Best sales people in the world never sold a thing ..

So goes a popular tenet in the sales circles. While misinterpretations can be many, I like to view it only from the positive perspective which it was meant to be viewed. :)

The day people try to push something very hard, then it is transactional. It will be one off thing, which will not sustain long relationship. And being a sales person, your clients are for relationships for long term, multiple selling and not transactions. So it is better to get in customer's shoes and view things as he wants and advise him as he needs. That is a better way to build ever-lasting relationships than doing one transaction.

As a start-up assess your priorities ...

I have recently met a start-up team. The team is quite an enthusiatic team on verge of launching yet another 'path-breaking' online store in India. They are funded by a popular hotel chain. We were referred to them by our technology partner company, a big cloud player. Three minutes in the meeting, I realized that they are cash strapped. (Most Indian biggies say funding but give peanuts.). I have suggested them options but cautioned that they need to look at their budgets. So while the CEO shied away, the other guys were insisting that I need to work out something for a start-up. I indicated to them my costs will not vary with the client. Irrespective of the client being an American, Indian, Established firm, start up firm, they are same. And in current age the margins are low in IT services industry, so I cant push much. Then I asked the fundamental question here: As a start-up do you need all the services? Thats when they were dumbfolded.

Most start-ups fancy the idea of having big bells and whistles to their core offering. It works fine for a big companies with deep pockets, but small companies should realize that there means are limited. So they need to assess the priorities: must-have; good-to-have; can-do-away. That way they are much comfortable in taking what is needed. In this current case, the start-up needed a 24/7 monitoring for their systems. They wanted this to claim that they can give this on par with other ecommerce stores in market. But they did not realize that when a customer signs, he is aware of the limitations of a start-up. He does not expect everything to be in order from day-1 but expects that his needs/pangs to be heard out. I advised them that they better stay close to their customers and call them on daily/weekly basis to figure out if things were in order and solve them than have a 24/7 customer support team. While it is important for the team to put money in performance tweaking and better tele-support than a monitoring service.