Product Versus Services Selling – Part 1

This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: At the highest level, “selling is selling is selling”. Sellers of both product and services need to convey the value of their offerings and get paid in return for the value. Because of this, many tech founders think that there’s no … Read more

Mastering PUSH Notifications – The PayTM Way

In Four Out Of Five Brands Get PUSH Notification Wrong, I shared my experience with PUSH notifications from four leading brands. I found it impossible or very cumbersome to redeem the targeted offers made by them. At the end of the post, I promised to share the rare example of a brand that gets PUSH notifications right. To … Read more

Four Out Of Five Brands Get PUSH Notification Wrong

Customer Engagement Management is a technology platform that helps brands manage their end-to-end engagement with their customers in order to foster loyalty, drive repeat sales, increase ticket size, cross-sell and upsell new products, and generate customer advocacy. Customer engagement spans the following stages: Customer Engagement Management Stages Stage 1: Identify customers and enroll them into … Read more

Blockchain – Calling BS On Decentralization & Resilience

Since I wrote Flight Delay Insurance – Why Blockchain?, I’ve come across several updates that have reinforced my skeptical views around the claim of decentralization and raised new doubts about the touted advantage of resilience. UPDATE #1: SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE Let me take the following remark in my original post: Data is distributed across multiple … Read more

Regulated Blockchain – Oxymoron But Killer App

There are many business relationships where trust is one-sided. Let me give a few examples of such relationships in which the contract between two parties A and B is such that A needs to trust B but B does not need not trust A. #1. METERING Mobile phone subscriber consumes data. The consumption is measured … Read more

Harmless As Tiny Noticeable Thing Or Explosive As TNT

Here’s another post on the cultural differences across different markets, with specific lessons for sales and marketing. Many years ago, Fortune had used the following lede to introduce the largest company on its prestigious list of 500 largest corporations in the world: Walmart is the #1 company on the GLOBAL FORTUNE 500. As the largest … Read more

Fintechs Shouldn’t Stop Chanting The Disruption Mantra

Direct-to-Consumer financial technology startups are new age companies that sell bank accounts, loans and other financial products directly to end users. In this post, we’ll use the term “Fintechs” to refer to these D2C firms and “Fintech” to refer to the industry as a whole. Fintechs are different from “Fincumbents”, which is a term I’ve … Read more

Teardown Of The VC Investment Model

This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: “We’ll disrupt uncouth taxi unions.” “We’ll kill greedy banks.” “We’ll upend shady realtors.” Startups with noble mission statements like these get billions of dollars of VC funding and enjoy unicorn – or even decacorn –  valuations. As a result, the average … Read more

Winners Don’t Let Security Screw Up User Experience

Like me, you may have come across people who appear obsessed with security but happily book cabs, send messages, order food, and even make payments without entering a single password / PIN on their smartphones. This is not as contradictory as it seems if you look at the end-to-end customer journey. For the uninitiated, Customer Journey can … Read more