I sell products and services for a living, is often repeated; here I am going to write a few points which I learned during the course of my sales endeavors. I have already written about many of them in my earlier blogs. Here goes the list of new ones:

Stay close to your customer

I took up one SaaS based product for sales couple of years back. And it would have been, I also chose to reach out to the people whom I knew very well with this product, but unfortunately they were living in a different part of the country. Since, it was costly and involved different sections of any organization to be involved in decision making, my contacts were only help till reaching out to people who could be the decision makers in this entire process. With their help I passed the initial rounds with flying colors, but as we got into intricate procedure of understanding the usefulness of product and value for money, number of my visits increased and so does the cost. Now, every sales pitch can’t get converted into actual sales, my two sales pitches in Mumbai and Pune yielded nadir despite 4-5 rounds of visit to those places and it set me back with decent amount of money, which were spent on travelling, stay and meetings. It taught me one lesson that nothing comes easy and cheap in anything, if you are focusing on quality. So, stay close to your customer to know them better and interact, reduce the expenditure on acquisition and for after sales service.

Don’t let your customer think

If you let customers go back home and think about your product or services, he or she will think about the available options also. If you are sure that your product is incomparable and best and customer has a need of it, then she will come back to you, but if there is competition available in the market, then you need to grasp and grab the opportunity in first shot itself. In one of the two sales pitches which I mentioned above, I missed easily the one which seemed easiest to me. I personally knew the decision makers and had a very good rapport with Competent Authority, who was empowered to sign the cheque. A meeting was arranged among three parties at completely different place than their base stations; Founder and CEO of the supplying company was in New York, his Sales & Marketing team was at Bengaluru, buyer, whose headquarter is at Pune was in Gurgaon for a visit, which is my place. We were digitally connected with Webex for presentation on one device, Skype for video chat and two smartphones for back up. Though this sounds all so exciting, but every device was dependent upon the network, which was not with us that day. Outcome of the meeting was disaster, but buyer was courteous enough to tell me that we can come to his place at Pune for another round of presentation. But we had lost the plot in this meeting itself. I went there quite a few times after that, but so many meaningless questions came up in the discussion in those meetings and so do the mention of competitions.

Don’t complicate the sales pitch

Jargons and show off are good till you want to grab the attention through marketing, but while doing sales, make everything simple to look and understand. Like I mentioned in my point no.2, I made the meeting look like a sci-fi movie, with lots of chances to miss the point about product and focus on devices for different purposes and result I have mentioned in the same point itself.

I will keep coming to you with lots more in coming days. Meanwhile I would love to learn about your experience. Let me know in the comments below!

 

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