On Oct 18th iSPIRT organized a #PlaybookRT in Mumbai and the topic of discussion was Global Lean Sales. Pallav Nadhani founder of FusionCharts came down for the RT and shared a lot of useful information about how they do things at Fusion Charts. Most of the information from the RT has been covered in Rushab Mehta’s excellent blog post about the RT. I am just adding to that post…
Pallav showed us the demos that Fusion Charts built for their products and I wanted to share a few thoughts about what I learnt from that…
When selling online using a low touch sales model, the web site must replace the sales person at least in the initial phase of the sales cycle. And that is a very difficult job to pull of.
You need to anticipate every piece of information that the prospect may be interested in and make that easy to find. Your web site must then convince the prospect that your product is the right solution to the problem they are seeking to solve. Or convince the prospect that your product will enhance their business and give them a competitive edge.
But the web site must still be simple and clutter free. Putting pages of text explaining everything is of little help because the prospect will rarely spend so much time reading. So what do you do?
Almost everyone today will put up a product tour/demo to try and solve the problem. But a one size fits all demo has its limitation. Not everyone can see a general purpose demo and connect the features to their business requirements, without help from a sales person. What can work much better are industry specific demos so prospects see how your product can be used in their industry (or a closely related industry).
Seeing the product in the context of one’s usage scenario can make it much easier to understand. Also instead of throwing all functionality at the prospect, only specific features can be showed in a usage specific demo.
FusionCharts does an amazing job of this. Their products enable data visualization and on their web site they have built a comprehensive section with dashboards to showcase the different capabilities of their products. This includes a Gym Dashboard which demonstrates how membership based businesses can analyze their membership via cohort analysis and a really cool Music Player which showcases the performance of their product.
Looking at these dashboards it is clear that a lot of thinking and effort has gone in to them. It is surely not a trivial exercise and would require a dedicated person/team to pull off. But I think the effort would pay dividends in prospects understanding the product and encouraging low touch sales.
It has inspired us to try and do the same for our product SOHODOX.
Contributed by Shiraz Ahmed, Founder and CEO – ITAZ Technologies