrets you didn’t know about aren’t really secrets. The Web is a big place, and there’s a ton of information out there.

Those infographics about nothing in particular and then those infographics about infographics are not helping either.

Stop shoving that highly-acclaimed guide of yours as soon as I hit your blog. Let me read the blog post I came to read.

Your dumb social media quizzes aren’t really creating engagement. They are dumbing down an entire generation. Last time I checked, they were the single biggest reason for bringing down the collective IQ of humankind to 40.

Your case studies aren’t really case studies. They are glorified customer testimonials. Might as well call them that.

Your seats aren’t really limited and time is not really running out. Figure out better ways to create urgency.

Your offers and discounts are hurting sales cycles at large. Buyers now expect discounts from everyone. Get people to buy from you because you have a great product, not because you have a discount running.

Creating more value

Over the next couple of years, we marketers are going to gain more and more clout as buying behaviors tilt more towards the marketing side of things. Our budgets will increase and instead of using that to create more marketing, we can use that to create more value. A lot more value.

Create tools and widgets that help people do their job better and faster. In turn, you will earn their trust and respect. Think Hubspot’s Marketing Grader or Twitter’s Bootstrap.

Create best practices guides that are not a rehash of what you can get from the first three search results on the topic. Think deeper about the topic, ask around your team, talk to your customers and then create the guide.

Have an opinion. That list of 25 WordPress plugins isn’t too hard to get. What’s hard to get is the experience people have had with the plugins and what comes recommended by them.

Curate content. The exponential rise in content marketing is also leading to an exponential rise in content marketing crap. Create value for your audience by going through all of it and suggesting the must-read pieces for them, thus saving them time and some terrible writing.

And most of all, stop thinking of yourself as a marketer. Start thinking of yourself as the guy who creates the best possible experience for the users. Right from their first click to when they renew with you. Personalize the website for them, predict what they need next, give them a great mobile experience, give them content tailored to their needs and make it super easy for them to contact you when they need to. And when they do, again give them the best experience by giving your teams complete visibility of all previous interactions. And this is not an easy job. This will require you to get the entire organization in line with your vision, make it everyone’s job to give users the best experience, get your systems talking to each other and and put in place the infrastructure required to give you end-to-end visibility.

Final words

From creating more marketing to delivering the best experience for our users, we marketers have a long way to go. But admitting it and taking a pledge to change the way we think is an important first step. From there, it can only go upwards. And if we all pledge to do it, the entire marketing community can go from being called the guys who put lipstick on the pig to the guys who actually create value.

What about you? How are you going to stop creating more marketing and create more value instead?

Reblogged from Poke & bite

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Deepinder Goyal of Zomato on “ethics, respect, attitude and skill”

Deepinder Goyal is the founder and CEO of Zomato, India’s first online food guide to go global. Founded in 2008, Zomato recently raised Rs. 227 crore from Sequoia Capital and InfoEdge in one of the largest funding rounds for a consumer internet company in India. This deal values the company at over Rs 900 crore ($150 million) and has “best positioned” Goyal “to build a formidable global internet company out of India.” Prior to founding Zomato, Goyal was a management consultant at Bain and Company. He holds an integrated masters in Mathematics and Computing from IIT Delhi.

This post was conducted by Innovate Delhi, a three-week long academy that works with aspiring entrepreneurs to hone their skills in innovation, team-building, and strategy. Applications are due on 1st February at innovatedelhi.com/apply

[Innovate Delhi] What prompted you to start Zomato? What made a graduate from one of the most prestigious colleges in the country working at one of the prestigious companies in the world start a restaurant discovery website and mobile app?

[Deepinder Goyal] Back in 2008, I was working at Bain and Company, one of the largest management consulting firms in the world. At Bain, I noticed that my colleagues used to line up to view the stack of restaurant menu cards in the cafeteria during lunch hour. There was a rule that you cannot take the menus to your desk since people generally ended up losing these menus causing inconvenience for everyone. Looking at the queue, and to save the trouble for everyone, I just scanned these menus cards and put them online for everyone to use. This small intranet website started getting a substantial number of hits from people within Bain. That is when we realized that we can build a business out of scanned menus. That is how Zomato was born.

Deepinder-zomato-Pankaj

You told your parents about your decision to quit Bain only after quitting. What was their initial reaction? As an entrepreneur, how important is having family on your side?
My parents don’t really think about things once they have happened. So when I told them that I had quit my job, their reaction was “Ok, whatever”. They asked me to tell them if things get difficult for me financially. My wife Kanchan has supported me right through – she is a big believer in Zomato. It is important having family’s support in your entrepreneurial pursuits. If one is focused on their goals, everything eventually falls into plan.

To preview out next interview with P Rajasekharan of v-shesh, we found out that he frequently brings his daughter to his office. Do you see yourself bringing your daughter to Zomato and blending your personal and professional lives?
I don’t know. I don’t plan such things. If it does happen, it will not be because I planned it to be that way. It will be because it has to be that way.

One thing that sets apart an Indian company from US-based companies is that Indians are willing to work harder. People here can and would work 24×7 to accomplish something. That’s the sort of advantage we have here in India in terms of people.

You believe in hiring “good people.” What has been the best and worst hiring decision you have made?
We look for qualities like ethics, respect, attitude and skill – in that order. Looking back, all the people that we have asked to leave have either failed at Level 1 (Ethics) or Level 3 (Attitude). Mostly at Level 3. Similarly, the best hiring decisions we have made have been in being able to identify people with energy, focus and persistence.

Deep Kalra, our first interview for the Innovate Delhi blog, told us that an entrepreneur should be ready to do anything and everything in the initial years. What have been some memorably crazy challenges that you have met and not met?
The major challenge we have faced so far has been making sure that we have covered each and every street in the cities where we launch and have information for each restaurant in the city. Ideas can sometimes matter less than the execution. Hiring the right people has also been a major challenge. When we hire, we try our best to ensure that people are cultural fits – skill alone does not cut it for us.

For global internet corporations too, India is now the preferred choice for new investments.

In your corporate and entrepreneurial journey, how do you think the Indian entrepreneurial space has evolved and what are the most promising trends today?
A lot has changed in India over the past few years. Let’s look at three things first: Start ups, venture capitalists (VCs) and the market. There are a lot of good start ups that we see nowadays. We have many role model firms and entrepreneurs today and people are looking up to these role models to build up their companies. The ecosystem has evolved quite a lot, though it still needs to do much more. In terms of VCs, there are many entry-stage and growth funds coming in and they are more willing now to take risks with their money than they were earlier. Thirdly, the local market has changed a lot. Earlier, consumers were very rare to find. But now, it’s relatively easy to hit scale.

One thing that sets apart an Indian company from US-based companies is that Indians are willing to work harder. People here can and would work 24×7 to accomplish something. That’s the sort of advantage we have here in India in terms of people.

Now with the growth of internet penetration with over 200 million Indians logging onto the internet, there is a huge opportunity for web-based start-ups in the consumer space. VC money flows to markets which have large problems to be solved with start ups solving them, India is one such market. For global internet corporations too, India is now the preferred choice for new investments.

One of our key goals for Innovate Delhi is to build a community of like-minded entrepreneurial individuals. To that end, how have you fostered and maintained your professional relationships throughout your career? How has the changed or evolved since you started Zomato?
Networking and building strong professional relationships is important for any entrepreneur. I have built a strong network over the years that has been very helpful. It always starts with alumni networks and grows from there.

If you were a judge at our program, what would be the top three qualities you will look for in an aspiring entrepreneur?
Focus and clarity on what needs to be achieved. It has been the one principle we have followed in everything at Zomato right from product to sales to hiring. Well, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’. Persistence and consistent effort are required in order to translate an idea into a business. Also, to follow through is important – to deliver on what you set out to do.

Well, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’. Persistence and consistent effort are required in order to translate an idea into a business.

This blog post was written by Sonal J Goyal for Innovate Delhi Entrepreneurship Academy. Innovate Delhi is a three-week long academy that works with aspiring entrepreneurs to hone their skills in innovation, team-building, and strategy. Applications are due on 1st February at innovatedelhi.com/apply