This is not Sales!

The entire section is dedicated to Raj Shankar, Co-Founder and Principal Strategist at Ichiban Business Consultants. , Raj is a trainer, mentor and consultant for early-stage entrepreneurs for their business growth, strategy building and thought leadership. I am regular follower of his blog http://rajshankar.wordpress.com/ .

I have attended two of his workshops and last one was last Saturday (14-06-20114). The agenda of the workshop was “Getting to Market” – Out of the Box methodology for customer acquisition and retention. It was arranged by NEN (National Entrepreneurship Network) and sponsored by IBM.

Sales is not like an Alien came from outer space. But in real life that is the apprehension. I have tried so many fresher to influence to join in Sales. But none of them shown interest, even MBA guys are not. They prefer working for Marketing (though they do not understand the difference between sales and marketing!).

In my professional and entrepreneurial life I have learnt, thought lot of different ways of sales. It was further validated, got strengthen by Raj during this workshop.

Sales is an art where we have to bridge between demand and supply. We need to understand demand, pain points, design solutions, promote value proposition and win the deal. But we fail due to various reasons, some of them are stated below:

• We start dealing on prices and in effect starts bleeding even after getting the orders coz margins are much diluted.
• We become desperate since we are small, we do not have resources.
• We keep on chasing, trying to pitch product/services without being understood the message is being communicated to the customer in his terms
• We communication value propositions in very generic ways like good services, best quality and so on and these does not any differentiating factors with our competitions since they also pitch the same.
• We keep on searching customers instead creating own visibility so that customers can find us. Otherwise we keep on chasing wrong customers here and there whereas matching customers near to us cannot be reached.
• The goal is being set ahead (as taught in management schools) instead of defining Capacities.

 

But let us not be upset on our mistakes. Let us try to improve on it in order to learn greatest art in any enterprise i.e “Sales”. This the pillar to success of any organization.

Let’s enjoy sales, Let’s celebrate entrepreneurship!