Video advertising is increasingly becoming a necessity for a business in today’s fast paced world. Gone are the days when you would pen down tons of text in the “About Us” section of your website. A crisp video about your start-up can definitely make you go a long way in explaining what you offer to the right set of target audience. There are lot of tools like Powtoon, GoAnimate, Wideo etc...
Why Buy Mine? This is the question I have kept asking myself ever since Pallav and Paras did their “Global Lean Sales” session at the #PNCamp in November. I used to send a long email before and often had to explain a lot to why we charge higher. Now I just use the below message and it does the job. There is nothing different from what we were doing earlier. But our message to our market is now...
When it comes to a successful negotiation, which is more important: strategy or skill? The definition of the verb, negotiate, is to “deal or bargain with others, as in the preparation of a treaty or contract or in preliminaries to a business deal.” In a sales context, the key definition is to “bargain in order to create, or culminate, a business deal.” Sales professionals are often negotiating...
Saikrishna Chavali posted the following question on my blog post about Data & UX being two ends of the product spectrum: I’ve got a question: how did you understand the user when you were in the ad business? Did you ever meet real users? In PM theory, one is instructed to empathise with the user by actually “getting out of the office”. Since it’s quite an important question, I thought I will...
Yes, you are going to lose weight, stop smoking, learn a new language and spend more time with your family next year. And while you are in the make-a-bunch-of-resolutions-to-be-totally-awesome-next-year phase, there’s another resolution I want you to consider. As a marketer, do not create more marketing. Create more value. [Warning: This is going to be brutal. So come along only if you are not...
Deepinder Goyal is the founder and CEO of Zomato, India’s first online food guide to go global. Founded in 2008, Zomato recently raised Rs. 227 crore from Sequoia Capital and InfoEdge in one of the largest funding rounds for a consumer internet company in India. This deal values the company at over Rs 900 crore ($150 million) and has “best positioned” Goyal “to build a formidable global internet...
There are many solutions that are targeted at a niche, that solve a specific problem. Selling these is relatively easy. You know the target, you know the problem. The challenge comes with the horizontal solutions, or ones that apply to wide variety of industries and business problems. There is tremendous potential opportunity there and yet they are devilishly difficult to sell for a small company...
Vivek from iCreate facilitated yet another juicy round table with lessons learnt ‘from the trenches’. While this article provides a distilled summary, it cannot do justice to in-person learning. I strongly encourage you to attend the next iSPIRT round table. Vivek started off by saying that there is no silver bullet. Every product exists in its specific market conditions. Different things work...
Marketplaces are difficult businesses to get off the ground. A marketplace without buyers cannot attract sellers and vice versa. In fact, the infamy of this proverbial chicken and egg problem detracts entrepreneurs from the challenges that a marketplace presents after it has successfully gained adoption and is successfully matching buyers with sellers. After all, marketplaces for products, like...
The first call you make to a prospect is critical. It could make or break you. And yet, I find capable, well-meaning, highly intelligent people not putting in the effort to prepare for it. While it is obvious, and most definitely not rocket science, it helps to have a checklist to go against. I recently put together a short checklist for a client of what to think about when making the first call...
