Beware Of The “Upskill Or Die” Scam

“Cognizant fires 30,000 employees at mid managment levels.” “Infosys lays off 10,000 project managers.” The media has been full of such reports for a while now. The common narrative in these doomsday prophecies is as follows: World is going digital. Employees at middle management of Indian IT Services companies are not geared up for digital … Read more

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

Dr. Batra’s – A Sanitizer That Will Outlive The Virus

The Co-Founder of Druva, the Pune-based cloud data protection software provider, once narrated the story of how his company broke into NASA. Its sales team was pursuing the prestigious American space administration agency for months with the usual sales approach spanning demo, proof-of-concepts, requirement study, and so on, but didn’t get much joy. Apparently, the … Read more

How Does Google Maps Know Traffic Conditions In Realtime?

When I was in Germany in the early 2000s, all my questions about distance would receive answers in terms of time. That too, under two conditions, namely, without traffic and with traffic. For example, if I asked a customer, “how far is your office from Munich airport”, the typical answer would be, “one and a … 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