Adding Value, Selling Smart
This topic and this post is going to seem a little out of the blue. :)
This is a ad-lib response to a post my friend Uday made on his blog (http://learningsalesman.blogspot.com/), in turn replying to a comment I had made on an earlier post he had made called Know Thy Customer. Reading that thread ahead of this would be advisable to those interested in a little background. But it should read fine standalone.
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I was thinking about the Dunkin' Donuts example Uday gave me (the server recognized him, knew his usual order, and offered it to him straightaway) and it made me think of two sales scenarios I am familiar with:
1) The paanwalas of India have perfected this service of offering you your 'usual' without you having to explain what it is for decades (if not centuries)! The reverse psychology that comes into play there, as anyone will tell you is very interesting. Nowadays, if a regular paan-eater/ smoker is not recognized/ offered his usual by the paanwala, it will be considered a slight to his huge male ego (most patrons in India are male). Secondly, it comes to a point where if a bunch of friends end up at a paan shop, and the guy at the counter offers the 'usual' to one of them, the man in question will puff up with pride and eat it - regardless of whether it was actually what he wanted. :) Go figure!
2) amazon.com - A place I am a regular at, which always meets/ exceeds my expectations. Three things they do for me really hit the spot. Curiously, I hadn't thought about them or realized they were there, until I read an HBR interview with Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com CEO:
a. They publish candid reviews from a very strong user community, and don't censor horrible/ bad reviews beyond editing for four letter words. While this may initially seem counter-intuitive (a sales force allowing bad juju about their product to spread), in the long term, it builds buyer confidence and loyalty. They were the first to do it, and now this is a standard feature expected of any e-commerce site worth its salt.
b. They offer me a menu of recommendations based on my ratings/ reviews/ past buying choices/ browsing history etc. (Netflix does this awfully well too.) This system of recommendations is really good (the technology/ algorithms behind it). It has got to a point where if Amazon recommends an upcoming book/ DVD that I have never heard about, I would buy it as though the recommendation came from a friend whose choices I respect!
c. The last is a bigger risk than the bad review publication, as any conventional store-owner will tell you. Like many other e-shops, Amazon lets its users sell their copies of books/ DVDs to other users in the feature called Amazon Marketplace. (Their flirtations with auctions a-la-eBay flopped years ago). I can buy second hand stuff on Amazon. So what?
What is amazing is that they list these competing second hand prices on the main page for a new product, and don't hide the second hand offering in some obscure corner of their site. So if I am buying a new, special edition DVD of a fifty year old movie for $40, they will tell me straight out if somebody in NYC has an older VCD/ DVD of that same movie available for $11 with shipping!
Again, while it might seem that this will hit their sales (and I'm sure their sales partners aren't too happy with them for it), in the long run this makes me feel good about buying on Amazon. I am also more comfortable with making impulse buys there, or buying stuff other than just books and DVDs (they now have over 35 mini-stores for everything from wine to washing machines), because I am reasonably certain that I am getting the best deal.
I guess what I am saying is, there is more to sales than simple memory. Value addition and smart selling involve
a) Thinking about what a customer really wants
b) Thinking about what a customer would really want if he knew it was available
c) Making a sale subtly without appearing to take over the customer's choice-making
Anyway... that was what I wanted to say. And methinks me opened up a whole new category of posts (or a new can of worms, depending on how you look at it) on this here blog. :)
1 comments:
You are right, one shoulds really think about what customers really wants. But how do you do it? Its easy(relatively) to do that on a website( cookies) or a panwalah because of an inherent characteristics where the customers comeback multiple times and there is also an assumption involved that the customers knows what he likes and the product is in demand. Simply put its a Market Pull scenario. There's a wealth of research and literature which explains how to do it, in this scenario.
But how to know what a customer wants in a technology push scenario. Its really difficult because in this case you are preempting the customer and saying you need this you just don't know it right now.If the technology push is for a sequential innovation, it may still be done based on the previous sequence, what if its a radical innovation, how do you find who the cutomer is and what he likes?....more thoughts later..sitting in a class:-)
Nitin
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