What is collaborative selling and why it’s important now?

Sale is not easy and it needs a continuous work and follow ups. And its getting tougher day by day. Modern tool sets are intended to help in simplifying the sales process, however repetitive tasks like continuous data entry makes it more complicated. Just because the tool is there, doesn’t mean that they feel the need to use it. If data isn’t put in, and records are updated, the return on investment is poor.

Some of the factors that a CRM system provider should keep in mind:

  1. Make sure goals for CRM are communicated with your sales team
  2. Give salespeople an incentive for buying into new tech
  3. Provide sales-related context for CRM use
  4. Collect and act on feedback from your sales team
  5. Encourage leadership to set a good example
  6. Keep the CRM system as simple as possible

Especially now that most sales teams have moved to a remote selling model, CRM systems need to be both powerful and easy to use.

Another important thing that a CRM system should aid collaborative selling. Collaborative selling is not new, but its a age old sales process which is achieved by a team.

What is collaborative selling?

Collaborative selling involves collaboration not between sales team members, but between your salespeople and your customers. Working together, sales professionals and customers can find the right solutions for individual clients, while driving more sales success for your team.

Collaborative CRMs are a great tool for team-based environments where data or customer interactions are shared across the organization.

Collaborative CRM is a method in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) where various departments (like Sales, Marketing, Service, Finance) within an organization share customer information to maximize profitability, increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Example: Feedback from a customer, gathered by technical support team could help marketing team to suggest more suitable products or services to the customer.

Advantages of collaborative CRM

– Improves customer interactions across channels
– Reduces service cost by using web or online collaborations
– Synchronizes customer data with call centre to allow multi channel interactions

ezTask.io: Why another sales automation platform?

Its well known facts that sales team does not like to use any tool, because they have to spent lots of their time on data entry work. Even if a company manually manages its sales team, still the sales team has to apprise their manager about their activities. Most of the time they end of using excel sheet to record all their sales activities, manage their prospects, inquiries, etc. In an average, they spent 40% of their time in such works, which is a non-sales work and absolutely adds nothing to their sales volume.

However, with advancement of technology, companies are now more focusing on automation. Now is the time for smart CRM, that would help field sales team to reduce non-sales activities by automating most of their data entry work.

ezTask.io is a Sales automation platform which focuses on reducing non-productive tasks and efforts incurred by the field sales team in capturing operations information in the CRM. EzTask.io enhances the productivity of the field sales team up to 30%.

It is extremely light weight and smart CRM that can make leads capture and management, pipeline and work flow management, contacts and client management and reporting a breeze.

Arrogance: its impact on business

Arrogance

Multiple times I have experienced how the arrogance of business owner impacts the business, as well not having a good marketing strategy can bring bad results for your company,, you need make that your social media grow for this you can check this advises for getting more TikTok likes. This is one of my recent experience that further strengthened my belief on things a businessman should avoid to have a successful business. Also I have experienced how a bad manage of a payroll can bring problems to your business so getting rid of your payroll inefficiency can be something very bad for your organization.

Recently there is a fish shop opened in our area, the owner of the shop known to me. They provide home delivery services. Earlier I used to go out and purchase any fish , but with this shop nearby, I get delivery at my home. The price also comparatively cheap and quality is good. My neighbors also started visiting the shop as quality is good. I generally call him and order the quantity and get it delivered.

And then suddenly one sunday, he disconnected my phone. I thought he must be busy and after 30 mins, I again called him and still he did not pick up the call. I then messaged him in whatsapp that I want to order some fish. Then I got a message back that to order any fish for home delivery you need to call another number. I tried to reach other number and did not have much satisfaction the way it happened. I also felt little bad for not picking up my calls. I finally decided not to order anything from this shop and started again ordering any non-veg items from a local shop nearby.

This seems to be a common phenomenon in my of the businesses. In the early days, they were quite approachable and nice service. But when they grow bigger, during growth period, they started neglecting their core early loyal customers. In turn, loyal customers shift their loyalty, and that is when downfall of the business starts.

In my opinion, a business should always respect and take care their loyal customers. Early stage customers have bigger role for the success of any business. They not only help generating revenue but also fine tune product and business idea.

In our case, one early adopter of ezTask.io, helped creating robust reports and based on these reports, we got some more customers too. I am always pickup any call or whatsapp message from our early customers. In the current situation, Social media has revolutionised the way marketing is done, the best strategy to acquire customers during early days is through work of mouth and it can happen through your loyal customers.

Best ways to manage your sales team – a collection of best practices

Team Leadership

Running a sales team is not easy, it needs a coordinated effort among team to get best of individual team members, . We have compiled some industry best practices and by following such practices, I am sure it will immensely help sales people.

Its considered challenging task to manage or balance between encouraging quality performance and pushing sales reps with new goals and also for sure be more environmentally friendly teaching of the members of the team the benefits of paperless paystubs.

Sometimes success depends on your team abilities to meet the task with great performance.

Here are some steps to lead you sales team with lots of motivations and encourage to touch a height of success.

  • Understanding the meaning and the importance of sales

First thing is to understand what is the importance of sale in order to have a fruitful growth in business.

How sales should be done, what are the important points should be consider during sales.

Without sales, business will die.

For managing a sales you need a great sales team for creating a relationship between customers. Without a team it can not be done.

  • Having One-on-One

Having One-on-One or individual meeting between you and your team members is most necessary part of sales process.

It helps to understand your team members in and out in personal level and to build a good relationship with them, give managers the ability to keep a pulse on how the the rest of the team is feeling.

Take time to understand your team members, who they are, what motivates them, what they want out of a career and show care.

Paying attention to each team members pay off to great investments.

Being the best leader for another means you must first become the best version of yourself.

While you’re giving your reps candid feedback, allow them the opportunity to do the same. You won’t regret it.

  • Track progress and success

When you start your sales you need to be update with your success and failure rate, what fails you, how you succeed, everything matters.

You need to define what is win means to your team, because success can only comes with both behaviour and results.

Both are important, works in parallel manners like if you only focus on behaviour how you talks to customers and keep repeating in the same way without knowing if it is the good way to have conversations with customers, in this for you result do not matters whether you win or lose. So its important to have good behaviour which leads to positive results.  

  • Managers importance 

As successful mangers leads to successful salesperson.

Mangers play a vital role for developing powerful team. Mangers should be very confident and competent to lead a successful team as a good leader.

Should always have conversations with team, discuss ideas, be happy with the team and never discourage your team

  • Hire who fits in the culture

It’s all about hiring people who will continue to build on that high-intensity, winning mentality that you created when you assembled your first sales team. Hiring individuals that do not add and complement to the existing culture could break all of the success that the team has had.

  • Analyse your weak spots and improve them

Every salesperson brings something unique to the table, but they also may lack a skill that is holding them back from the results they want.

So it is important to understand the weakness of each team members and start leverage it.You can assign work to your teams according to their area like in which area they are good and let them work on their weak points by learning from other team members, it builds more cohesion and less tense competition.

Having competition between the team members may leads your sale in reverse direction, so having good relationship within the team members is important.

  • Practice Before Talk To Real Customers 

The most important thing that should be to understand by sales teams is the habit of practicing before they talk to real customers.

Need practicing because sometimes we didn’t know how to speak, what to speak and most important sometimes we are not familiar with the product which we are going to sale, so first practice to understand your product.

Without prep and practice before they start conservation with the customers leads to disaster to sales.

As a leader, if you are not establishing a culture where roleplaying and practice is inspected, then you will allow your sales teams to practice on your customers.

  • Always explains with an example 

Start motivating your team with an important examples so that they can have a clear idea about the process of work, because you are in a leader positions to handle you team, if you gave up then also your team.

Better providing a joyful and positive environment, sometimes mind needs peace for work-flow. Success comes by team when we have clear communication with each other, collaboration of ideas and dependability – let them work dependent to their own ideas and projects so that they can get up with some good strategy which may help in sales, you’re empowering your team to respect and adhere to the same business drive as you have.

ezTask.io – a smart and lightweight sales CRM for SME

ezTask.io – a sales automation platform for SME. We are offering introductory price of 50% discount for 6 months for any number of users for our sales automation platform ezTask.io(available in Android, Web and iPhone). This is valid till Feb 29. Call 9880398951

ezTask.io is a cloud based sales automation and team collaboration platform available in native android app, iPhone app and web app. It will help you to carry your business solutions with you wherever you travel. Our realtime dashboard provides you a 360 view of all your existing customers and new leads with their related data. Its advanced
date-time based filtering system will help you to get snapshot of your business at any point of times instantly. Why ezTask.io? Most sales management solutions are designed around Enterprise There are not many customized solution in the market SME cannot afford Complex CRM solutions – too pricey Transition from Traditional Practices SME needs a platform to have end to end functionalities – Cannot afford multiple applications for their operations

Task Management and WhatsApp

Effective Task Management Process and WhatsApp

Recently there is a growing trend to use whatsapp collaboration as a task management app. I was talking to one startup that deals in delivery services, they have around 40 employees and they have 20 whatsapp groups to manage coordination among employees and delivery persons for successful delivery of products to consumers. I asked them how do you manage such big number of groups? They said, though they have problems in managing all groups but they don’t have any alternative. Hence, the problem is can WhatsApp be used for managing tasks? This is not the problem with this company but others too.

A task management needs to have a todo with time, a task and then a supervisor and owner who needs to see if task is completed. A task also need to remind the owner just before task started. For a group task, it needs to remind all participants and help them communicate with each other like whatsapp does. Whatsapp is a communication platform and it used to communicate between people. And one part of task management process is to have an effective communication and thats where whatsapp comes into but the core of an effective task management process is not only communication but also timely reminder, monitoring too. The good part with whatsapp is that number of people using whatsapp quite quite large, that makes it a de facto way of communication and collaboration. You can communicate with people immediately who is on whatsapp and has net connection. It does not give you reminder or snoozing the task. It also does not give you freedom to repeat the task. With growing trend of using for a task collaboration among people is self detrimental, it makes more complex. Objective of any task manager app is to save time, collaboration effectively and timely reminder. It needs a specialized application that would help on these activities. Whatsapp would be solving on portion i.e. communication, but other factors those are more important in execution are completely missing. In fact by using WhatsApp for team collaboration is not going to help in long run. Instead of optimizing time, it would lead to spending more time managing tasks. If any communication has some important information then user need to search and there is a high chance that you miss it giving the volume of data exchanged in whatsapp.

The other important factor that I feel which is missing from whatsapp’s feature list is real time status update and push notification whether a task is completed or not. If a task has multiple subtasks and you have shared the task with your peer and need to get real time status update on sub tasks then you need to better use a task manager that would help you on this. And planning is completely missing.

In summary, for a better planning, collaboration, communication and execution you need to use a task manager that gives you these features, instead of using a communication tool like whatsapp.

A tale of two trees

This post will tell you how the environment and your immediate surroundings have great impact on your growth and well being. Many times, we think that we are independent and we are not bothered about happenings in our surroundings. But this is not true, we are nurtured by our environment, friends, neighbors and surroundings. My office at Diamond district, Bangalore is almost 500 mts from the place where I park my car. I have to walk through a busy surrounding of offices, footpath vendors to my office.

Cassia tree opposite to a Wine shop
Cassia plant opposite to a tea stall

Recently BBMP or some local people, not sure has planted some saplings in the footpath. This is indeed a noble work. The green cover of Bangalore is depleting in a alarming rate and such initiatives in large scale would definitely help in bringing back lost glory of beautiful weather of Bangalore. I everyday cross two cassia sapling on my way. One of the cassia sapling was planted opposite to a wine shop- top left side plant and another cassia sapling was planted opposite to a tea stall where people from nearby offices come, spent time smoking, gossiping. In the beginning two plants were growing properly, and we quite healthy – for first 2 weeks. The plant opposite to tea stall is always poured with water, no litigation, grows properly. As you can see the plant opposite to wine shop, neither there are water and people also took out the remaining leafs. Some other day, some one has broken its branch. So the point is our growth and wellness is heavily influenced by our surroundings. Most people come to wine shop – an open bar are mostly daily workers, rickshaw pullers and I can see some time there are altercations, some people even out of sense lying in the footpath. They might have broke the plant, plucked leafs. Where as, the other tea stall has people from nearby offices, blue collar/ white collar executives. They understand the importance of a tree at current situation, that helps to pour some water and the plat grows. Similarly, One need to be with good people. That not only increases the effectiveness of your collaboration with your surroundings but your growth too. Collaboration is always two sided and equally participated by both. If you cannot take care of a poor plant why should you expect anything in return be it oxygen or shed from sun.

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How to be successful: stop these 7 things

How to be successful

I come across this post from linkedin. As an entrepreneur, we keep on doing things like to please others, keep following people, though they never care – These are just waste of time. We need to have our own way of doing things and we should not be a story of someone else’s pen. Let it be our pen to write our story.

I could not stop myself than adding all points in my blog.

7 things to STOP right now if you want to be SUCCESSFUL. Get that JOB and KEEP it ! 1. Stop being loyal to people who are not loyal to you.

2. Stop worrying what people think and say about you – hardest lesson to learn.

3. Stop trying to please everyone because you can’t.

4. Stop reacting and start responding” – Buddha – another hard lesson to learn !

5. Stop wasting time on people who do not care, there are so many who do – lost money can be found, lost time is lost forever !

6. Stop letting others dictate how you should live your life – “When writing the story of your life don’t let anyone else hold the pen” unknown

7. Stop doubting yourself. Don’t think you deserve the job ? Apply anyway. Don’t think you will do well on the interview – go to it anyway ! Don’t think the recruiter will respond to your email ? Send it anyway – do not self-reject. Failures do not kill dreams – doubts do.

Product update ezTask Personal , a task management application

Recently our intelligent task management solution ezTask Personal is getting more traction with number of installs increasing. We have committed to provide a free task management solution to provide all features to efficiently manage time for individuals.

We have just released a new update to help User to manage all contacts, select contacts to create a group task.

There will be an additional menu option “Contacts” to view all contacts. The contact list will show any contacts already using ezTask app. User can also invite contacts for using ezTask app.

User can create any group task by just selecting contacts. After contact selection, our system will prompt User of type of group events. We have collected popular type of events and show it to User for quick task creation.

We will keep on adding new features, bug fixes, UX improvements. Your feedback will help us to improve this product.

Here is the playstore link

 

Managing Disruptive Technologies in business

Disruptive Technology

Every company in every industry works under certain forces—laws of organizational nature—that act powerfully to define what that company can and cannot do, a well salary for employer is one of those thing that companies have to deal with, if you are business owner you can follow this tips to make sure you are paid well. Managers faced with disruptive technologies fail their companies when these forces overpower them. Lets take a look at history of manned flight innovation. The ancients who attempted to fly by strapping feathered wings to their arms and flapping with all their might as they leapt from high places invariably failed. Despite their dreams and hard work, they were fighting against some very powerful forces of nature. No one could be strong enough to win this fight. Flight became possible only after people came to understand the relevant natural laws and principles that defined how the world worked: the law of gravity, Bernoulli’s principle, and the concepts of lift, drag, and resistance. When people then designed flying systems that recognized or harnessed the power of these laws and principles, rather

than fighting them, they were finally able to fly to heights and distances that were previously unimaginable.

As in the analogy with manned flight, these laws are so strong that managers who ignore or fight them are nearly powerless to pilot their companies through a disruptive technology storm. However, that if managers can understand and harness these forces, rather than fight them, they can in fact succeed spectacularly when confronted with disruptive technological change. I am very confident that the great managers are very much capable on their own of finding the answers that best fit their circumstances. But they must first understand what has caused those circumstances and what forces will affect the feasibility of their solutions.

Here are some of excerpts from the book Innovator’s Dillema

Managers may think they control the flow of resources in their firms, in the end it is really customers and investors who dictate how money will be spent because companies with investment patterns that don’t satisfy their customers and investors don’t survive.

The highest-performing companies, in fact, are those that are the best at this, that is, they have well-developed systems for killing ideas that their customers don’t want. As a result, these companies find it very difficult to invest adequate resources in disruptive technologies—lower-margin opportunities that their customers don’t want—until their customers want them. And
by then it is too late.

As I read the book, I will be publishing some more excerpts from the book. Please keep watching this space.