“I don’t care what others think about me, I just want to get on with doing a good job only”, well good job and hard work surely matters and there is nothing wrong to have such attitude, but such attitude may not be enough for achieving the desired career goals. Personal branding has a key role to play in the development and advancing of one’s career. Creating yourself as a brand at work can often be the deciding factor for a successful career.
Today only a few organisations have all the resources & infrastructure to tackle new market opportunities or competition independently, maintain economies of scale, cost efficiency and deep network penetration. Going it alone only, may lead to unreasonable investments and an infrastructure which may require dismantling afterwards. Business partnering can actually be cheaper and more flexible than a merger or acquisition.
“Strategic Business Partnering”, here is in context to an organisation which have manufacturing facilities but still enters into an alliance with another manufacturer for mutually beneficial goals, viz, capacity utilisation for one and for the other catering to the market demands without additional infrastructural fixed investments.Here we are not discussing of relationships viz, of a manufacturing company with trade, financial institutions or a venture capitalist.
Business leaders across the globe agree that data is the new oil and business analytics has been gaining importance and playing a pivotal role in organizational strategy & decision making. It is apparent that data and analytics will become the essential function for any organization not only to grow, but to survive.
It’s often said that at the core, everyone is a Salesperson. Irrespective of the work, level or the profession you are in, as long as you are dealing with people, you are selling something. Hence, shouldn’t sales be second nature to all?
When you set aside the commercial angle of Sales, it is just an exchange of goods, services or ideas, which is an integral part of our daily lives. So, what is the larger definition of Sales? Here’s what I would put it as – anything you do to help another person or provide value to them in exchange for something tangible or intangible, is Sales. And when that exchange entails a monetary value, its commercial sales as we know of it. And when there is no monetary aspect in this exchange, which is very often the case in our daily lives, we seldom think of it as Sales. However, the exchange for some intangible benefit is also Sales in another form.
What makes sense now, the upper funnel should be the focus of most marketing teams in the coming months. Marketers have to keep tracking the trends throughout the customer journey and digital marketers may have to focus more on the organizational sales and marketing strategy and not just on, dull brand, product or service marketing calendar initiatives.
The sales objective is to pursue quality leads and the marketing objective is to generate leads that sales can later qualify and pursue, in turn, the marketing team need to innovate new way and solutions which works for the sales lead management funnelling.
Much has been written about how PR has changed/ is changing in recent times. A key reason is undoubtedly the rise of digital media — including social platforms, that has changed how content is consumed
Do you know People (Employees, Customer, Investors, and Business Partners) generates more data points in a company than any other factor? Invasion of mobile phone has accelerated the pace of data generation. A research said, an average person looks at his/her mobile screen more than 600 times a day. Social media has already taken world by a storm with an exponential growth of more than 80% per annum. Internet speeds are increasing day by day, with fibre networks being made available across nooks and corner of the country. The work boundaries have melted with anytime anywhere working condition. This phenomenon is something, which is also talked in business circles under the new strategy of SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) or CAMSS (Cloud, Analytics, Social and Security). Indeed, this is an era of data and digitization for run business.
In the year 2010, I got an opportunity to hear Dr David Maister, co-author of The Trust Advisor in a conference in Washington DC, USA. Since then, the collocated word, Trusted-Advisor got stuck with me, and is also an often-aspired phrase in the service industry.
We use many collated words in our personal and professional life, like Manager-Employees, Employer-Employee, Dealer-Distributor, Market-Customer, etc. One can notice a common thread in all of these. Often the word of high prominence and significance is mentioned and spoken first in all these collocated words. You just cannot speak other way around, so much is the significant of the first word.
It took aviation and automobile industry more than 60 years to gain user base of 5 crores and the same feat was achieved by Twitter in 2 years and Pokémon-go in only 19 days!!! Such is the incredible power of digitization and social media in recent times.
I often refer to the first chapter of the bible of marketing, the Principals of Marketing Management book of Mr. Philip Kotler, to distinguish between the selling concept and marketing concept. While, marketing is a logical way to build services and products in a sustainable manner, an excessive usage of it, in today’s era of social marketing and public relations (PR), has its own benefits and drawbacks.
It was early January of 1985, when I landed in Kolkata on my new assignment with Godrej Soaps Ltd (as Godrej Consumer Products, or GCPL, was known then), as a Sales executive. Winter chill pervaded the air, and signs of New Year revelry were visible everywhere, more so on the famed Park Street.