innovation – AppiVa Software Pvt Ltd

November 18, 2021

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:

Make sure goals for CRM are communicated with your sales team
Give salespeople an incentive for buying into new tech
Provide sales-related context for CRM use
Collect and act on feedback from your sales team
Encourage leadership to set a good example
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

June 4, 2020January 17, 2022

Why you need a smart sales CRM?

Smart Automation using Artificial Intelligence — Smart CRM uses power of smart phone and AI

What is CRM? As per wiki “Customer relationship management(CRM) is an approach to managing a company’s interaction with current and potential customers, is one the best ways how you can do a combination in between accounting and business. It uses data analysis about customers’ history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth” wiki

In most of the CRM tools available today, sales people need to enter data and this data would be processed for meaningful strategic outcome. However, entering data manually comes with a cost. Data entry is costing your employees valuable time and energy, and the trend shows that this cost is just increasing. With today’s technology, the question could be asked if CRMs shouldn’t be more intelligent by now. Have a critical look at your sales organization and you’ll probably start seeing the leaks. Don’t allow this to eat your sales organization from the inside.

First of all, Sales employees to focus on sales, but you also need the data in your CRM to be able to manage your operations. Research has shown that the average employee using CRM tool spends about 4 hours per week entering data into the CRM system manually.

Secondly, imagine your employee who generated good sales, but doesn’t get paid out because the data hasn’t been entered properly. Shouldn’t this employee concentrate more on sales instead of spending time on entering data?

On average, only 40% of all sales updates are ever entered into a CRM. Again, the reasoning behind this is actually easy to understand. In addition, data is typically only entered at certain moments of the week or month. Either when a reminder is sent to enter the data, or shortly before a team meeting where results are being discussed. This means that only at specific moments will you have all information in your CRM to actually make good decisions.

And finally, what happens if a sales rep leaves the company? Typically, a large part of the pipeline simply goes up in smoke. Vanished, as if it was never there. You lose any progress made, and might even sabotage other sales reps who pick up those prospects and don’t know the history. All because the data wasn’t entered.

Why automation is the only solution?

The only real solution can be to take this work away from them. The 4+ hours per week spent on entering the data, and the time and energy spent on the discussion around it, can be saved by automating this process.

With advancement of technologies, it is possible to use latest technologies to automate most of the tasks. Here are couple of automation those can help to reduce the burden of manual data entry

Email automation – Email is the first communication channel to reach customer. The user should be notified when customer opens the email, entering data to the system when email received from customer. The system should notify the summary of emails received from customer with sentiment analysis. This will help sales people to further engage with customers in real time. This will help relieving sales employees of administrative work and support sales leaders in creating a high-performance sales organization.

Call Management – Imagine you are talking to customer and phone screen flashes with some visual clue to inform you the mood of the customer. Based on that you can decide how to talk to customers, whether is customer is interested or not. After the talk is over, the system should generate summary of the talk and also sentiment of discussion. This will help sales people to improve their communication skills as well. As the summary of talk is already stored in the system, further communication with customer will be more productive.

Geo-fencing – Geo-fencing is another feature to inform sales people of any nearby customers based on their movement and geo-distance. It is a virtual perimeter that allows users to see existing clients and leads on a map. For sales professionals with access to a geo-location tool in CRM, targeting and selling to a specific geographic area has never been more simple.

With advancement of technology, it’s now time for CRM+, CRM plus smart automation with intelligent data analysis.

June 4, 2019

How to be successful: stop these 7 things

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.

November 15, 2018

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

September 20, 2018January 17, 2022

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.

February 12, 2018February 12, 2018

Year 2007: That changed the digital world

I remember I was at NY when iPhone first released. It was Steve Jobs took the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on January 9, 2007, to announce that Apple had reinvented the mobile phone.

I in fact got my unlocked iPhone-1 from a chinese store at Queens and its still with me now.

The moment that Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone turns out to have been a pivotal junction in the history of technology—and the world.”

There are vintage years in wine and vintage years in history, and 2007 was definitely one of the latter.
Because not just the iPhone emerged in 2007—a whole group of companies emerged in and around that year. Together, these new companies and innovations have reshaped how people and machines communicate, create, collaborate, and think.”

In 2007, storage capacity for computing exploded thanks to the emergence that year of a company called Hadoop, making “big data” possible for all.”

In 2007, development began on an open-source platform for writing and collaborating on software, called GitHub, that would vastly expand the ability of software to start, as Netscape founder Marc Andreessen once put it, “eating the world.”

On September 26, 2006, Facebook, a social networking site that had been confined to users on college campuses and at high schools, was opened to everyone at least thirteen years old with a valid e-mail address, and started to scale globally.”

In 2007, a micro-blogging company called Twitter, which had been part of a broader start-up, was spun off as its own separate platform and also started to scale globally. ”

Change.org, the most popular social mobilization website, emerged in 2007.”

In late 2006, Google bought YouTube, and in 2007 it launched Android, an open-standards platform for devices that would help smartphones scale globally with an alternative operating system to Apple’s iOS. ”

In 2007, AT&T, the iPhone’s exclusive connectivity provider, invested in something called “software-enabled networks”—thus rapidly expanding its capacity to handle all the cellular traffic created by this smartphone revolution. According to AT&T, mobile data traffic on its national wireless network increased by more than 100,000 percent from January 2007 through December 2014.”

Also in 2007, Amazon released something called the Kindle, onto which, thanks to Qualcomm’s 3G technology, you could download thousands of books anywhere in the blink of an eye, launching the e-book revolution.”

In 2007, Airbnb was conceived in an apartment in San Francisco. In late 2006, the Internet crossed one billion users worldwide, which seems to have been a tipping point.

In 2007, Palantir Technologies, the leading company using big data analytics and augmented intelligence to, among other things, help the intelligence community find needles in haystacks, launched its first platform.”

In 2005, Michael Dell decided to relinquish his job as CEO of Dell and step back from the hectic pace and just be its chairman. Two years later he realized that was bad timing. “I could see that the pace of change had really accelerated. I realized we could do all this different stuff. So I came back to run the company in … 2007.”

It was also in 2007 that David Ferrucci, who led the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and his team began building a cognitive computer called Watson—“a special-purpose computer system designed to push the envelope on deep question and answering, deep analytics, and the computer’s understanding of natural language,” noted the website HistoryofInformation.com. “‘Watson’ became the first cognitive computer, combining machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

In 2007, Intel introduced non-silicon materials—known as high-k/metal gates (the term refers to the transistor gate electrode and transistor gate dielectric)—into microchips for the first time. ”

Last but certainly not least, in 2007 the cost of DNA sequencing began to fall dramatically as the biotech industry shifted to new sequencing techniques and platforms, leveraging all the computing and storage power that was just exploding.”

Excerpt From: Thomas L. Friedman. “Thank You for Being Late.”

January 8, 2018

Are you scared of starting your own, then this post is for you?

Start your own business

Happy new year 2018 and its time to live your dream. Are you planning to start something new in 2018 and have already thought pros and cons about it. And finally family life, EMIs etc. Finally concluded lets wait for some more time and then will think of my own. Then this is the post for you. Here are collection of 37 quotes from famous people and will definitely give you adrenaline to get started.

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” – Pablo Picasso
“Don’t worry about failures, worry about the chances you miss when you don’t even try.” – Jack Canfield
“You can’t plan for everything or you never get started in the first place.” – Jim Butcher
“Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” – Theodore Roosevelt
“Start before you’re ready.” – Steven Pressfield
“A year from now you may wish you had started today.” – Karen Lamb
“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.” – Les Brown
“Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.” – Ray Bradbury
“You don’t have to be good to start … you just have to start to be good!” – Joe Sabah
“If you can dream it, you can do it.” – Walt Disney
“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.” – Beverly Sills
“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.” – Henry Ford
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney
“The hardest thing about getting started, is getting started.” – Guy Kawasaki
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” – Mark Twain
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” – Jack London
“The greatest amount of wasted time is the time not getting started.” – Dawson Trotman
“Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.” – Farrah Gray
“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford
“If you have a dream, you can spend a lifetime studying, planning, and getting ready for it. What you should be doing is getting started.” – Drew Houston
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” – Les Brown
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” – Mark Twain
“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tsu
“It’s time to start living the life you’ve imagined.” – Henry James
“The beginning is always NOW.” – Roy Bennett
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” – George Eliot
“All our dreams can come true – if we have the courage to pursue them.” – Walt Disney
“The only thing that stands between you and grand success in living are these two things: getting started and never quitting!” – Robert H. Schuller
“What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The greatest time wasted, is the time getting started.” – Dawson Trotman
“The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps – we must step up the stairs.” – Vance Havner
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” – Sally Berger
“He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.” – Horace
“The distance is nothing; it’s only the first step that is difficult.” – Marquise du Deffand
“We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.” – Calvin Coolidge

June 29, 2017

Startup shutdowns in India

https://inc42.com/buzz/startup-shutdowns-india-2017/

Today, there was a news that 8 startups closed their office in 2017. This is not a good news for startup industry and it must have impacted everybody associated with these startups. I wish they will again rise with a new beginning.

Last year, between January and August 2016, reportedly 29 startup shutdowns in India took place. Hyperlocal startups were the hardest hit. As compared to 2015, reported 15 startup shutdowns that were reported in media.

If you further analyze these startups and their business model, then you can find that most of these startups are some kind of copy or replica of an existing successful startup or solution. Copying another business idea is permissible as long as there is some kind of innovation added into it and market is yet to get saturation in terms of competitions. But blindly copying an existing business model will be a disastrous. In the travel space, there were some unsuccessful startups like travelgenie, travelchacha, etc. Its not that their product is bad but they simply failed to attract customer. Most of the impacted startups are in hotel bookings and aggregation, hyperlocal, niche ecommerce and foodtech.

In reality, making small changes to things that already exist and successful might lead to a local maximum but it wont help in getting into global success. FlipKart is still a Indian retail giant, with almost no global presence. You could build a best version of iPhone app to order toilet papers but iteration without a bold plan wont take it to 0 to 1. A company is the strangest place for all for an indefinite optimism i.e. why should you expect your business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism idea of evolution maybe fine for other context but in startup, intelligent design works best.

May 27, 2017

Innovation or customization

Our future depends upon how we try to progress in our day to day life. The progress means changing every aspect of life with regard to time with some new happenings. When we talk about new happenings, we generally think of improving some existing solutions and then adding glue to make it different. That is what makes it a different and with proven success in it. In the history, there are enterprises succeeded by copying and updating existing solution and even making the solution much better compare to original idea, this is hybrid and there is nothing wrong in it. But some time, some companies copy an existing solution and then modify it in such a way that the modified product is termed as innovative one.

Apple has changed the way we use mobile phones, though before iPhone there were Palm OS with touch screen but the actual innovation for the User happened after iPhone came to market. This is not innovation but this is customization that refines how User should use phone. There was a paradigm shift on how User should use phone using touch screen features. This came when Apple was on the verge of perform or perish. I still remember those days of attending Steve Jobs’s iPhone presentation. The same way, ebay created a market place of used items and it was instant success. These are the few instances of how consumer’s usage pattern was redefined using technology.

Its not always true that innovation starts from 0. Some time innovation comes from existing products too. Twitter is another example of customization of blog and sms, which made Users to write anything of 140 characters.

The summary is, irrespective of whether you copy an idea or invent something new, it all matters how your product/service impacts Consumer behavior and how its perceived by consumer.