Data By Da{t}ta - Shiraz Datta

Making Sales Collateral and Lead Generation Stronger: Lessons Learned from Social Networking

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:30:00 +0000

Social networks are re-writing the rules of what best practices in marketing are. Listening is in, shouting is out. Targeting is in; carpet bombing via e-mail is out.

Responsiveness is the new black and trust is the new currency.

Brands are laid bare in front of millions daily. It doesn’t take long for just one customer to make a major statement about how they feel about a brand and make a major impact on sales too. Using Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, blogs or YouTube, customers can make their voice heard immediately. United Airlines’ wake-up call last year is a case in point as is the recent controversy Southwest Airlines faced.

So Many Social Networks and So Little Time

With so many powerful social networking platforms, applications and tools available why are marketers still not getting to their lead generation and sales goals?

Why do companies who have such a strong passion for their customers lose their way to delivering exceptional experiences?

Why does their sales collateral promise so much and at times fail to deliver?

Because product marketing, product management and marketing teams fall into the trap of believing you have to inundate the prospect with features, in-depth data and tons of documents to prove you know what you’re doing. Carpet bombing prospect’s in-boxes with e-mails to send the message you know what you are doing is ironically proving fatal.

Why? Because you and I respect people so much more when they listen to us and talk with us instead of talking at us. Too much technology marketing, specifically in software, talks at the prospect, instead of with them. That is the heart of the potential of social networks – to engage and talk with prospects instead of at them. And it takes hard work to make relationships count. You can’t earn sales through a deluge of content; it has to come from being genuinely interested in helping a prospect over a major problem.

The First Step: Find the Passion of your Company

There are dozens of excellent software applications out there for managing lead generation and follow-up but unless it reflects the soul – the passion of a company – it is meaningless. What makes all these lead generation apps really work? It amplifies, projects, makes more visible the passion a company has for owning a problem prospects and customers have.

No software application can compensate for a company that has not decided what it is passionate about.

But for those companies who have chosen a mission – a vision of what problem they will own for any prospect or customer – then lead generation becomes real for them. Companies struggling to produce leads may not have a software problem; they may have a passion problem. Defining that passion for service will go a long way to finding good leads, not those captured through attrition from lists. How much more powerful passion is for solving a problem over just endlessly listing off features and data. Passion puts all that intelligence into motion and makes it relevant.

Lessons Learned

Social networks and the customer immediacy they provide make it imperative that marketing focus on what they have a passion for and what a company can deliver in terms of products and services. From that vantage point consider these lessons learned:

Sales collateral, both in-print and online, must have a very clear customer it is aimed at. Surprisingly so much is produced aimed at the “enterprise buyer of IT solutions”. I have never met anyone who called themselves that. Get real and if you can’t define the customer, consider cancelling the collateral.

Urgency to own the customer’s pain now and provide a proven solution. Marketers who are making social networks generate leads get this and get their company’s passion for owning the problem out loud and clear. Features matrices don’t come close; re-think that strategy and go own a problem to gain leads and sales.

What is the collateral’s goal and how does it fit into the marketing strategy? An excellent question to ask when there are many, many open projects in a marketing department and there seems to be little shared messaging. Collateral, both online and offline needs to resonate the passion a company has to serve. It has to be so strong that there is no doubt your company intends to be the global leader in solving the problems and pains you target.

Answers the question of how your products and services are different and proven. Differentiating at the benefits level, not at the speeds and feeds or features level is critical. What odes your company’s passion make it especially good at? That is the most powerful differentiator there is.

Does your collateral teach or preach?

Go after teaching, and share your insight and intelligence freely as a company to gain thought leadership over time. Your company will get what it gives when it comes to sharing insight, intelligence and knowledge. Blog regularly. Give away insights from studies free. Be open. All of these tie back to a passion to own a customers’ problem.

Is your collateral evangelist-compatible?

Consider that if you are selling a complex system or service that your sales cycles often involve dozens of people in a variety of roles.

Is your collateral designed to make it easy for those championing you inside a company to carry forward what makes you unique?

Can the online collateral move quickly through social networks?

These are all relevant questions to this point and to evaluate your collateral on.

Design to Inspire and Educate.

The simplicity and clean layouts of social networks are the result of years of usability testing in some cases. Make sure your offline and online collateral reflects these design criteria.

Bottom line:

Social networks are making companies confront what they really stand for and what they are the most passionate about. It’s best to start thinking about these issues and make your collateral all coordinate to what your company truly stands for. Owning a problem and being passionate about it will generate far more leads than any other strategy.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus

Foot Steps

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:37:00 +0000

Some Stories are not meant to be told, but then some are meant to be the other way around. So here is a small one to start my week with. I guess few of you must have already heard this one as it has told many times.

Foot Steps….The Story

One Night a man had a dream. He dreamed he was walking along the beach with the Lord. Across the sky flashed scenes from his life. For each scene, he noticed two sets of footprints in the sand; one belonged to him and the other to the Lord.

When the last scene of his life flashed before him, he looked back at the footprints in the sand. He noticed that many times along the path of his life there was only one set of footprints. He also noticed that it happened at the very lowest and saddest times in his life.

This really bothered him and he questioned the Lord about it. "Lord, you said that once I decided to follow you you'd walk with me all the way, but I have noticed that during the most troublesome times in my life, there is only one set of footprints. I don't understand why when I needed you most you would leave me." The Lord replied, "My precious, precious child, I love you and would never leave you. During your times of trial and suffering when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you."

Have a good week.

Just Imagine….

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:10:00 +0000

Sometime life ask you to imagine and sometimes it leave you only to imagine…Well…Imagination…something to imagine that does not have boundaries, frameworks, bars…..sometimes you need to ride on a trip that takes you to a place where you would or/and could like to go….People who know me will tell that I am always on such a trip.

That’s what I do!!!!

That what I do to live, survive, do my job…..just imagine….I imagine thing and sometimes thingS….that I wish or may do one day. Imagination…something that takes me places without leaving my seat.

Wikipedia explains Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses. Imagination helps provide meaning to experience and understanding to knowledge; it is a fundamental facility through which people make sense of the world, and it also plays a key role in the learning process. A basic training for imagination is the listening to storytelling (narrative) in which the exactness of the chosen words is the fundamental factor to 'evoke worlds.

Don’t worry about the definition…..Imagine is not worth a define. Its something that you have to do. I guess we in which ever face of lives are are imagining….when I become big…..when I will be rich…..when everyone will know me……when I can look back in those eyes……When……

Its important sometime to start your sentence with “When”….it helps to imagine…..

Well while writing this article I have already started to imagine. So let me take you to something that can help you to imagine…..check our the picture below and you can imagine……

AND SOMETHING TO IMAGINE FOR SOMEONE ELSE!!!!!!!

Sometimes the least thing you can do sitting on your seat is to IMAGINE…..PLEASE let your heart be a part of that process and you will imagine WONDERS…..

As you Heart is on the left but Always Right…

JUST IMAGINE…

Happy Holi from Down Under

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:38:00 +0000

Wishing all A Happy Holi from Down Under. Well I am not much of holi or a festival person, but likes to take an opportunity to wish anyone or everyone. Enjoy the festival of colours and help someone to bring colours in his/her gray lives. Of course not to miss me :)

For benefit of those who don’t know about this festival celebrated in India - Holi, or Holli, also called the Festival of Colours, is a spring festival celebrated by Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains and others. It is primarily observed in India, Nepal, Srilanka, Pakistan,Bangladesh, and countries with large Indic diaspora populations, such as Suriname, Guyana, South Africa, Trinidad, UK, USA, Mauritius, and Fiji. In West Bengal of India and Bangladesh it is known as Dolyatra (Doul Jatra) or Basanta-Utsav ("spring festival"). The most celebrated Holi is that of the Braj region, in locations connected to the god Krishna: Mathura, Vrindavan, Nandagaon, and Barsana. These places have become tourist destinations during the festive season of Holi, which lasts here to up to sixteen days.

The main day, Holi, also known as Dhulheti, Dhulandi or Dhulendi, is celebrated by people throwing coloured powder and coloured water at each other. Bonfires are lit the day before, also known as Holika Dahan (burning of Holika) or Chhoti Holi (little Holi). The bonfires are lit in memory of the miraculous escape that young Prahlad accomplished when Demoness Holika, sister of Hiranyakashipu, carried him into the fire. Holika was burnt but Prahlad, a staunch devotee of god Vishnu, escaped without any injuries due to his unshakable devotion. Holika Dahan is referred to as Kama Dahanam in Andhra Pradesh.

Holi is celebrated at the end of the winter season on the last full moon day of the lunar month Phalguna (February/March), (Phalgun Purnima), which usually falls in the later part of February or March. In 2010, Holi is on March 1.

Rangapanchami occurs a few days later on a Panchami (fifth day of the full moon), marking the end of festivities involving colours.

Highlights of Economic Survey 2009-10

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:59:00 +0000

Economic Survey 2009-10

Ahead of the Union Budget 2010-2011, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee today presented Economic Survey 2009-2010. The economic survey focuses on measures to maintain and accelerate economic growth. The main concerns like high inflation and fiscal deficit are expected to be addressed in the upcoming budget. The economic growth is projected at 8.5% (+/- 0.25%) in FY11 and also expected to grow at 9% in FY12, compared with projected growth of around 7.5% in the current year.

Key Highlights of Economic Survey:

Economy likely to grow by up to 8.75% in 2010-11
Full recovery; return to 9% growth in 2011-12
Broad recovery gives scope for gradual stimulus roll back
Survey recognizes food inflation as major concern. Food inflation is hovering close to 18%
Industry growth expected at 8.2%
Higher inflows have policy implications on capital account.
Moot direct food subsidy via food coupons to households.
Major decline in consumption expenditure growth in FY10
Growth in GFCF (Gross Fixed Capital Formation) seen at 5.2% in FY20, up from 4%
The fiscal deficit for FY10 is expected to shoot up to 6.8% of GDP
India 10th largest gold holding nation at 557.7 tons
India can become world`s fastest growing economy in 4 years.
Trade deficit will increase as imports increase as compared to exports.
Large decline in customs and excise duty expected
India not immune to global price situation
Hike in fuel prices will impact inflation
Supply side pressure to prevail for near term
Farm & allied sector production falls 0.2% in 2009-10
Need serious policy initiatives for 4% agriculture growth
Direct food subsidy via food coupons to households
Auction for 3G spectrum to provide existing and foreign players to bring in new technology and innovations.
India world`s 2nd largest wireless network with 525.1 million mobile users
Net capital flows to India at USD 29.6 billion in April-September 2009 remained higher as compared to USD 12.0 billion in April-September 2008.
During fiscal 2009-10, foreign exchange reserves increased by USD 31.5 billion from USD 252.0 billion in end March 2009 to USD 283.5 billion in end December 2009.
Bank credit grows by 13.9% on year-on-year basis.
Investment deposit ratio increases to 32.52%.

Who Killed Ekalavya? (Cont.)

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:35:00 +0000

Sometime back I wrote a post on “Who Killed Ekalavya?". Though I got many responses for the same but the best one so far is the below. Something that is interesting to know.

Kavach, kundal were donated by karan to Indra devta when the latter had come to him in disguise of Brahmin.

As for the other qs as to how lord krishna "died", it is to be understood that lord never takes birth or dies as he is "shashwat". for the Lord, words appearance and disappearance are used.

As for the pandavs, they ruled after the war and after krishna's disappearance, went to himalayas where they left their bodies except for Yudhishter who went to swarg in his own body nd where he met the souls of his brothers and Draupdi.the whole of kauravs were wiped out in this war. no one remained from duryodhan's side, the only survivors of this war were the 5 pandavs

Following will tell u of Lord krishna's disappearance. it is from Srimad Bhagwatam, courtesy, The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc.

His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, Founder Ācārya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness
Lord Kṛṣṇa, the son of Devakī, having seen the departure of Lord Balarāma, sat down silently on the ground under a nearby pippala tree.

SB 11.30.28-32: The Lord was exhibiting His brilliantly effulgent four-armed form, the radiance of which, just like a smokeless fire, dissipated the darkness in all directions. His complexion was the color of a dark blue cloud and His effulgence the color of molten gold, and His all-auspicious form bore the mark of Śrīvatsa. A beautiful smile graced His lotus face, locks of dark blue hair adorned His head, His lotus eyes were very attractive, and His shark-shaped earrings glittered. He wore a pair of silken garments, an ornamental belt, the sacred thread, bracelets and arm ornaments, along with a helmet, the Kaustubha jewel, necklaces, anklets and other royal emblems. Encircling His body were flower garlands and His personal weapons in their embodied forms. As He sat He held His left foot, with its lotus-red sole, upon His right thigh.

SB 11.30.33: Just then a hunter named Jarā, who had approached the place, mistook the Lord's foot for a deer's face. Thinking he had found his prey, Jarā pierced the foot with his arrow, which he had fashioned from the remaining iron fragment of Sāmba's club.
SB 11.30.34: Then, seeing that four-armed personality, the hunter became terrified of the offense he had committed, and he fell down, placing his head upon the feet of the enemy of the demons.
SB 11.30.35: Jarā said: O Lord Madhusūdana, I am a most sinful person. I have committed this act out of ignorance. O purest Lord, O Uttamaḥśloka, please forgive this sinner.

SB 11.30.36: O Lord Viṣṇu, the learned say that for any man, constant remembrance of You will destroy the darkness of ignorance. O master, I have wronged You!

SB 11.30.37: Therefore, O Lord of Vaikuṇṭha, please kill this sinful hunter of animals immediately so he may not again commit such offenses against saintly persons.

SB 11.30.38: Neither Brahmā nor his sons, headed by Rudra, nor any of the great sages who are masters of the Vedic mantras can understand the function of Your mystic power. Because Your illusory potency has covered their sight, they remain ignorant of how Your mystic power works. Therefore, what can I, such a low-born person, possibly say?

SB 11.30.39: The Supreme Personality of Godhead said: My dear Jarā, do not fear. Please get up. What has been done is actually My own desire. With My permission, go now to the abode of the pious, the spiritual world.

SB 11.30.40: So instructed by the Supreme Lord Kṛṣṇa, who assumes His transcendental body by His own will, the hunter circumambulated the Lord three times and bowed down to Him. Then the hunter departed in an airplane that had appeared just to carry him to the spiritual sky.

Śukadeva Gosvāmī said: Then Lord Brahmā arrived at Prabhāsa along with Lord Śiva and his consort, the sages, the Prajāpatis and all the demigods, headed by Indra.

SB 11.31.2-3: The forefathers, Siddhas, Gandharvas, Vidyādharas and great serpents also came, along with the Cāraṇas, Yakṣas, Rākṣasas, Kinnaras, Apsarās and relatives of Garuḍa, greatly eager to witness the departure of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. As they were coming, all these personalities variously chanted and glorified the birth and activities of Lord Śauri [Kṛṣṇa].

SB 11.31.4: O King, crowding the sky with their many airplanes, they showered down flowers with great devotion.

SB 11.31.5: Seeing before Him Brahmā, the grandfather of the universe, along with the other demigods, who are all His personal and powerful expansions, the Almighty Lord closed His lotus eyes, fixing His mind within Himself, the Supreme Personality of Godhead.
SB 11.31.6: Without employing the mystic āgneyī meditation to burn up His transcendental body, which is the all-attractive resting place of all the worlds and the object of all contemplation and meditation, Lord Kṛṣṇa entered into His own abode.

Hare Krishna

Who's Blogging What About Social Media in 2010

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 07:05:00 +0000

Where is social media going? Find out what 30 top marketing bloggers predict for social media in 2010. The "Who's Blogging What" ebook brings together the responses from numerous bloggers including Ann Handley (MarketingProfs), Mitch Joel (Six Pixels of Separation), Paul Dunay (Buzz Marketing for Technology), and Mike Volpe (HubSpot). Hear what they had to say about:

What to expect in social media in 2010?
What benchmarks can marketers use to measure social media ROI?
How do you separate hype from reality in social media marketing?

Also recommended view and read of "How to Use Social Media for Lead Generation" video and ebook when you download the Who's Blogging What ebook and learn how to start leveraging social media for your business.

Download the free ebook: Who's Blogging What About Social Media in 2010

Happy Reading,

IDC Predictions 2010 and the Product Configuration Landscape

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:10:00 +0000

International Data Corporation (IDC) does a consistently excellent job summarizing their IT predictions and then regularly critiquing them throughout the year.

In the following five minute video you can get an overview of what IDC sees as the 10 predictions impacting the market this year. If you are interested in downloading them, IDC has created a microsite dedicated to this topic.

Product Configuration Take-Aways:

The proliferation of mobile devices is going to make untethered sales and product configuration a critical requirement for more companies than ever before.

AJAX and optimized XML on private networks are going to be the foundation of distributed order management systems that can manage varying levels of product order complexity. Think scalability of production process, from assemble-to-order through engineer-to-order.

The pervasiveness of cloud computing and virtualization is going to be a catalyst for product configuration strategies being used for standard products too.

Bottom line: IDC’s continual updates to predictions are worth paying attention to through your RSS Reader to capture the latest from their site and YouTube channels.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus

The Truth … It Works: Customers Expect a Perfect Order

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:47:00 +0000

In the face of economic uncertainty, the inherently unquantifiable areas of a company get a higher level of attention than ever before. The center of attention for many companies today is the integration of marketing strategies and programs to supply chain planning, management and optimization. The extent to which marketing and supply chain management teams are synchronizing their plans together is directly proportional to the ROI both attain together to create a customer-driven supply chain. This has to go beyond Collaborative Forecasting Planning and Replenishment (CPFR) and encompass supply chain management as part of the New Product Development and Introduction (NPDI) process. Companies that take this approach and define dashboards and scorecards that get beyond just measuring their own activity and contributions to measure accuracy, speed and permanency of change they bring to each other through collaboration is what is of the greatest value.

Why Being Demand-Driven Matters More Than Ever

The Perfect Order as a Barometer of Customer Expectations

The Perfect Order Index (POI) is one metric that captures the effects of collaboration on supply chain execution and fulfillment. What’s needed are links to the four main components of the POI that measure how effective demand generation strategies are in general and marketing specifically are in ensuring on-time, complete, damage-free orders that have been accurately invoiced. At first glance, many would argue these four metrics that comprise the POI (on-time delivery percentage) x (percentage of orders shipped complete) x (damage-free order percentage) x (accurate invoicing) are only relevant within supply chains.

Defining the Perfect Order Index

In fact, all forms of demand generation strategies have a direct effect on these measures, because the initial market direction and expectations created by a company through its marketing and selling strategies define, in the customers’ mind, what the minimum level of performance of each of these measures are. Perceptions don’t lend themselves well to the metrics that drive POI calculations, yet they are just as if not more powerful.

Consider the launch of the Apple iPhone to see how the perception of perfect-order performance impacts the calculation of the POI for a new product that relies on a significantly different supply chain. Apple and its intensely loyal customer base have very high expectations of any new product being intuitively designed, cool in ergonomics and navigation and most of all, integrated. Apple has created this expectation over the years of having their products come out of the box and work immediately, and must have PhDs in the fields of ergonomics and user design on staff who study the out-of-box experience customers have with these products. All of these factors together set the POI bar very high for Apple, and having demand generation an integral part of supply chain planning, management and fulfillment was critical for the launch of the product.

Customers don’t think in terms of POI scores obviously, but they definitely can, given the chance, quantify their expectations of a company’s performance. At the intersection of customer expectations, demand generation strategies that create expectations, and supply chains and fulfillment delivering on them, is the customer’s perception of performance. All three-demand generation, supply chain performance, fulfillment and customers’ expectations-are interlinked. Given the pervasive adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, it’s possible to overlap POI data on a per-product basis to customers’ attitudinal scores, creating a barometer of how effectively a company is meeting or exceeding their customers’ expectations. In the vernacular of Web 2.0, this would be called a mash-up, combining structured financial data with unstructured attitudinal data captured through surveys or through comments from customers analyzed through text mining for example. Forward-thinking companies could actual trend line this and see the effects of bringing supply chain planning, management and fulfillment into the New Product Development and Introduction (NPDI) process over time. The goal of having a measurement of how collaboration and synchronization between demand-generation strategies and supply-chain performance would be achieved. Taking this one step further, publishing these measures of performance for customers to see would bring entirely new levels of accountability and collaboration into any company’s daily culture and no doubt bring collaborative efforts to the forefront of any project.

Driving Up Lifetime Customer Value in Tough Economic Times

The saying, “no one ever cost-reduced their way to market leadership,” takes on entirely new meaning given the current economic uncertainty that leads many companies to cut back on investments in integration demand generation and supply chains, production and fulfillment with each other. Arguably the level of sales a company attains is driven by the continual meeting and exceeding of customers’ expectations, and the cycle of supply chain and demand generation being synchronized is essential for a company to continue to grow. Since customers’ expectations are the future of any company, it’s critical to keep demand generation and supply chain, production and fulfillment integrated together. It’s extremely difficult, however, for companies in the middle of tough economic times to look at becoming demand-driven, or be committed to staying on the path to its fulfillment. Costs of integrating demand-driven strategies, including marketing programs to supply chain planning and production to fulfillment that together increase a company’s ability to attain higher POI levels, seem like a much lower priority versus pursuing aggressive cost-cutting. Measuring the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for supply chains that don’t invest in becoming demand-driven is like only measuring half of the factors that go into calculating perfect order performance. It simply does not make sense and is short-term as a result. Reduce the cost for any series of systems and processes long enough, and there will be a positive ROI and low TCO. Yet the far greater and quantifiable gains of exceeding customers’ expectations through exceptional performance have a far greater financial impact. When the ability to consistently meet or exceed customers’ expectations are taken into account as part of perfect order performance, ROI and TCO of demand-driven supply chains shift from cost reduction to top-line revenue growth. Instead of worrying about the pennies saved by not connecting one process or system to another, the concern needs to be on how to make more dollars using demand generation and fuel new business growth.

Taking Steps on the Demand-Driven Journey

With so much pressure within companies to reduce costs, it’s important to get started on a pilot project that quickly shows the positive impact of making supply chain planning and management more demand-driven. Product introductions, product-line extensions, the launch of a new service, channel management strategy or on-boarding a new channel partner all are events companies have used to rationalize making investments in being demand-driven. For manufacturers of complex products that have build-to-order strategies, being demand-driven is a necessity. Of all selling strategies, built-to-order most influences the POI score of a manufacturer because it directly influences both the percentage of Shipped Complete orders and the percentage that are shipped Damage Free. Optimizing order-capture systems to make sure a customized order is taken right the first time not only saves the time of production planners, it may surpass customers’ expectations as well. One truck manufacturer known globally for its customized industrial truck designs takes on average seven iterations of an order to get it accurately entered. It’s doubtful the customer expects several phone calls to get the order right, yet it’s a certainty they expect the truck to be configured to their requirements and delivered on the date promised on the quote. This example sets the foundation for the steps needed in making the demand- driven journey:

1. Get outside your company and see how your supply chain is changing customers’ expectations. It’s too easy to sit back and get complacent in a company and not notice how supply chains are out of sync with all aspects of being demand-driven, from the initial expectations of customers to fulfilling customized product orders. Get outside your company and experience how it sets expectations, and monitor how they fulfill them or not. There are many ways of doing this, but don’t outsource it to a research firm. Get out and experience it firsthand to see if customers’ expectations are getting fulfilled or not. The bottom line of this exercise is seeing whether or all of the expectations demand-driven strategies create are actually being fulfilled through supply chain, manufacturing and fulfillment integration. It’s a good idea to get a sense of your POI score at this point to see improvements over time as well to perfect order performance.

2. Take the lessons learned and start integrating people, processes and systems together to make supply chain planning and management more demand-driven. Get customer-facing processes-including order capture, quoting and pricing-and with channel partners or retailers, forecasting, integrated back to supply chain planning and management. Redefine processes as part of a pilot in this phase, and measure the impact on the specific area’s POI score. This is a great way to see how changing customer-facing processes impacts perfect order performance.

3. Take the lessons learned from the pilot and define a plan for integrating all customer-facing processes to supply chain planning and management systems. There are many aspects of this last step, the greatest being to get people to change how they do their jobs today in the demand-generation, supply chain planning, management, manufacturing, fulfillment and services areas of the company. There’s also the need to look at how to bridge the gap between demand-driven initiatives and strategies and supply chain planning, management and production. The Cincom Acquire Enterprise Sales Portal has been specifically designed to enable manufacturers to bridge the gap between demand generation strategies and supply chain, manufacturing, fulfillment and service operations areas.

3. Individual Responsibility and Accountability

The perfect order isn’t just for supply chains anymore. When one considers the impact it has on customer expectations and as a barometer of how well a company is fulfilling those expectations, it forces the issue of how demand-driven a supply chain really is. Since customers’ expectations are any company’s future, it’s also important to not try to cost reduce operations so that high ROI measures are achieved at the expense of being able to fulfill orders accurately, completely, on time with no damage. Creating pilot projects to see how becoming demand-driven in just a single area impacts perfect-order performance is the approach many companies are taking, gradually expanding into all customer-facing channels and processes over time. Even in tough economic times, investing in demand-driven has the potential of bringing in top-line revenue growth and permanently changing a company’s ability to compete for new business.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus

Free Webinar from Stanford University on Cloud Computing Scheduled for March 30th

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 16:54:00 +0000

One of the best series of free webinars available today on design, engineering, innovation, and software development is sponsored by the Stanford Center for Professional Development.

Their next software-related webinar, From Virtualization to Cloud-Computing: Challenges and Opportunities in IT is March 30, 2010 from 9AM to 10AM Pacific. Daniel Barreto, Chief Software Architect for Wyse Technology is presenting

It is well worth the time to get a free login on the Professional Development site, and often the webinar hosts provide the handouts for downloading before beginning. These webinars typically attract over 400 people, so be sure to sign up early.

Bottom line: The goal of these webinars is often to recruit students for certificate and degree programs, so the content is often over-the-top in terms of quality. It’s definitely worth checking out if you are interested in cloud computing.

Flickr attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/36531501@N00/1623451769/

It’s Complex to Write Simple These Days … But Hemingway’s Rules of Writing Can Still Work

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:27:00 +0000

I’ve had Marketing and PR employees work for me right out of college, and found most were woefully unprepared for the real-world new PR environment. Not because of any inherent deficiency in the school they came from, but more from the frenetic pace of change in the Marketing and PR industry. Blogs, Vlogs, Podcasts, Social Media, SEO, SEO PR, Tags, and on and on and on. The technology changes alone can be daunting or intimidating.

Complex and Under-appreciated

It’s a skill and art that is complex, under-appreciated and, as far as I can tell, under-emphasized by schools. Or—if you have the teeth-pulling, Novocain-less pleasure of reading many press releases—companies, for that matter. Why is that? One of the main reasons is …

It’s Complex to Write Simple These Days

Ernest Hemingway had a clear understanding and vision of writing simply and effectively when he discussed the four rules of writing he learned as a journalist at the Kansas City Star.

Hemingway Four Rules (well, not really, they were the Kansas City Star’s actually)

Use short sentences.
Use short first paragraphs.
Use vigorous English.
Be positive, not negative.

“Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,” Hemingway said in 1940. “I’ve never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them.”

These rules still work. Rarely used. But still work.

WHY??? Click Here.

Complex Selling Cycles and Basketball: Both Need Values to Succeed:

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:14:00 +0000

Lessons from Coach John Wooden

Recently Cincom Founder and CEO Tim Nies published an article titled “Rhythm and Tempo Must Be Orchestrated by the Maestro.” He draws the parallels to Maestros controlling the rhythm, metre and tempo of a symphonic performance to that of an excellent selling professional who seeks to excel at value-based selling in complex selling cycles. He points out that for sales cycles to be successful, each person and department contributing to their success needs to be synchronized with each other. Knowing when to jump at an opportunity with total intensity and passion versus when to pull back and use time wisely is a key point of the article.

His many points made me stop and think of the best examples of leaders controlling the rhythm, metre and pace of their teams to their goals. Coach John Wooden of UCLA immediately came to mind.

With a career record of 664-162 (.804), 10 NCAA National Championships, 13 trips to the Final Four and a member of the inaugural class of inductees for the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006, Coach Wooden exemplifies what being a Maestro is all about.

No other collegiate coach has won this many national champions in the history of NCAA basketball. Consider the players he orchestrated through their collegiate careers, including Bill Walton, Gail Goodrich, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kevin Grevey and many others.

Complex Selling Cycles and Basketball Seasons: Both Need Values to Succeed

Sales professionals who sell on value are a lot like Coach Wooden. They orchestrate their teams to align with the most urgent needs of prospects, capitalize on opportunities to excel and compete more often against themselves than letting a sales cycle degenerate into a price war. When entire companies choose to sell on value, just as when entire basketball programs do, they improve over a season. The same dynamic happens in complex selling cycles. Being more focused on using time competitively is what also differentiates winning sales cycles and winning basketball teams.

Respect and value for time must anchor any long-term selling effort, the same way a coach will look to the hours invested in practice to make their team the strongest, fastest, and smartest it can be. Being a Maestro or coach also requires that a new perception of time be communicated to everyone involved in a sales cycle or team, and it is this: competitive strength comes from how time is used and invested, not in the size or financial might of a competitor. Coach Wooden could attest to this.

Managing Time Is the Greatest Competitive Strength

UCLA’s first national championship under Coach Wooden came 1964 against Duke, a basketball powerhouse and a financially stronger school than UCLA at the time. Coach Wooden came into that national championship with a perfect 30-0 record. How? From exceptional recruiting? UCLA was relatively unknown for basketball to this point. Exceptional alumni donations? The UCLA basketball budget in 1964 was less than many pay for a new car in 2010. It was valuing time and making the most of it, time used well was the great equalizer, the competitive strength UCLA used to win their first national championship and nine more.

Just as any sales professional knows who has managed and won complex selling cycles, the competitor who manages their time the most effectively has a greater chance of winning. Everyone competing in a complex sales cycles has to wake up every day and resolve to be more efficient, more focused, stronger with solutions for the prospect than their competitor – and when this mindset is achieved complex selling cycles are won.

Seeing Time as a Competitive Asset First, Constraint Second

A great coach can control the rhythm, metre and pace of a game their team is competing in. The same holds true for sales professionals who sell on value when they are managing complex selling cycles. A common trait both have – and it is essential to control rhythm, metre and pace – is seeing time not in fear but as a competitive strength to be gained by using it well. Coach Wooden at times quoted verses to his players including Ecclesiastes 9:11, The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all. In other words, everyone has the same amount of time; it’s up to each of us – selling or supporting the selling cycle – how we’re going to use it.

Wooden’s Competitive Secret: Strong Values Lead to Championships

Just as a Maestro conducts a symphony comprised of widely varying instruments, so too a sales professional orchestrates selling teams that each have their unique strengths used in the service of customers. What unifies an orchestra or symphony and the highest performing sales teams are their shared values.

Coach John Wooden began work on the Wooden Pyramid of Success, shown below and downloadable in PDF format here, over his years of coaching first at Indiana State and through the years at UCLA. Take a moment and read over the Pyramid of Success and reflect on the highest performing sales teams you’ve ever worked with. If your experiences are like mine, you can readily attest to a very large overlap. The best salespeople who sell on value are teachers; they genuinely love to serve their customers. Indeed some see it as a calling to be of service to customers and have a passion for it. Best of all, the Wooden Pyramid of Success succinctly communicates what great teams exemplify and that is a selflessness of service and a willingness to give complete intensity and focus to winning.

Bottom line:

Complex selling cycles are as long or longer than a basketball season.

Anchoring the coordinated efforts of teams in shared values and treating time not with fear but with an opportunistic mindset makes all the difference. From the Maestro who delivers an excellent performance to Coach Wooden winning 10 NCAA National Championships, to the sales professionals who sell on value and orchestrate their teams to winning new business, all must be anchored in solid, strong values to succeed.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus

About the Author

Louis Columbus has nearly 20 years of experience in the IT industry, specializing in market and industry analysis, sales, product management and development. He's held senior positions at Toshiba America, Lockheed-Martin, Intergraph, and immediately before joining Cincom, as senior analyst at AMR Research. Mr. Columbus is a frequent contributor to industry publications, is a columnist for CRMBuyer.com, and has published 15 books on operating systems, peripherals, and industry analysis. In addition, Mr. Columbus is a frequent lecturer in Webster Loyola-Marymount University's graduate program on International Business. He is a regular contributor to the Perfect Customer Experience and the Complex Selling Made Simple blogs. Contact Information: LColumbus@Cincom.com

The Sales Challenges of Complex Manufacturers

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 02:26:00 +0000

Streamlining the quote-to-order process improves competitive advantage

One of the first sales tricks you learn during your first fast-food job is the process of “upselling.” Say a customer comes to the counter and orders a soda. If they don’t specify the size, you ask them if they would like a large soda. You never suggest a small soda.

The idea is that if the customer really wanted a medium and you offered a small soda, they might take the small soda. On the other hand, if you offered a large soda and they really had a small in mind, a medium now doesn’t seem so “large.” They’ll take the medium, earning your employer a few cents. Those cents — multiplied across hundreds of franchises add up to thousands of dollars a year.

In the fast-food business, supply isn’t a problem. Sodas of all varieties are in abundant supply. It’s how much soda you can sell that sets you apart from your competition.

Complex manufacturers by nature move products that are exponentially more difficult to configure than a large diet soda. But the order process for their products should be almost as simple and transparent to a regular customer. It is a cost-savings and relationship-building process that savvy companies are just beginning to explore.

The burden of excessive supply

Ever since Henry Ford first put cars on a conveyor belt, the keyword for complex manufacturers has been efficiency. In the past, American companies were rewarded for getting more products out the door faster to a world eager to consume their goods. As the global economy emerges as a reality — and not just a buzzword — these same companies now find their manufacturing processes highly efficient, but some of their sales processes woefully out of touch.

These sales processes need to be streamlined to reflect a new business model where it’s just as important to move products as to manufacture them. In order to remain competitive, companies must capture more market share by building relationships and being easier to work with than their competitors.

The quote-to-order process is a perfect example of an area that has not had much scrutiny from efficiency experts. In reality, it can be a serious drain not only to productivity and profitability, but it can also harm a customer’s positive perception of your company.

Getting it right the first time

Like kids playing a game of telephone, the quote-to-order process is not always a smooth path. With too many operators in the middle of the action, there is a great potential for miscommunication and error.

Consider the typical quote-to-order process. A sales rep takes the call from a customer and listens as the customer describes what they want.
Even a seasoned sales rep that has complex knowledge of the product and how it is manufactured can easily overlook a customer request that contains incompatible parts or customizations that are no longer available. The result? Customers end up with quotes that are invalid or functionally not optimal.

This situation worsens when invalid quotes are manually turned into orders with invalid configurations, incomplete information, unsatisfied product outcomes, and unforeseen price discrepancies. These can all lead to lower profit margins or even losses on the sale.

With a more controlled quote-to-order process, these problems can be turned into a major competitive advantage that will capture more market share. Instead of letting the customer drive the order conversation, new technologies present sales reps with a list of questions to ask about each order. Each question, when answered by a customer, leads to another set of questions, based upon the specifications established by the manufacturing floor, procurement and engineering.

Since the system is tied to procurement and the manufacturing floor, the sales rep can instantly give the customer a much more accurate projection of when their order can be delivered. If parts or materials are missing, procurement can be instantly (and seamlessly) alerted to the needs of this order as it is being processed.

This new emphasis puts a new spin on the customer-facing process that relies on knowledge management and rules management. What does all that mean? It means that the correct information is gathered — and quoted to the customer — the first time, every time. In a sense, the configuration is the DNA of the order. If you get it right, the results are predictable.

Efficiencies further down the line

The cost-savings of a more advanced quote-to-order system don’t end in the sales office. When implemented correctly, the return on investment can extend across the enterprise.

Many companies employ engineers who are responsible for double-checking sales quotes and orders. These engineers validate the specs in the order, search for information missing from the order and then develop schematics for that specific order.

With an advanced quote-to-order system filling the need, these engineers can use their skills more effectively for new product development. The system validates each quote based upon the rules specified and begins to create schematics for the order based upon existing knowledge. This allows the shop floor to schedule appropriate staff for incoming orders much more accurately.

Changes to orders are an inevitable part of doing business. Most changes, however, should come from customers, not from an inefficient quote-to-order process.

At multiple levels, changes are expensive, requiring time and resources to process the changes through the product lifecycle. The cost of change skyrockets as the order gets closer to delivery when manufacturers are forced to scrap nearly finished products due to misalignment with customers’ needs. This complicates build schedules, engineering, and manufacturing. The total cost of change is seldom recovered with special prices. Most companies never fully recover the costs of change and see their profit margins erode.

Planning for future demand

Focusing on the customer-facing processes within an organization may be the most important initiative a company can leverage.

Imagine how much more accurate forecasts would be if:

Quotes could be generated in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks
ALL quotes were stored in a centralized database and available for reporting as soon as they are created
Orders were electronically generated directly from the quotes in the quote database
Win/loss rates were known and predictable based on the history in the quote database
Future sales could be predicted with a high degree of accuracy several months in advance (at the time of quote instead of the time of order)

If all of this were possible, imagine the benefits to the company:

The ability to predict labor requirements — increase or decrease labor pool based on forecasted sales
The ability to predict inventory requirements, and stock what is most likely to sell
The ability to negotiate purchases more effectively through more buying leverage
The ability to offer price incentives to improve business before the end of the quarter
The ability to provide more accurate guidance to shareholders

Focusing on customer-facing systems may be the most effective way to address the sales challenges of complex manufacturers.

Courtesy - This article was originally written by Jim Hessin, a former employee of Cincom Systems.

What Guided Selling Strategies Need To Learn From Social Networking – Part I

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:20:00 +0000

The essence of any successful guided selling strategy is the ability to fully understand customers’ needs and recommend the best possible combination of products and services to meet them. For a guided selling to be believable it has to be trusted – even for commodity products.

The good news is that social networking’s many applications have the data necessary for making guided selling highly effective. To the left is Brian Solis’ Conversation Prism. This is one the most widely referenced graphical models of social networking because it illustrates simply and powerfully how ongoing feedback and insight drives participation. Look at the inner three circles of the prism as well, and all contribute to the brand’s position.

Social Networking Has Much Potential for Guided Selling

The catalyst that makes this entire model “move” is trust. I am currently reading Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith and I highly recommend it.

As I’ve read through the first chapters of the book so far it dawned on me that Trust Agents are a lot like the best guided selling systems you can possibly design. They redefine their area of an industry (what the authors call “Make Your Own Game”) and they also have many of the same attributes the authors discuss. You’ll have to pick up the book to see the further connections to guided selling and product configuration systems that gain trust and therefore excel in serving customers.

Trust Is Earned When Customers Get Respect

The best guided selling systems pick up on the nuances of needs and wants customers have and model the application quickly to those preferences. As a result, they are not forced choice Myers-Briggs exercises in navigating a product catalog. They are experiences being built in real-time. Go check out a social networking app and you can get a sense of this usability aspect. From Facebook to Twitter to any number of other apps that have advanced usability, it’s all about streamlining the experience first to make the sales possible.

Guided selling systems need to be evangelists of product value and exceptional experience. Evangelists seek to understand the innate desires, needs, wants and passions of an audience, whether that evangelist is selling the Apple iTouch as a development platform or Microsoft selling their .NET vision. They get in touch with the passions people have and give them a path to their goals – they enable a vision to be attained. The best guided selling systems does this – and if you doubt this just go onto Expedia and start thinking about a trip to Tahiti (or your favorite warm destination) and you will find amazing ways to rationalize those airfares. Guided selling systems could learn much more from social networking apps and technologies of how to be even better evangelists. Again this gets back to earning trust and setting expectations – and then exceeding them.

Delighting customers by having more knowledge of them and their expectations by mining social networks shows exceptional potential. Imagine being on a business trip and staying at a hotel chain you haven’t been to in months. When you check in they remember you are a member of their loyalty club, and they have the request you did five years ago saying you like fresh fruit in your room when you arrive and that you like a ground floor room because you like to get out and run in the mornings and don’t like hassling with elevator lines. Because you’re a Facebook fan of the hotel chain they give you a discount coupon promises through Twitter and Facebook. You didn’t have to ask, they just did it. You see what guided selling could be? Like a virtual 24/7 concierge. I have a friend who manages one of the largest Hilton hotels in the Los Angeles area and the biggest training challenge is to get employees to deliver what he calls “service with heart”. How much better to give the employees a chance to know customers before they arrive – anticipating their needs and delivering service with heart? Guided selling with social networks could make this happen.

Bottom line: Earning trust by thoroughly understands customers’ expectations and then exceeding them is what best practices in guided selling can be. It is far beyond automating commodity transactions – it can be a catalyst for delivering service with heart.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus

Interactive {Marketing} Bandwagon

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:48:00 +0000

The evolutionary cycle of marketing has lead marketers wondering on how to leap into the interactive bandwagon. This no more seems to be pertaining to any specific industry, company(s), or sector. It’s now a global phenomenon or rather a cross industry phenomenon. The definition of interactive marketing comes from John Deighton at Harvard, who says interactive marketing is the ability to address the customer, remember what the customer says and address the customer again in a way that illustrates that we remember what the customer has told us (Deighton 1996)

Well, this could explain by President Barack Obama, Shashi Tharoor, Anand Mahindra, Gul Panag and so on is all on Twitter. Of course the another example that I love talking about is Amazon.com that mainly started to use interactive marketing so effectively, as customers record their preferences and are shown book selections that match not only their preferences but recent purchases.

I have to admit that though interactive marketing has been dominant in the digital domain, however the same has started to make inroads into other means of non-digital marketing. Though whatever terms we may use however the simplest way to understand interactive marketing is to understand the behavior of your customer and predict…well what ever predictions you can make about your customer, but not merely based on your intuitions, feeling and so on; rather based on substantial data.

While we, marketers, are attempting towards interactive marketing and trying to make a mark through getting into a conversing mode with its customer. Yes, I am talking about conversation mode in business to consumer environment. But with an event of such interactive marketing, marketers need to focus on two fundamentally important ingredients of Interactive Marketing - Analysis and Profiling.

Analysis and Profiling are fundamentals to Interactive Marketing. While I used the definition by John in starting of this articulation, I equally like to emphasis to the fact that it’s important to know your customer. Knowledge of your customer is the only way or element that could enable you to move towards interactive marketing to your customer.

For developing an effective interactive or conversational marketing, we need to understand and acknowledge about what our customer or prospective customer want to converse about. What are they like and what are their dislikes, and of course, what medium they prefer to converse with or at.

With an explosion of tools and technology we can start targeting consumer or prospective consumers about what they want. But….Hey….those are just tools. We cannot let a tool decide about our strategy(s) to converse with our customers. With the plethora of tools available it has become even more important to evaluate what tool to deploy and how the same would enable us to meet our strategic goals. It becomes little concerning and/or alarming when I enter into meeting or calls where we all are discussing about social media, Google keywords, etc without any clear strategic goal that is based on what profile of customer that we plan to target. It sounds something weird to me that we are going the interactive way without any substantial effort or homework towards understanding the customer. We just love to quickly get onto the bandwagons……… without even realizing that it may not be going where you would like it to go.

Now again how to gain that profile of your customer. Of course I can give a simple answer…Analytics or analysis of your current customer base. The analysis would yield “some” insight to your customer base, that could enable you to draw conclusion or at least draw a behavioral trend(s) of your customer. The same could be act as an important ingredient or the right spice for your strategic development activity for interactive marketing.

If I can come back on the example of Amazon, they did a wonderful study of their customer base to develop new understanding of their customer, based on which they developer programs for marketing and product offerings. Equally, if I may use an example of Facebook, a glorified discussion board that led to utilized a niche requirements of the customers. Again, this idea could have not been ideated before doing a great work at analysis of what a customer would or could have wanted.

Though this post alone will not justify the subject hence lookout for more discussion on this topic. Would appreciate your thoughts or comments at shiraz@shirazdatta.com

60 reasons to love India

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:24:00 +0000

A great insight into 60 reason by Kushalrani Gulab at Hindustan Times highlighting on why you should love India. They are no particular order or achieving greatness, but simple thing that makes India, the India we know.

Have an interesting read:-

Our ability to adapt other cuisines to our tastes: Hot and Sour Chinese soup has desi tadka. Sandwiches aren’t thinly sliced and lightly buttered slices of bread with slivers of cucumber. We add green chutney and sliced aloo and beetroot. We invented Chicken and Veg Manchurian, developed Udipi pizzas, concocted onion omelettes, created veg kheema, de-Japanesed Japanese food by cooking up gajjar-ka-sushi, and now are well on the way to Indianising the seafood diet of penguins in Antarctica just in case that becomes the hot new phoren cuisine of 2010.

Faith and spirituality: Tell someone you don’t believe in God. Go on. You’ll find yourself arguing so vehemently to make your case that you could well be accused of having a severe case of faith – faith in no God in this case. Because that’s what we do – believe. Hard. With passion. In anything we want to believe. Which is why practically every faith known to God is right here in India, and we’re not above inventing several more if we think we haven’t enough.

The way we are so flexible: Checked anyone’s filofax lately? Know anyone who has a filofax? We may set off in the morning expecting to follow a strict schedule of assignments and appointments, but we are always happy to chuck all our plans at a moment’s notice, particularly if the alternative involves partying.

Our many and varied stories: Our history goes back 5,000 years – and so do our epics that contain every emotion, possibility and philosophy that humans have ever managed to come up with. Not to mention a frightening amount of maths, if we’re considering the ages that make up the four yugas. Add to that the epics of Islam and Christianity, local folk traditions and tales that simply emerge from our fertile brains, and we’re wondering why our TV channels need to import bad reality shows from phoren and inflict them on us.

Chai: It’s raining. We need chai. It’s cold. We need chai. It’s hot and sweaty and miserable. We need chai. Yes chai, not tea. The over-boiled, over-milked and over-sweetened stuff that could rot our teeth and turn our insides into shoe leather, yet never fails to put life back into our tired frames. Then there’s also tea. Darjeeling, Assam, Nilgiri, Kangra... Mmmm, the fragrance.

Monsoon mania: Who needs marijuana or Ecstasy? The monsoon is what we get high on. After a long summer spent gazing up at the sky through a magnifying glass looking for the merest hint of a cloud (and in imminent danger of setting our eyebrows on fire), we see the sky begin to darken, then the first drops of rain hit the earth, then we breathe deep and our nostrils fill with the delicious scent of wet earth... and then we complain bitterly about floods.

Weddings and family occasions: Our weddings are attended by family, relatives, friends, past and present neighbours, people who invited you to their or their siblings’ weddings, past and present colleagues, random strangers because we had 300 wedding cards extra and didn’t want to waste them, plus gatecrashers – a guestlist so long it rivals the population of the whole of Africa. If however, our homes are filled with the population of only one small country, like Bangladesh, we’re just having a family dinner.

Bollywood jhatkas: Hips swirl in one direction while the torso twists in another and the shoulders go somewhere else entirely even as the head moves so violently, it could spin off the neck entirely. We’d make excellent weather vanes, only no one would know where the wind was actually coming from.

Autos: Germany had its cute little Volkswagen Beetle, we have our cute little autos – three-wheelers packed with hi-tech music systems and disco lights that would put nightclubs to shame, which trundle up and down roads as their drivers overcharge everyone in sight, including themselves by mistake.

Bargaining: Worry about being cheated, who us? It’s the people we’re buying from who are tense. That’s because we don’t see bargaining only as a legitimate means of lowering prices. We see it as a sport. So we will not move an inch from the thelawalla even if the sun is blazing down at 53 degrees. We want that 30 paise off our kilo of apples and that is that.

Desi hospitality: Atithi devo bhava… and we will be devo-ed till our stomachs burst. (Perhaps because our hosts bargained so hard with the thelawalla that the apples were practically free?) When we step into anyone’s house we are fed, watered and pampered so much, we’d never believe there was a single nasty person on this planet. The only difficulty is getting away – if they could, our hosts would adopt us on the spot.

Tel maalish: Even as we read the stories by our lifestyle journalists on the joys of spa massages, we are getting our hair cut in full anticipation of the head massage that will follow. It’s hard to fathom why the phoren people get so excited about massages. Haven’t we been tel-maalished from the second we were born?

We’re child-friendly: Aside from the fact that we love children so much that we’re soon going to produce enough to populate the entire world, everything in our lives is geared towards their happiness. So much so that our parents never want us to leave home.

So many newspapers and magazines: Whatever the rest of the world may think about reading, we have so much respect for knowledge that many of us literally worship our books (i.e., take them to temples to be blessed, instead of actually opening them). This may explain why new newspapers and magazines are constantly being launched even as marketing people complain that nobody reads any more.

We survived the recession: That’s because even though we are clambering up the conspicuous consumption ladder just like those phoren people who drove their economies to the brink of extinction, unlike them we have a culture of caution and saving that pulled us through when entire countries had to declare bankruptcy. That’s why. Our stash of black money certainly had nothing to do with it.

We’re a democracy, thank God!: You say, I say, she says… we all can say. And many of us do say – very, very loudly. Ideas and arguments are alive and though some of us (call them Party A) feel a great desire to clonk some others (call them Party B) over the head for having foolish opinions, we’re lucky because still others (call them Party C) are just as thrilled by the idea of clonking some of us (Party A) over the head for their ideas, as meanwhile, Party D lurks about, thinking hard thoughts about Party C. So a balance is maintained at all times.

We’re miserly and extravagant at the same time: We spend approximately the amount required for a new house on a new handbag, but we turn purple with rage and start throwing things about (though not our new handbag) when the auto driver suggests Rs 25 as a fair fare.

Raddiwalas: When those phoren people start making noises about our carbon credits – ours, for heaven’s sake, when we are the most frugal people on this planet always trying to save 10 paise here and 20 paise there, never mind that there are actually no coins in those denominations any more – we can tell them that we are green without even trying because ours is a country where recycling has always been a business, thanks to the raddiwalla.

Jugaad: Nothing in India need only be what it was originally meant to be. A motorcycle can be attached to a cart and become a bael-gaadi, a tangle of wires could become a satellite dish, and when prissy parents refuse to serve alcohol at weddings, the boot of a car is a bar.

The sheer number of holidays: There’s a New Year’s Day practically every month, not to mention some festival or the other courtesy one community or the other. And if we don’t take the holiday, we are nasty exclusionists who do not believe in unity in diversity. So there is a minimum of three holidays every month not counting weekends and if we live in Kolkata, we also have bandhs.

Our values are still (mostly) intact: Family – check (see the millions who turn up for our weddings). Friends – check (see movies like 3 Idiots). Frugality – check (ask the thelawalla if you need proof). Hospitality – check (look at the size of our stomachs and we haven’t been home for weeks). Modesty – uh oh. What’s that we keep telling ourselves about Asian tigers?

Our patriotic songs: They can be truly heart-rending. Just the first few bars of Saare Jahaan Se Achcha can make us weep – and not only because our neighbour sings it so badly that we’re convinced she’s a Pakistani terrorist. And they are also so rousing that it takes just one hearing of Hum Hindustani to make us grab anything at home that might serve as a weapon and queue up at the Defence HQ, ready to sign up for the Army.

Amazing diversity of food taboos: We have vegetarians who won’t touch anything that once had the potential to move (though we don’t understand this too well – don’t palak leaves flutter in the breeze?), we have vegetarians who will eat all vegetables but won’t touch garlic or onion, we have eggetarians who will only eat vegetables and eggs, we have chickenatarians who only eat vegetables and chicken but not eggs, we have fishitarians who will not touch dairy with a bargepole and non-vegetarians who think green veggies are a form of mould. We have so many people with so many dietary problems that it’s a wonder we get to eat anything at all.

Amazing diversity of food: Food taboos, shood taboos! When we set off for school or the office clutching our tiffin boxes, we know very well we’re not going to eat anything that’s in them. Because the second it’s time for lunch, tiffins are exchanged for what our classmates or colleagues have brought. Which is why, in one day, we could find we have eaten anything from akoori (Parsi) to aloo poshto (Bengal), to sai bhaji (Sindh), to bisi bele bhaath (Karnataka), to aloo-bhaji (UP), to tandoori chicken (Punjabi), to biryani (Muslim) to de-Japanesed Japanese like gajjar-ka-sushi (wholly Indian, mera Bharat mahaan).

Amazing diversity of us!: For a people who have so much in common, we come from a wide variety of races. Across the world, we are mistaken for Chinese (anyone from the North-East), Caucasian (Parsis and Sindhis), Italian and Spanish (Goan people, especially with curly hair)... You name it, we’ve got the gene.

Amazing belief that anything worthwhile could have originated only in india: We don’t care what anyone says about Africa being the cradle of civilisation, we know for a fact that we invented everything in the world – including the world’s genes, so there! We’re responsible for shampoo (champi), bungalow (bangla), thug (thugee), chicken tikka masala... Err... Well, we’re responsible for the chicken tikka and the masala and since the combination is so ghastly, we’re fine if the Brits take the credit for that.

We’re a nation of ideas: Tired of the sheer boringness of branded shoes? Someone will paint your keds for you. Want a poem for a loved one but can’t rhyme anything but moon and loon? Call the poet-for-hire. Ordered 3,00,000 wedding cards and find you actually know only 2,50,000 potential invitees for the wedding (oh, the shame of it)? Call the rent-a-baraati company in Ambala. We are short of many things in our lives, but we’ll never run out of ideas.

Our wealth of healing plants: If there’s one tree we cannot do without, it’s neem – and it’s here. It takes care of almost every ailment known to human and animal kind – and it gets rid of pests. Then there’s haldi, there’s cloves, we even have soap growing on trees, there are a host of plants that are ours – and if phoren people use their convoluted legal language to patent these and take them away from us, we’re going to sing Hum Hindustani, pick up our frying pans and clonk them over their heads.

Singing: What do you get when two of us, even if we’re perfect strangers or deadly enemies, are hanging around with nothing to do? A sing-song, that’s what. Because we luuurrrve singing. We sing everywhere and anywhere, we have contests for bathroom singers and enormous national-level singing contests called antakshari – whether we can actually sing or not.

Indian English: So here we are, writing in the phoren language our one-time colonisers bequeathed to us, and here you are, reading it. But let’s not get all chauvinistic about this. Because just as we have de-Japanesed Japanese food and come up with gajjar-ka-sushi, we have de-Englished the English language and now only speak Indian. Indian is only superficially English. That’s because we translate phrases directly from our local languages into Indian so it’s no wonder that at times we feel there’s someone eating our heads. And if we’re in too much of a hurry to translate anything, we just bung in words from all over the place, so there are five separate languages in a single sentence. And come to think of it, do we really need that poet-for-hire? Don’t we rhyme-shyme everything in sight-shight all the time-shime?

Yoga: While the phoren people are doing horrible things to their abs with sit-ups and crunches, we are standing on one hand with one leg wrapped around our heads, experiencing an inner, spiritual glow, because – aha! Yoga isn’t just a workout for the body, it’s also a workout for the mind and soul.

We’re a hardworking bunch: (Except at our government offices.) Out there in the West, everything shuts at 7 pm, so if you need bread or a life, you have to go to an Indian shop. Here, you lose your key at 2 am and the chabiwalla is by your side at 2.03 am.

Mahatma Gandhi: One frail old man took on an entire imperial empire. And he did it in such an inspired manner – non-violent non-cooperation, brilliant! – that we’re still seen as the most moral country on the planet.

Thelawallas selling cut cucumber, peanuts, chuski, bhel etc: Because as we all know, food provides fuel and without fuel we can’t function, so never mind the tiffin boxes from home, if we don’t have a small snack every 20 minutes or so, we will simply collapse in a heap.

Mangoes: Mumbaikars will kill for Alphonso. Northerners swear by Dussheri and Langda. The ones down Vindhya way will die for Begum Palli. Goans will eat any mangoes that ripen in their backyards. There are also Rajapuri, Kesar and a hundred other varieties of this best of our summer fruits. If, after all that, you don’t like mangoes, we might consider you anti-national.

Indian stretchable time: What time do we need to report for work? 9.30 am? Ah, that explains why we phone the trade union when we arrive at the office at 1.30 pm and learn we’ve been docked half a day’s pay. Indian Stretchable Time is in a zone of its own – and no one can understand it but Indians.

Our child-like enthusiasm: The Nano finally hits the roads? You can be sure that everyone on the road – including the world-traveller in his BMW will be tailing the Nano, just to look at it. We win the T-20 World Cup? Everyone will abandon work to line the streets to look at the team – everyone including the bosses.

Drinking water: Everywhere else in the world, we’ve got to pay roughly the sum of a two-bedroom flat in Mumbai for a bottle of water, but in Indian restaurants, waiters will swoop down on you and refill your glass even if you take so much as a sip.

Domestic help: By which we mean servants. One to cook the food. One to wash the dishes. One to sweep and swab the floor. One to dust. One to wash the clothes. One to clean the toilet. One to make chappatis. One to watch each baby. One to man the gate and run the errands. One driver per car. One to wash the cars. One to cut vegetables. One to massage the baby. One to water the plants. Why do we have so many? Since we obviously can’t complain about household chores, we’ve got to complain about something, no?

Indian Railways: From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, Jhansi to Jhumritalaya, there are only a few places in the country we can’t reach by train. And while the journey is not always what we might call comfortable, we can’t deny that it presents us with a magnificent tableau of everything that makes India India.

The way mobiles have taken over everything: Need veggies? Phone the veggie man. Burning desire for panipuri? Phone the chaatwalla. Practically no one in the country doesn’t have a mobile phone any more – even the beggars on the streets (and we do want to know how their phones are so much fancier than ours).

Superb scenery: We’ve got ice deserts in Ladakh and actual deserts in Rajasthan. We’ve got the Himalayas – the highest mountains in the world! We have the Ghats on either side of our peninsula, islands, stunning beaches, the seas, the lakes, the jungles, the wildlife, the rivers, the waterfalls… we’ve got the whole planet, right here. Who needs a passport, for heaven’s sake? (Though, because it says Republic of India, we’re very proud of ours.)

BPO power: We are not concerned ourselves about minor things like getting to work on time, but if people around the world need traffic movements for their commutes, they have to phone us. We’ve become so good at fixing their things from a distance, doing their homework from a distance and even reminding them about their anniversaries from a distance, we’re wondering how the world turns without us.

The riot of activity in every household every morning: It’s chaos till 11 am – even if there are only two people in the house. People being dragged out of bed, people queuing for the loo, people rushing about looking for shoes, people eating breakfast on the run, the domestic help switching off fans and sweeping us literally off our feet – you’d imagine no one had ever woken up in the morning before.

Nothing is beyond repair: When your computer man tells you that your machine has died, call the raddiwalla – if he can’t tell you how to fix it, he’ll certainly show you how to convert it to another purpose altogether. This is India. Nothing is ever so broken that it’ll never work again.

The way we have a name for every single person we may be even remotely related to: Ma, baap, dada, dadi, nana, nani, taya, tayi, chacha, chachi, bua, phupha, mama, mami, beta, beti, potaa, naati, poti, naatin, behan, jija, bhanja, bhanji, bhai, bhabhi, bhatija, bhatiji, pati, patni, saas, sasur, damaad, bahu, jeth, jethani, nanad, nandoii, devar, devarani, saali, salaa, samdhan… And that’s only in Hindi. Need we say more?

Indian movies: Bollywood, Tollywood, Mollywood, any wood – but the films that we make are definitely not Hollywood. Our films are our films – wherever in the country they’re made, in whatever language, there will be laughter, tears, songs, dances, action, family values, principles (and even principals) – all in three hours. Talk about paisa vasool.

The way we force MNCs to Indianise: McDonald’s had to invent the McAloo Tikki, the Paneer Wrap and the chicken burger. Pepsi came up with Masala Lays. Coke never used celebrities in their ads abroad till they came here. Whatever the MNCs are famous for in phoren, when they’re here, they’ve got be us.
Our need for heroes: We love people who achieve things – even if what they achieve is notoriety. Hey, as all PR people know, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Galli sports: Sports arenas, sphrorts arenas, who needs them when we have gallis, bits of crate and an aged tennis ball? While we hate it that our kids have little opportunity for organised sport, our kids calmly play on the streets – and then walk straight into international arenas.

Every occasion is a celebration: Complete with cards, clothing, eating out opportunities, gifting options, holiday options – nothing is safe from this relentless need to party – including this. Happy Republic Day!

Mukhwaas: You wouldn’t notice it in public, given how we have to skip lightly from garbage heap to garbage heap, but we like everything about us to be fresh. Which is why we’re such big fans of supari. We can’t avoid body odour, but we can eliminate bad breath.

Pet names: In Bangkok, Tuk-Tuk is an autorickshaw. In Bengal, it is the name of a person. Or in Punjab, we could be called Sweety, Cutey, Happy, Jolly, Pinky or Frooti (just add Sneezy or Dopey and we’ve got the seven dwarves). Our parents take great pains to name us in such a way that we are ensured safe and happy lives – and the second our names are registered, they call us Goldie or Pappu.

We can stay with our parents for life: Indian parents never, ever want their kids to leave home. So it doesn’t matter how old we are, we are at liberty to sail through the door at all hours every night, expect to be served, have our chores taken care of, pay almost no bills, and enjoy all the comforts of home. Because Indian parents never, ever want their kids to grow up.

Saris: What’s sexy, modest, graceful, classic, cool, hot, well-ventilated and gorgeous all at the same time? One word: the sari.

The Republic Day parade: It is the biggest national PR exercise ever, but we either long to be there or tune in on TV to see everything that makes our Bharat mahaan – our Armed forces, the different cultures of all our states, even cultural events that normally have us running screaming into the nearest cinema for a pop-culture fix. And at the end, we sing the national anthem and burst into tears.

The tiger and the peacock: And the lion and the crocodile and the Ganges dolphin and the elephant and the rhino and the hornbill and every single creature of the natural world that makes our country so special.

Paanwallas: Because it doesn’t matter what household need we run out of and when – need a toothbrush at 3 am? Go to the paanwalla.
Our wacky record holders: We aim to have the longest hair, be the person who wrote the most letters to the editor, the man who can take the most kicks in the crotch (really). We are determined to be the first at anything wacko – and if we can’t achieve that, we are the nation that tried its hardest to be No. 1 in the Guinness Book of Records.

Just because: We don’t need 60 reasons to love India. We just need one. It’s home. It’s saare jahaan se achcha.

Social Space….The Uncharted territory.

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:06:00 +0000

Wikipedia Explains Social Media as a media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media supports the human need for social interaction with technology, transforming broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

Or let me put it in a simpler ways - Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies

The definition of Social Media could be as simple or as complex as we want. But its ability to achieve or disseminate a content is un-doubtfully behemothic or in simply HUGE. One of the recent reports by Nielsen Online suggest that Time Spent on Social Networking in U.S. increases by 83 Percent; Facebook Leads, top 10 sites’ list revealed.

It could be corporate’s that wants to leverage this new format or now in the “digital time span” medium age marketing to attract new or retain old customers. Aaron Uhrmacher provides 35+ Examples of Corporate Social Media in Action. Irene Lizarraga provides examples of beauty sites in the social media space, building awareness about Swine Flu or most importantly Kareem’s friend trying to use this medium to free Kareen out through http://www.freekareem.org/.

Social Media can offer help to all, provided you know how to gracefully accept it. But then is this means that it is for all and can be done by all. To that I would say that it is certainly for all but cannot be used by all. Examples of Social Media Disasters are all over the Internet, in every forum, in every group, and probably in every digital space. But then I would say to that what I learnt in my mountaineering days could be implied for social - “You tend to make mistake when you enter an uncharted territory, but then don’t make such where you loose your life”.

Social Media is not a process, it’s a believe of marketer that plan to venture into this uncharted territory that would provide reaping benefits but offers a gigantic valley full of illusions(s) or mirage. Hence don’t learn the traits of social media, learn and believe in social media. It’s a climb of K2, you cannot afford to venture out without preparations. I encounter situations where we may believe its working, but then is it actually doing what it promised or are we looking through our illusionary glasses. The best part of digital media is that - its biggest strength of monitoring the space has become its biggest weakness – we don't know how effectively monitor it, and of course Social media carry the same genetic code.

Hence it’s important to you to analyze that Which Social Media Channels Should You Be Using? And how you can monitor or analyze the same.

Guided Selling in Medical Products Manufacturing: Lessons from Market Leaders

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 03:01:00 +0000

Creating and sustaining selling strategies for medical products often involves taking into account the treatment strategies and long-range plans of hospitals, medical centers, and clinics. Each of these healthcare providers has completely different needs for medical products and equipment.

From GE Medical Systems with heart monitoring and EKG machines to the defining of state-of-the-art x-ray systems that need to be designed in many cases to fit into smaller and more compact spaces, medical products manufacturing is engineer-to-order in many cases.

Evolving Best Practices in Guided Selling for Medical Products Manufacturing

The use of guided selling systems to deliver insights into how best to design and install complex medical products is an area that is getting increasing attention. Factors that are taken into account in these best practices include but are not limited to the following:

Greater focus on data integration of one device to another. State-of-the-art medical devices often have IP addresses in them so they can report back the status of a patient if they are monitoring vital signs. These devices can also sync up x-rays, medical tests, and results with patient information systems and electronic health records as well.

Greater need for accuracy in manufacturing as margins are squeezed. As the U.S. healthcare cost structure is disproportionately higher than many other nations in the world, costs for medical products equipment are often managed very closely. Margins or profits for medical products manufacturers are entirely dependent on how efficient their production systems and processes are. The use of guided selling to get the most accurate quote, and from the quote, an order, is critical in the medical products market.

The majority of medical products are ordered via quote further underscoring how critical it is to have excellent guided selling strategies in place. Nearly all medical products are ordered through quotes, which translates into the need for absolutely clarity and accuracy in the quote-to-cash process. The use of product catalogs and knowledge bases to support guided selling strategies further ensures the accuracy of orders.

Bottom line: Guided selling in medical products manufacturing drastically reduces errors and increases profitability, and is essential for an industry highly dependent on order validation and precise definition to healthcare providers’ needs.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus

Improve Demand/Lead Generation, Handling and Follow-Up

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:57:00 +0000

Good demand/lead generation is a continuous process that involves targeted messages and campaign management, response management, lead qualification, sales inclusion and customer relationship-building and retention.

Revenues have been the primary measure of sales performance and still are. For marketing departments, the number of leads generated has often been used as the key metric. This can result in an emphasis on simply increasing the sheer number of leads from a marketing effort. This may also result in frustration for sales teams because of the perception that marketing-generated leads may not be fully qualified.

A number of business analysts visualize the process of lead generation and how that results in sales, like a funnel with holes along its sides that represent “leaks.” Lead and demand generation activities by marketing departments fall into the funnel at the top. Because of the increased use of a wide variety of interest-generating media, such as telemarketing, the internet, and social media channels, leads are often more challenging to qualify. Often the number of leads generated is larger and the leads are in various states of qualification.

However, along the length of the funnel, leads leak out for several reasons, such as:

Poor qualification methods
The time leads are in the funnel, which can cause a “warm” lead to go “cold”
Limited follow-up by sales

The result is that between 40% and 80% of the original leads may be lost before they arrive at the end of the funnel, where they may appear as sales opportunities.

How to prevent the loss of sales leads

To prevent the loss of leads, it may be useful to ask the following:

What is meant by a “qualified” lead, and do both sales and marketing agree on the definition? Sales often expresses skepticism about the quality and “warmth” of the leads generated by marketing campaigns. Concurrently, marketing is often skeptical about sales reps’ ability to translate all the leads generated into actual sales. Technological systems like the one we use—Eloqua help to standardize and automate some parts of the process and should improve agreement and the ability of these two groups to collaborate.
How are marketing campaigns evaluated so they can be continued or changed to make them more successful? The number of leads alone is not usually a good metric, as mentioned above, and now technology is available that can track campaign performance based on qualified leads and other metrics.
Is there a process in place for providing the prospect’s interests to sales reps before they make the follow-up call? One way of looking at ongoing communications to collect such information is called “drip-marketing.” It involves the use of a variety of media to connect with the prospect in a personal, regular and consistent way. It requires technologies and processes, strategies to ensure privacy and compliance, and ongoing testing and measurement to determine effectiveness.

Addressing these sorts of questions basically results in the insertion of another layer in the process of marketing’s discovery of prospects and handing them off to sales. A means of qualifying the leads now occurs before the hand-off, providing sales with both names and intelligence about them and a much “warmer” prospect than before.

Courtesy – Jay Mckveer

Listening Platforms

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:05:00 +0000

In response to marketers’ changing needs, brand monitoring vendors are evolving to offer a more strategic and comprehensive platform. Forrester refers to this category of vendors as listening platforms. Listening platforms differ from brand monitoring vendors in one fundamental way: They deliver insights to shape marketing strategy rather than simply tracking metrics. Forrester’s evaluation of leading listening platform vendors across 62 criteria revealed an emerging category still maturing in its capabilities and vision. We found that Nielsen BuzzMetrics and TNS Cymfony established early leadership — thanks to their strong balance of data collection, analytics, and consulting services. Dow Jones Insight, J.D. Power & Associates (JDPA), and Visible Technologies are all Strong Performers: Dow Jones Insight for its strong data coverage, JDPA for text mining and market segmentation capabilities, and Visible Technologies for a strong technology backbone. Biz360 is also a Strong Performer with an innovative product offering — Opinions Insight. This study’s sole Contender — Radian6 — lacks the ability to identify sentiment but offers a solution with an easily customizable user interface tailored for PR teams.

Recommended Read. Click Here to read the report.

The Social Media Landscape

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:28:00 +0000

Social Media - a magnetic force field that is attracting marketer from all across. Of course I too was attracted towards this paradigm of marketing, but was certainly fortunate to get acquainted at a much earlier stage of its emergence. However, having opined that, I have to admit to the fact that it’s changing or rather shifting dimensions at phenomenal pace than what I or my teachers at the time could have anticipated.

Social media space just like the emergence of Internet on the face of the earth has attracted recipients and consumer, but more importantly the conversion of consumer and producers of the content. It no more producers producing content and consumers consuming. It’s more like a mashup situation where consumers have turned its biggest producers.

Surly saying that it’s a world of its own may justify some power of social media. But as they say “With great powers, comes great responsibility”. This is were I have to admit that while marketers are willing to go on board as quickly as possible on the social media bandwagon, but are they responsible with it….…unfortunately most of the them comes under the unfortunate NO bracket. It’s not an element of your checklist of marketing do’s or putting “Share This” on your webpage. It’s surly something much larger than that. It’s an art that has or needs to be integrated into science. Well…..I hope you may acknowledge its importance with my little arts and science thingy….Nevertheless….

Why should you spend your ad dollars on social media? This is one question that Sean Carton had tired to answer in his recent article “A Social Media Strategy Checklist”, which I have to admit is a good articulation in recent times on this subject of Social Media. I completely buy and echo his worries on social media and the way its being currently embraced by marketers without clear objectives, goals or strategy. Specially a Para “Why should that worry me? Because I've only rarely encountered people with actual strategies behind their social media push. Sure, plenty of clients (and prospects) I've spoken to in the past year or so made vague noises about viral video or being on Facebook or tweeting, but when I've pressed them for why they want those things, few can give me an answer”. Wonderful…..

He further articulates 10-step of social media strategy checklist (A recommended read), which is certainly an example of true cognizant thought process. However I would like to add one additional element and probably accentuate one step mentioned in the article.

One element to add is the “management commitment” or buying in into the process. Unfortunately the associations or companies that I have witnessed with this paradigm (social media) has highest failure rate due to the simple reason that management did not believed in it. Of course at initial stage it will not receive any different response that what one may have received when venture into an uncharted territory, as per your management is concern, which of course Social Media offers – “An Uncharted Territorial Media”.

Hence to ensure the success of this activity or element or what ever word you may feel appropriate for social media that the management is in agreement into your venture with high level of patience. Yes, Patience is certainly an important element of social media so called ROI. Equally, as a marketer you need to ensure a high visibility, understanding and effectiveness of the program are well fed back to the management.

This leads me to an element that was surely mentioned in the article by Sean Carton however deserves little more amplification. Its ability to monitor or analyze. I love stating that Internet is most measurable medium in the history of marketing and the only thing which is left is to measure it. Social Media much like the digital space faces the same genetic disorder or at least the symptoms in some cases . Though we (marketers) go all out to say about the measurability aspect of the digital domain to sell our idea(s), but actually how many of us do it. With my experience of working with various organizations the answer is little discouraging, needless to say in some cases horrifying.

But then for every major disease there is a vaccination on the way. Equally, I have to advocate the necessity of integrated analysis, and decision making matrix based on the same. It’s imperative to rope the management and of course largely to learn the effectiveness of the social media through analyzing or rather integrated analysis of your digital properties. This certainly could be done through your understanding the data points served by your website tracking tools, of course great offerings by Omniture could enable you to do it, and similarly with the analysis of the social media space. Equally a name that comes first to my mind is of Radien6, an effective tool for real-time social media monitoring and analysis.

Having mentioned the tools, it’s equally imperative to merge or have an integrated view of the data points of information provided by the tools, converting it to knowledge. Thus, finally providing a knowledge based matrix that would enable an effective decision making backed by numbers and not merely by judgments, intuitions and so on. However, by stating this I would not like to discount the role of judgment, intuition and similar elements played or enable decision making.

The one greater challenge that I am certainly witnessing and/or foresee for the social media space, beside its competitiveness, is its ability to change the game or the landscape at a much steeper phase than expected, which would surly not be comforting to most of the marketers, of course including me.

Hence the discovery may require discovering more (or further educating) in the space we call Social Media……

Marketing Insights Gained from Military Strategy

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 02:03:00 +0000

All of recorded history confirms that the relative strength of a nation’s military power largely determines the degree it can assert and enforce its imperialistic, economic and political aims. The waxing and waning of its relative military power tends to closely correspond with the rise and fall of nations.

Similarly, the relative power of a commercial organization’s marketing, sales and distribution capabilities largely determines the success or failure of a business worldwide.

Perhaps for these reasons, analogies of various military strategies have been used to illustrate marketing and selling mechanisms and means. Certain ideas of military strategy are important for all who are engaged in commercial competitive activities. These are the ideas of maneuver, and especially of flanking movements.

Maneuvering and Flanking a Vulnerability

In marketing terms, a flank is a point of vulnerability or opportunity with a major customer or in a large market, which is sometimes called a niche.

If a competitor successfully takes this opportunity it can become a launching point from which the competitor can further encroach on large markets and specific customers.

Winston Churchill describes this phenomenon in his series entitled “The World Crises.” In that series he states that maneuver is necessary before one group can flank another.

Maneuvering is typical of competition during the early and developing stages of a market. Almost every great company establishes themselves by maneuvering themselves into a position where it is considered the best choice for customers.

This maneuverability must also remain a main focus of organizations once they mature as they keep track of the major established segments in the total market. This obsession with maneuvering can leave new, vulnerable flanks in the market, which smaller organizations can attack with specialty products and offerings.

Examples of flanking movements can be seen in almost any industry as smaller firms recognize and take advantage of weaknesses to surpass well-established competitors.

Read the Entire Article

Questions???

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:42:00 +0000

They always say that a picture tells a story. We as humans tend to see with “Filters”. Some says its our worldview, some says its how we envision, some says its how we reflect, and some says its how we imagine. But then, think of it, isn’t those our filters. Filters through which we see or rather want to see. I have to admit that I am not here to either diminish your filters or justify mine’. I am here to show what I see, Of course, what I see through my own Filters.

Donna A. Favors once said, “A Picture of many colors proclaims images of many Thoughts”. I assume that every thought in an individual’s mind can interpret a picture in many ways. Way(s) of fun, joy, sadness, love, fear, passion, and so on.

But today I see pictures that ask questions. Questions that I interpret by viewing these picture, …….and……answers that I believe in…………

Do I Need More People To Stand For What I Believe?

- NO!

Am I A Proud Citizen Where Kids Have To Work On Signals To Eat?

- NO!

Would I Survive A Storm?

– YES!

Do I Deserve Your Affection?

- YES!

Can You Tell Am I a Hindu, a Muslim or a Christian?

– NO!

Will Ever I Be Able To Give Warmth To My Family and Guests?

- YES!

Do I Deserve A Lonely End?

- NO!

Can We Be Friends?

– YES!

And Finally……….

What Do You See?

- QUESTIONS!

Give Picture A thought………….

Guided Selling Predictions for 2010: Crossing the Chasm from Transactions to Trust

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:17:00 +0000

2009 as a crucible that both companies and people passed through, making them stronger, smarter, more aware of how critically important trust is in these times is a good way to look back on last year. Trust is the enabler of selling, not just price or any other aspect of a channel or marketing strategy.

Trust is the bridge across the most treacherous chasms any company – or person – has to face which are uncertainty and exceptional levels of risk. In 2010, guided selling strategies will be more about building trust and being open than ever before – and will contribute to sales chasms be crossed through trust, not just price. Predictions for how guided selling in 2010 is going to make the buying experiences online more efficient, transparent and trustworthy are presented here.

Rapid advances on context-aware and location-aware 3G and WiFi networks are going to revolutionize guided selling. Google Latitude, the APIs Twitter added in 2009 to be able to track to GPS coordinates the location of subscribers and the advances Nokia is making on location-based advertising and messaging will all significantly change guided selling starting in 2010. This will continue rapidly as guided selling apps over mobile handheld devices will give marketers the chance to define potential upsell and cross-sell products for customers literally as they are walking by their stores. In B2B applications this will streamline order status and quotation management from guided selling systems as well.

Guided selling systems will align more accurately to how customers want to buy more than ever before, relying on a combination of Web analytics and personalization. Now over a decade only, personalization technologies are already getting a makeover based on Web analytics. The use of Assemble-To-Order manufacturing strategies to back up guided selling will accelerate as manufacturers especially seek to gain greater levels of production efficiency.

XML and XLST make guided selling apps pervasive across microsites, enterprise websites and through social networks. XML is the de facto integration standard that guided selling, product configuration and enterprise catalog management systems are using today to integrate together at the role-based and process levels. In conjunction with the advances in XSLT technologies, guided selling will become more of an indispensible strategy for launching products. Catalog management integration to the XSLT command level will also make personalized catalog online shopping experiences a reality.

Guided selling is already transitioning from standalone app to Web Service and this will be accelerated in 2010. No long will guided selling be just a stand-alone Web application that is licensed; Web Services are already being used to streamline guided selling, turning the Web into the operating system. Web Services based on Microsoft .NET for example will be much more mainstream in 12 months and as a result guided selling will be a heavily used app on smartphones and PDAs.

Catalogs that support multiple product taxonomies and role-based use emerge as dominant. In industries including electrical products distribution where product taxonomies are exceptionally complex there is going to be a long-overdue upgrade to catalog management apps. In those industries including healthcare and insurance were role-based use of guided selling is predominant, expect to see catalogs that can also support Business Process Management (BPM) workflows and the automation of tasks.

MRO Finally Gets Its Due. Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) is the lifeblood of many asset-intensive industries including aerospace and defense (A&D), which generates the majority of its revenue from replacement products and services. MRO, long a revenue source for A&D manufacturers, will be pervasively adopted as a lifetime product selling strategy.

Bottom line: Guided selling is due for a breakout year due to these trends, some nascent and others quite visible, impact selling strategies across industries using them.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus

Flickr attribution:
New years in London: http://www.flickr.com/photos/84934592@N00/2154248534

Waiting for an Easy Year…

shiraz@shirazdatta.com (Shiraz Datta) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 04:32:00 +0000

With a beginning of New Year and my first day back at work the usual question that comes to my mind is that what this year entails for me. Will it be the same as last year worst or may be good?

Start of anything new comes with a bag of fear(s) that would eventually dictate the terms on how we behave. But it’s interesting that we all, or at least for me…. have somewhere down that it would be easy if this ends.

So what is “THIS”….This for me could be this night, this year, this century, this day, or anything which is not what I want to witness. Now it at a stage where I can say this Lifetime….

As a young boy I always use to wonder that If my school ends, life would become easier…..The wish was granted….or at least some portion of it…So the school ended….but the problems didn’t. So here I was in a college with the so called entire world open for me but not knowing what to do. So tried…tried and tried to make a mark…but then yet came to the same stage….If my college gets over then life would be little easier…….You know what my prayers were heard again…but again partially….College got over…and here I was in middle of know where….so many degrees yet not knowing where to go or what to do….Then came an extensive hunt for job……Well I have to say that I was lucky…but while I was on my job hunt again the feeling started to cripple that if I get a job life would be easier…..

Well as a perfect human being…..The job was good the money wasn’t….then started the fighting with the competitive job arena….proving and proving my worth and hoping the day when all things would fallen in place….

Well……now with the start of new year…..due to some reasons I wonder that my life would be easier if this or that happens……But you and me know the answer…..it will never be……

This reminds…. A nice scene from Mr. India (a popular movie) in which all the kid, Sridevi and Mr. India (Anil Kapoor) have been captured and are in Mr. Mogambo’s jail. While Sridevi hoping that Mr. India would come and save the lot…..while Anil Kapoor (Mr. India) trying to explain that he is Mr. India to the lot. While attempting an escape, Anil tells Sridevi that “Madam, don’t wait for anybody. No one is coming”……In some way it tells me that while I am waiting for the perfect time….it will never come and I will have to deal with my own Sh#t.

So with this and my job calling…need to cut it short and say don’t wait for anything which is not coming.

Let the year be and unfold itself.

Have a Happy New Year…..