Who's Selling You?

I came across an interesting survey recently called 'Are you being sold?'
details of which you can read in the Industry Facts section of this issue of DQ
Channels. This survey was timely because at a time when vendors across the
boards are trying to come up with ways and means to beat the recession and gain
customers, they are missing out on the most crucial link in this cycle, the
person selling their product.

The survey has revealed that annually IT and consumer electronic vendors in
India loose upto Rs 84 lakh, because the person front ending your brand is
probably not doing a good job of promoting it. In the retail space, the above
survey showed that in India over 43 percent of the sales people made an attempt
to close a deal, and often did not even offer the customer an alternative to the
product they were seeking.

Don't dismiss this as something that happens only in the retail space. Such
instances find echoes in the corporate selling space.

Interestingly, around this I also met the representative of an enterprise
storage brand and asked him why his company is still trying to find a foothold
despite being in the industry for some years now. He very candidly admitted that
a big reason for this was that the sales people of his solution provider
partners were not promoting his brand.

Now, he is trying to come up without of the box solutions to encourage not
just his sales people but also those of his channel partners to position his
brand more prominently with customers.

He has learnt the lesson fairly late in the game. But at least he did learn
it. Several of his peers forget that their brands have no direct interaction
with their end-customers and have to rely on their partners to act as their
actual brand ambassadors. The partners in turn have their sales people who are
actually the guys who influence the final decisions of their customer.

And yet these ambassadors are the ones, who are least equipped to be able to
convince the clients on grounds of anything other than the pricing of the
product. And often, they clinch the deal on that parameter alone, giving
solutions that will ensure them an incentive than giving the customer what he
truly needs.

They rarely ask the customer about his needs, instead they think ahead of
ways to position the brands they can derive benefits from directly. This is
scary news for any vendor, but sadly is also true.

Maybe rather than spending crores of rupees signing up celebrities for brand
endorsements, brand owners must instead look at empowering frontline sales and
motivating their performance, they will yield better results. And they will save
quite a bit in the bargain too.

Vinita Bhatia

vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in