Solution Integration and Partnership

Today, through this blog, I am trying to address a question on why Partnership and Integration certification plays a key role for any Independent Software Product companies especially in Asia Pacific. The days when technology was a proprietary of western countries are gone, Thanks for westernization! Massive buildings, change of lifestyle, eagerness and openness to adapt to the change of culture are some of the examples of westernization. This contributed to India and China being identified as strong players and fastest growing countries, and it created an opportunity for India and China to be seen as one of the very promising countries in adapting the New Technologies into business. Asian leaders emerging as global leaders and Asian companies acquiring global companies are some of the positive signs of successful entrepreneurship. This has not only created positive vibrancy in the market but also rooted thousands of start-ups and millions of entrepreneurs.

Globalization and outsourcing not only created job opportunities but also created a necessity of integrating technology as a part of day to day life. This has given a chance for the global leaders to not only seed the technology, but also to carry the customers and reputation they earned through years. The global leaders though understand global market, they need strong local influence to understand the culture and also to capture market share. May be problem and solution around the world is same but the medium and way of communication is different. This invited global companies to integrate closely with local companies. The only solution for faster learning and strengthening is the most powerful word “PARTNER ECOSYSTEM”. The Partner Ecosystem not only plays a crucial role for Global leaders in localization but also to the local vendors to showcase their talent and to reach global by becoming Partners of these Global leaders.

Customers blindly trust these leaders because they have earned their trust and confidence by providing extraordinary services. Global leaders leave no stone unturned to win the customer satisfaction and reputation. So most of the big companies bring all the required process in place, one such process is “Certification for integration” for Partnership. They make sure through this certification that the integration is seamless and there is a hassle-free environment integrating 3^rd party solutions. So at any point of time customer simply sees this certification for integration as approval ticket that carries the trust and confidence where reputation can be shared

Home Work - most essential for Sales

I would like to share one of the real experience. I got an appointment from a CIO of a billion dollar company to sell IT outsourcing services. After understanding the size of our company, he simply avoided saying, you are too small for us but the following will show how we overcome that rejection.

Home Work:

I always use linkedin to get full information about my contact person (school, college, experience) and recommendations...when you read the recommendations you will come to know what his special skills are.... and if he is the CIO of a big company, you can easily catch him in one of the press releases... like Acquistions, Product Purchase, Deal Outsource and etc...so you can atleast know where the company is going

So my VP saw his photo and previous employment history from the homework document and asked him, did you work in this company and do you know this person??.. he said "YES" the call deviated from business to something else... you wont believe they spoke for about 20 minutes till why he left the company.... finally the result was... he said I am travelling to India next month.. Let me visit your company in India...as we have implemented a new ERP and we may need skills.. but remember you may compete with big players like Infosys and CTS...and finally I picked him for the client visit.... from Leela Palace....

People Mapping - Cold Calling

There is a technique called People Mapping..... 

1) How to get the E-mail address of the CIO and 2) People Mapping (leadership hirearchy)

Always remember an appointment with CIO is the most precious time in your life... because it will change your life...and can do many wonders as they are the decission makers...but we also should remember they are only "decission makers" and they may be responsible for multiple divisions.... so when you get a chance to talk to him and if you use that time for getting information... i think we are loosing business...this is the time for projection and create impression.... here is where people mapping plays an important role.

May be CIO is a decission maker but there are always influencers and recommenders and never forget a decission cannot come without teamwork.

Now i think you know what i am referring to .... yes IT Managers, Director of Technology, VP IT and so on and so on.... and my great assest is always linkedin and jigsaw... when i know the company i target i surf for atleast 4-5 people of the same line of business..... and i will have thier name and email address.. I will try to get the maximum informatoin from the IT managers and they will be too friendly with you....and they will tell you either a good time to contact or not.... you wont believe i got a reference from IT manager in UK to contact CIO in Sharjah and later we understood its a treasure.

and at worst case... the harder people are best people anytime... i always call the CIO assistant and will not ask her to connect me to CIO but i will ask her whom i can contact to not waste CIO's time... and you get a reference there... and most of the times it will be the IT manager....now you have an authority..and i would never mention the assistant name with IT manager. I will always say... i spoke to the CIO's office and they wanted to talk to you...so you are now lucky.. you got the best of his time...if you create an impression you can write a thank you email and you can ask IT manager to forward to the CIO copying you... only if there is an opportunity...

Email address: finding email address is all how you play magic with the operators...

1) I will always call the operator desk to reach the IT manager..... i very well know, she will transfer me to the voice mail....i will call her again and will tell her i reached voicemail or i had spoken to him earlier and i missed the email address or i wrote it wrong ..can you help me with email email address as I wanted to share some important information... 60% you will get email address if not you will be connected to the person.. (Try this, i was successfull).

2) I always surf the internet for email address... and end up getting wrong person email address but from the same company.... i map the same with the CIO and call the asst and i will confirm her the email address (I was successfull)

What makes SAP a dream company?

Of course, most of “SAP employees” would have experienced this moment during their tenure with SAP. Somebody asks you “where do you work” and you say “I am with SAP”, the immediate reaction is WOW you are working for a Great company. After that you spend 2-3 minutes talking about SAP and employee benefits and etc. This happened to me many times and that is what made me write this article.

There are lots of times; I questioned myself what made SAP a dream company for most of the IT experts and like everybody I started giving choices to myself thinking this may be the reason

1)      A Great Technology company

2)      A very good paymaster

3)      An employee friendly organization

4)      Open culture

5)      Very good employee policies and list kept increasing……

And I found the above mentioned reasons were not at all reason because in each case there are competitors who fairly compete with SAP in each case

One day I went for a regional movie, where an actor is driving a bike and I noticed SAP logo on actor’s Helmet.  Immediately felt proud about SAP. Not sure if the actor knew he is carrying SAP logo on his helmet but I understood he is also doing indirect branding and promotion for SAP and that gave me an answer to my long awaited question.

The only way any organization can become employees Dream Company is only by making an employee feel proud that he is working for a great company, where his efforts are well recognized and that is what SAP is exactly doing. A great product is an outcome of a great work, a great work is an outcome of great thought, a great thought is an outcome of ownership and Ownership comes only when their efforts are well recognized.

Recognition can be of two types any organization

1)      How well you are recognized within the organization

2)      How well you are recognized outside the organization.

We can give equal 50% to the both. Most employees of start-ups and small company are recognized for their work and that is what is keeping them happy. I think in SAP, we have already scored 50% for the second type of recognition. So anything you score on the first point is a BonusJ. I am proud to be a part of SAPJ

Cold Calling - How to Reach CIO office?

The easiest way to reach the CIO is only Email because you can very well avoid road blocks like Operators and Executive Assistant but the challenge is how to make the CIO to read your email. I followed the following steps.... which gave me fantastic results... always remember may be he is a CIO of a big company but he is always a human.... So do not ever sound Salesy at any point of time.... Let me share what made me successful

I will always surf for Top 100 CIO's or Best CIO's of the Globe, or CIO Forum, and finally for the best conference speech from the CIO's..

My Subject will always be quite different and it may sound quite funny like "TOP 100 CIO", "Best CIO's of the Globe" "Please advise" "Please Educate me" and remember my email will never be salesy... my first intention is to reach him..... and to get his attention.

So I will start of with small self introduction, followed by a big appreciation and finally end the email asking for an appointment to learn or to get educated from him about the technology or market situation or what his great skills are

What i learned from this exercise is most of the CIO do not even know that they were named the BEST CIO or they are in the Top 100 list... you wont believe... out of 100 email i sent.... I got response from 60+ CIO's directly and 20 + from assistants.....now dont you know what to do...

The responses are like... where did you get this news??? can you share the link?? what you want to learn?? and a few...emails asking me to talk to the Asstnt's and get an appointment... so now the request became authority... so i always use this email as my great strength and block CIO's calendar....

From then, the whole of team mates come to me for suggestions, and you wont believe we have cracked most of the billion dollar companies.....

Every sale is different like a customer

I personally feel, if the concept of selling is just to sell, then I think we lost the game. I feel in each and every sale you make there is a lesson to learn, there is an experience to gain. I could easily make out the difference between the first sale I made and the sale I make today.

One day I started analyzing the difference between my first sale and today’s and I realized I am very successful today, though I sell the same product with no difference in price. The only factor that contributed my success is confidence and my experience.  Is this confidence, a result of my experience gained through repetitive work, reading same script? The answer I answered myself was, No. I realized I got this confidence through reading customers particularly understanding them.

Understanding customer is one of the first and foremost priorities in selling. A customer will buy only when there is a need for him to buy or only when he is capable of buying. The secret of success for every sales person lies in understanding the situation of the customer and then sell rather than just selling.

Understanding the situation will never be a result of oneday homework. Everytime you make a sale, you have to go through the salescyle of that particular sale and understand what made this vendor to buy this product. Repeat the same for different types of customers. This will expose you to come up with a list of questions that you need to ask your customers during your sales meeting.

And these questions will get you to reach near perfect in understanding the customer situation.

Approach your customer differently – The only way to sell

Like any other business unit (or) division, sales is also getting much matured. As a sales person, if we ever think that we can win a customer by magic talks, I think it’s high time, we should change our attitude. In today’s Search Engine World, knowledge is adequate and anybody can get any information from any part of the world. An employee can easily find what’s his market salary is, when this is possible any buyer can easily find how much he has to pay for the product he is going to buy. So if we think, we can win any customer by slashed quote, again we are wrong. And the growing population of Network Sales (Amway) and Modern Technology Sales (Social Media, e-mail, and Tele-Sales) has created a great awareness in all kinds of customers especially on how to deal or handle the sales people by any means. “I still remember when I called one of CIO of the reputed organization to sell outsourcing services, he was so kind to tell me that I am the 28^th cold caller in the same day and this made him understand the value of his Assistant Secretary”. This shows we are not different by any means of reach and also how huge the competition is.

After all these, if we get an appointment from the customer, then this is what we should call it a “Golden Opportunity”.  And in this chance, if we are very usual and routine with same kind of presentation slides explaining how we can address his pain points, we are 100% lost. The customer clearly understand what his pain points are and he also understand what can solve his problem and that is why he is on call with you. So it is always good to be prepared on how you are different from your competitors and what value proposition you bring in to the customers table. If you do not have answers for the both then you are playing a big time luck game. When Industry problems are same, the chances for industry solutions should also be same. So we should keep inventing new value propositions and to be different from our competitors. This is the only way for sustainability.

Finally, in my experience, I understood a Sales guy will be the most respected person in any organization when he is qualified with In-depth product knowledge, Sound convincing skills to feel the customer they are different from the competitors through which value proposition is proved.

My Ideas for a start up to become successful

On the one hand I see a very good number of start-up companies in social media communities sharing immune enthusiasm and great ideas. On the other hand I see again a great number of Techies and Business Development experts with an “Entrepreneur Tag” across communities. But the question now is how many of them are really successful? And how many of them are still able to live with the “Entrepreneur Tag”?

Now there are lots of questions to address

1)      Considering the increasing number of start-ups and new companies in this Global crisis and with strict labor polices across the globe, are we still managing to get enough business?

2)      If not globally then, has any country got huge potential to meet demands of new start-ups and Entrepreneurs?

3)      If the above two are the barriers then how about competing with the market leaders who keep increasing the market share day by day and empowering the leadership?

4)      And finally, how to secure the ideas because no idea is a fresh idea tomorrow, they are immediately manipulated and duplicated

After all these if any of the startup or an entrepreneur survived, the only question to them is for how long?

One positive thing about the startups and people with Entrepreneur tags are that they are confident about their skills and very positive about the market. Through this blog I have tried my best to improve their pulse.

For any startup to become successful the following skills are very important

1)      Expertise in business

2)      Sense of Ownership

3)      Invention and innovation of process in business

This should be the heart of any business; if you closely watch any employee’s Dream Company they will have the above three as the heart of their business. I meant Dream Company because not every successful company becomes the employees Dream Company.

Expertise in Business:

What I often observe with the average startups and Entrepreneurs is that they are specialists and not experts. To make this point clear, a product specialist can easily develop the product in no time and he can address any question around the product, where an expert is also a specialist, who can clearly define the road map for the product, identify which industry the product caters to, what the right target group is, the market pain points and clear insight on Go To market plan.

This doesn’t mean specialists are not capable of survival, they are capable but they cannot be as successful as experts.

How to become an expert:

Cross-learning is the only option here; a technically sound specialist does not have enough knowledge about business development. Sound Business Development people do not have sound technical knowledge. You cannot identify a person with both personalities, if you found one, being a startup you cannot afford one either as they may be already a successful entrepreneur or they may be holding a great position in a great organization. “As the whole world knows great employees make a great organization”

The only option left out for a specialist to become an expert is to learn the opposite skills but once you announce yourself as company, learning by mistakes is not an easily affordable task considering the huge payouts in the current market trend.

Do not mind spending for the right resource where cross learning becomes critical:

“Hire opposite skills like BD for technical and vice versa, attack as a team but do not forget cross-learning”

Sense of Ownership:

This one word decides any organization’s victory and failure. Even one resource’s failure to have this attitude is a huge loss to any organization. The core responsibility of any management team is to develop the “Sense of Ownership” to the rest of the employees. “Love your job not your company”, love to your job will not come unless there is a feel of ownership. Fine, now who creates this?  Is this self-driven or company-driven? Being an owner of any organization, if you start arguing, the argument will never end. So accept it is always management driven, to accept this is a starting point for a failure

How do I create Sense of Ownership in everybody?

1)      Hire a specialist and make him an expert

2)      The moment he becomes an expert he will feel proud to be in the organization

3)      The moment he feels proud he will start to deliver a great job

4)      Any great job is a great product

5)      Any great product is a great customer satisfaction

6)      Customer satisfaction is always a Success story, and the story continues…………..

Invention and innovation of process in business

These two words are the most powerful words for any organization. The only way to survive crisis is to preach the above two word mantra because you have to remember as a start up you are not the pioneer in the industry. If you are not different from your competitor, you are not a competitor. And this is why there is a huge difference between the great companies and small companies. If there is no room for invention, then innovate. If there is no room for innovate the product, then innovate the process of business and thinking.  Always remember the birth ISO’/CMMI/Six Sigma is an example of innovation of thinking.