Differentiate Your Inside Sales With NATO Phonetic Alphabet

There are several ways for IT companies to differentiate their products and services. They include: STRADOF framework to look beyond features to find differentiators Marketable Items to make headway in crowded markets ASPOs to improve cold call response rates. But all of them cost money and take time. Meanwhile, here’s a low hanging fruit for … Read more

When ERP Projects Get Derailed By “Silly” Reasons

According to the popular narrative, a software product should be highly customizable so that it can meet the customer’s specific requirements. Often times, when customers say customization, they have in mind labels, forms and reports. Certainly all leading COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software products do support customization of this nature. But when customization enters … Read more

Remote Working Funny Incident

According to The Register article entitled New York Attorney General probes Charter over claims it forced staff to work in offices amid coronavirus pandemic, US telco Charter Communications is facing an investigation … over allegations … that it forced employees in New York to go into their offices for work, rather than (letting) them … … Read more

One Secret About Jargon That One-Percenters Will Never Tell You

In Six Secrets Of Making Jargon Work For You, I described many ways by which you can legitimately use jargon in your sales and marketing efforts. In this post, I will describe another way in which jargon is used by the One-Percenters. For the uninitiated, the term refers to members of the top one percent of … Read more

The Secret To Success In Outsourced B2B Lead Generation

Any business endeavor has many drivers of success. Leadgen is no exception. But, unlike other pursuits, outsourced B2B lead generation has one driver that has an outsized influence on its success: Definition of Lead. If you get this right, half your success is assured. On the other hand, if you leave it to your outsourced … Read more

Don’t Ascribe To Generation What Can Be Explained By Age

Most statements about behavior of Millennials are true for all people when they were 25 years old, regardless of whether they really belong to the generation called Millennials (defined as born between 1995-2005) or some other generation like Gen X, Boomers or Gen Z. Let’s take one oft-quoted behavior: Millennials prefer renting to owning houses. … Read more

Latecomer Outflanks Incumbent Products

Here’s our latest success story: Latecomer Outflanks Incumbent Products “AHA” moment gives the winning edge to new SAAS product A midsized IT company wanted to develop a new Configure-Price-Quote product and engaged us to provide specifications for its Minimum Viable Product version. CPQ is a category of software used to support the configuration, pricing and … Read more

Why Does Cross Selling Fail?

In my last post on cross-selling entitled Cross Selling Is Hard, we had seen several cross-selling flops by majors. In each case, a company that is wildly successful in one product category attempts to cross-sell a new product to its existing customers and achieves very little success. In some cases, the lack of success is … Read more

Cross Selling Is Hard

I recently came across a post on social media predicting that WhatsApp will very soon become India’s largest digital payments product because it has 450 million users in India. I politely pointed out to the Original Poster that WhatsApp has precisely zero customers for its payments service and that nobody can tell how many of … Read more

The Six Secrets To Attract Venture Capital

Entrepreneurs are driven by idea, originality, product, problem solved, team, technology, and so on. But, for VCs, they’re merely means to an end. As we saw in Teardown Of The VC Investment Model, the goal for venture capital is to earn multibagger returns in the short-to-medium term. While the exact numbers could vary from one … Read more