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These are some reasons why you should not buy my solution? What would be your prospective customer’s reaction if your introductory slide were to have the above message? Most of the managers feel that the above is nothing short of a Harakiri! In Originals – How Non-Conformists Rule the World,  Adam Grant, an American Psychologist at Wharton has turned the conventional logic on its head. Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman  were appalled by false advertising and bad advice about parenting and started an online magazine and blog network called Babble. They wanted to challenge the clichés about parenting. In 2009 when they approached investors they made presentation before their investors with a typical sales pitch. In two rounds they realized that their unbridled enthusiasm was perceived with scepticism as salesmanship with a hidden agenda. Remembering the adage, ‘insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’ they de...

Winning a Jackpot: How do you decide? Situation : Imagine you are participating in a game show and after going through qualifying and elimination rounds, you have reached the finals.  The game-show host presents you three options A, B & C and you have to select one of the options which are the respective doors. One of the doors leads to a jackpot (say a Mercedes) and the other doors to an insignificant prize, say a tennis ball through each door. Now let us say you have selected option A. You are curious and excited to see if you have hit the jackpot. The host asks you to be patient, opens the door C and what you see is a tennis ball. Now he asks you whether you would still stick with option A or switch to option B? What would you choose and why? When this question was put on different platforms like linkedin, what’sapp it was observed that 95% of the respondents voted for A. Now read on: Analysis:  Generally people tend to stick to option A, the reason be...

Soumyajeet Mohanty ran  Edu Solutions,   an educational consultancy service in Bhubaneswar Odisha. Initially he started  Sunrise Coaching Solutions providing tuition to engineering students. As the venture did not yield much returns, he ‘moved up the value chain’ by providing  ( fake) admissions to students wishing to get into medical colleges.  Most of these students  either had poor scores in NEET ( National Eligibility cum Entrance Test is an entrance examination in India for admission to medical and dental graduate courses) or  who were repeaters. Mohanty and his team of six were able to notch up a revenue of Rs. 8-10 crores  within 2 years. The admissions were fake, the seals bogus.  Mohanty’s team was able to extract Rs. 10 – 50 lakhs from parents  for each seat  Now what is common between Mohanty’s modus operandi and the management principles? Focus on Results : The moment he realized he was not getting re...

What does it to take succeed in a competitive market? A good product is necessary but not a sufficient condition. You also need to find the right segment where the product needs to be positioned. To achieve this goal, organizations spend considerable time in strategic planning ,  coupled with vision,  mission and  goal statements. Quite often such statements look great ONLY ON WALLS is beside the point! In 1959 Honda Motorcycle Company from Japan decided to enter the US market with its new brand of motorcycles. The strategic planning and the marketing team did a careful market research and came to the conclusion that premium-end motorbikes are appropriate for the US market. Being a highly developed automobile market, the motorcycles were used as fun vehicles where speed , power and long-distance drive on highways were the critical customer preferences. A new design team was put in place for this project, prototypes tested, developed and the bikes were launched. ...

A number of readers ask me the significance of the word  Context  in my book  Contextual Selling . Generally speaking American, European cultures are considered to be low context cultures whereas the Asian cultures like Japanese, Chinese, Indian are considered as high-context cultures. Social Psychologist Richard Nisbett says that the orientation towards independence (low-context) or interdependence ( high-context ) actually decides the cognitive processes of thinking, decision making etc. In one of his experiments, a group of American and Japanese people were shown images which consisted of a big fish and a number of small fish with sea weeds around. The Americans were able to recollect the big fish; the Japanese more of the small fish and the seaweeds. That background of any situation can be termed as the context. In the low-context cultures your communication has to be clear and to the point. People are individualistic and perceive themselves as being unique, s...

In the early 90s Airbus and Boeing, the two major players in commercial aircrafts decided to come together to manufacture Very Large Commercial Transport (VLCT). Later on both the competitors parted ways as their business strategy could not synergize. Ultimately in 1994 Airbus decided to go solo on this venture and the project was codenamed A3XX. And thus the first flight of A380, the largest commercial aircraft happened in 2007 which is a double-deck, wide body 4-engine aircraft with 6000 square feet of usable space, 40% more space than its nearest rival product Boeing B747-8. A380 could accommodate 500 seats in 3-class capacity (Economy, Business and First Class) or 850 in an all-economy class. With several delays the project cost escalated from the initial 9 billion to 13 billion Euro Product Pricing and Positioning : The A380 had a seating capacity which was 5 times the Airbus A320 Neo but the price point was 4X . The List price of A 380 was $430 Million whereas A320 was...

It is assumed that the value perception of a product lies in the product features, workmanship etc. which is proved otherwise in this example. Recently I was conducting training programs for the Pan-India Sales Team of  Bharat Fritz Werner (BFW). The topic was  Effective Value Selling of Capital Equipments . BFW is a renowned manufacturer of Machining Centres, Special Purpose Machines, Turning Cenres, Lathes etc. Murali, one of the Sales Engineers who is an expert in lathes for the last 15 years; narrated an interesting example. While working for Batliboi, his previous company, he used to approach a company called Priyanka Enterprises in Coimbatore. Mr. Ulaganathan who used to make automobile components had upgraded from a normal lathe to a CNC lathe so as to cope with the increased volumes. A sales engineer from a CNC Turninng Company convinced him to go for one. By his misfortune, the  new machine failed to deliver as per his expectations and Ulaganathan wa...

Who is the Managing Director? Suresh, narrated this interesting episode when he was the Sales-cum-Service engineer working for a  Special Purpose Machine (SPM) manufacturing company in Bangalore. There was an important proposal submitted to a client in Delhi. The vendor from Bangalore did not have any market presence in North India and consequently no sales setup. The customer called the vendor for price negotiations. Suresh was sent to Delhi to close the order. He landed at the factory and enquired for the concerned Purchase Officer at the reception. It was around 9.30 AM. He was asked to wait in the conference room. Ten minutes later, a man in his early fifties dropped in the cabin. After exchanging pleasantries, he said, "Tell me, what is the best discount you can offer?" Suresh: "Sir, the best I can offer is 5%." Man: " Ok, I will talk to my MD and come back to you. He is a busy man. You may have to wait." After 2 hours, at a...

Rahul, a fresh engineering graduate, was trying his hands at rubik’s cube. He said,” after doing google search and watching youtube videos, I have been able to crack the code. The world’s fastest player can solve the puzzle in barely a minute. I have studied his instruction set 15 times and I am able to crack the code in approximately 4 minutes.” What happens when you a solve a puzzle without applying your mind; relying on google search or a guide in the first go? In this process of solving a puzzle, I was wondering whether the goal is more important than the journey or the end is more crucial than the means? What happens when we are obsessed with the goal (scoring marks, getting a job, expecting a promotion) without giving due importance to the means ( thinking, creative problem solving, putting the right efforts in getting results etc) Students may score marks without a deeper understanding of the subject. Managers may get short-term resul...

In the early 90s Airbus and Boeing, the two major players in commercial aircrafts decided to come together to manufacture Very Large Commercial Transport (VLCT). Later on both the competitors parted ways as their business strategy could not synergize. Ultimately in 1994 Airbus decided to go solo on this venture and the project was codenamed A3XX. And thus the first flight of A380, the largest commercial aircraft happened in 2007 which is a double-deck, wide body 4-engine aircraft with 6000 square feet of usable space, 40% more space than its nearest rival product Boeing B747-8. A380 could accommodate 500 seats in 3-class capacity (Economy, Business and First Class) or 850 in an all-economy class. With several delays the project cost escalated from the initial 9 billion to 13 billion Euros. Product Pricing and Positioning : The A380 had a seating capacity which was 5 times the Airbus A320 Neo but the price point was 4X . The List price of A 380 was $430 Mi...