I clearly remember, it was 1985, my dad finally booked our first Refrigerator. The Refrigerator was delivered almost a month after the booking. Unfortunately one decorative plastic cover was found broken. Toll free or customer care concept was not there even in the imagination of the brands. The dealer was the only channel of communication between the customer and the company. The dealer listened to our complaint, assured everything but did nothing to replace the broken part.
A digital instrument that converts your Mobile phone into a device for carrying out financial transactions can be defined as a Mobile Wallet. Technology evolved from fixed line phone to a cordless phone to a mobile phone and that got us thinking of how could we add various services to this device and found replacement to various services that were restricted to a desktop or a hand held camera. How could our commercial transactions be left behind? We brought the ability to conduct these on the mobile phone.
After the recent pandemic, the world has realised that if a business has to stay relevant it has to transform itself to its Digital Avatar. If you stop meeting people and want to sell you need an interface to complete the commercial transaction. That interface to accept payments digitally is provided by a payment gateway.
Let’s understand the evolution of plastic money. Visa as founded in 1958 followed by JCB (Japan Commercial Bank) and MasterCard. These names are often referred to as card schemes. These companies issued plastic cards that would be accepted at the merchant location and dependency on cash was reduced. The advent of internet saw businesses going online and payment gateway was evolved as a tool to accept the payments digitally. Today there are various card schemes – Rupay, China Union pay, American Express, Discover to name a few. We are moving from a cash economy to the digital payment world.
We all are going through an unprecedent crisis there is no doubt about it and this one is going to stay here for a while. This crisis will also change a lot of things and ensure that most of the things are not going to be the same anymore.
The good part is that such crisis comes once or twice in 100 years, the best part is we may most likely not be facing this again in our life time.
As students our strengths are age, energy and being connected. That’s what we need to harp upon during these uncertain times. If you look at these three pillars individually and merge them together you would realize ways to not just navigate these times but also come out successful.
In my experience here are the ways in which you can learn sales and be a top-notch professional.
Observe what good salespersons in your organization do – If you are working in a sales organization, this is absolutely important and fastest way to learn. I have observed many strong sales persons (and not all were in sales!) and many interesting styles to sell. Observe very closely how the best sales persons in your organization bring in sales, how do they fix their appointments, how do they ask questions, pitch and handle objections from clients. How do they position themselves and so on.
“Boss, we will understand the data signals, optimize our search, do some data management, integrate Al, set an evaluation metric…’ a young trainee exults as | look on, wondering whether he can connect the dots.
In another context, | hear a colleague say, ‘Digital marketing will either outdated us or recast us: At a CMO meet recently, we nodded our heads in sombre agreement. ‘If we can synthesize classical marketing with the newly emerging tools of digital, we will lead the change, if not…’
“We will be led, the others echo.
‘Advertising troubles both sociologists and financial directors: the former because they think it works, the latter because they think it does not,’ says Byron Sharp. The question of whether to advertise or not is especially a concern in today’s times when the results may not be seen immediately. Unfortunately, this can’t be directly measured since advertising has a long-term impact and the drop in sales is not immediately noticeable – over a period of time, it impacts a consumer’s ability to recall. Advertising works like the engines of a flight: while the engines are running, everything is fine, but when the engine stops, the descent eventually starts. The bigger the brand, the more it has to spend to appeal to a larger number of consumers across various occasions to keep a threshold recall for their market share to hold.