HOW AND WHEN TO PLAY BUDGETORY AND 'STAY FIRM' GAMES, ON RECIEPT OF A RFQ

Industrial Selling is a different cup of tea in India than in the West. Here reject RFQ's at your own peril.

  I read Geoffrey James’s article titled “How to give the customer a price quote”  and it’s really   a fine piece of sales writing. I wanted to write something else this week.But then I thought about all those young kids, in sales and   marketing, the newbies and the almost-s all over the immense country and I changed my mind. (In Kolkata its 39 ^o Celsius plus in the shade in March, so I can just think about Chennai.In India, you don't get AC cars to zip to on sales calls in junior levels, so I decided to write this blog post instead).Apologies Geoff, but that kind of selling will not get you anywhere in INDIA. Sure, the track is right but your direction is all wrong, my friend. Just my 5cents but you need the culture shock absorber.

        In India, you have a system of budgetary quotes and firm quotes. Now, I am sure that there must be a system of budgetary quotes in the West too, you just use a term for it, which I am not familiar with.Anyway, some of the biggest requirements come from the Public Sector Organizations(e.g.IOCL the only Indian company which is in the Fortune 500, if I'm not wrong). In a sort of matrix cum pyramidal structure, you have many different departments. For instance Engineering Services (ES) and Maintenance are different departments and you can have business with both as the ES as well as the M.M(mechanical maintenance) as the former goes in for the projects and the latter, the after sales part of the business. Say, you are selling pumps for intake, the concerned in Indian Oil Corp Ltd dept is Power and Utilities.(In other organizations, it may be different). From my experience I can say that if you get a RFQ from such a department, DO NOT EVEN THINK of calling the boss in the department. See who has signed the RFQ and if you find say its a Purchase Manager or even an Asst Manager, from Operations, your stand is vindicated. It is a must to quote but a little later.
                 

              The chances are high that if you call up the boss, he will have an even less idea of his requirement then you. Your best bet is the original sender, although he is in no way the final decision maker. In Govt. organizations, there is no final decision maker and that is the way it should be. The operations man wants to buy the things he has mentioned but as he is the one doing the legwork, he's got no authority. Say you are pissed off and do not quote, you may have unquoted yourself out of a job. These guys are good at selecting the equipment type but they need to have an estimate of the cost.That's because proposals beyond 10-15% variation are shot down by the finance guys. Before your lips start curling in derision, let me tell you some of India's most talented engineer's are these.They think of everything too help you, and they don't give you any advantage. You need to have relationship selling experiences with them for the best results

          

HOW REJECTION CAN BE YOUR MOST EFFICIENT SALES TOOL

Yes, Its true. Sales Rejection, if handled right, can be one of the most potent selling tools, provided of course, that your boss is not the younger (or elder) brother of Hari Sadu (of the Naukri.com TV ad fame).

Why's that? That is because it is only by rejection that one learns. I remember once in my first visit to the man who will be placing the order, as I shook his hand and I handed over my card, Mr. Customer was just looking at my company name and logo and then he asked me " Do you deal with XYZ's products? " and incidentally XYZ was our main competitor-the No 1 in the country with us at No.2. I stared at him, taken aback and told him that they were our competitor. The small room was full of nervous energy and the funny point struck both of us. We smiled and the tension was broken. I told him that I am there to sell my company's products and that I did not have a clue as to how to do that, so I would be obliged if he gives me some advise as to how I can convince him to give us a try-out. That was the start of an excellent relationship and I'm happy to say that after three years, I had replaced most of XYZ's products by ours.Anybody can sell new products to a new factory but phasing out your competitor is not easy, let me tell you. 

Whenever you read success stories of people, do you really think that this person , who has written a book on sales, succeeded every time he pushed. Nope-that is impossible.  Rejection is as much a part of the sales rep's official experience as acceptance is. In fact the average sales rep is more at home with rejection than acceptance.What you need to do is after each rejection, you need to list down and find what went wrong. 

SELLING BY RESEARCH: The Concept of SBR

This blog is proud to say that the phrase "SBR " which stands for  'Selling by Research"was first coined here and the SBR techniques which have been lightly touched here is ORIGINAL to this blog. The idea first germinated here in the form of the written word.

Many Sales/Business Development Managers/General Managers/even VP's think that the more prospects, a salesperson visits, the better. Never mind, if it lays emphasis on quantity rather than quality. The Manager has the data to justify his sales forecasts for the next quarter. And at the month end, when the CEO is surprised to see that the sales person has visited the highest number of potential customers but has flopped in actual selling, the same manager will tell him “there is something wrong here, you lack application, you lack communication skills” the newbie can hardly say that the strategy was devised by the manager himself.  "Gee!! that’s not fair" you may say but trust me, these kinds of managers do exist and they are in the majority.

                  In industrial plants and manufacturing organizations, decision makers have no time to entertain sales-people on fishing expeditions. In Industrial Marketing, which comprises of selling of high or medium value systems, “cold-calls” can backfire on you. Before the net, cold calls were a must. Information is power.Cold calling in industrial marketing was done for collection of market information. Having information gave a party an immense advantage over its competitors. Today, the internet can help your sales-people to collect all information about prospects, making cold-calls redundant.

     " We live today in tumultuous times. In the future, people will think us as the most lucky people for never before has a generation witnessed such sweeping technical and socioeconomic changes within such a short time. If you want to survive, you need to adapt, to change with the times unless you want to be extinct. "

The Internet as an Information Source

          How do you collect information from the internet? Check websites of service providers usually involved in projects.  A few website types, where information is available free are as below. (This is only a partial list and you can find many more classes if you are interested)

(1)B2B trading portals and Business Directories: These contain all information and all you have to do is collection and compiling. 

Screen Shot of site. Look at the projects link at the lower right

(An example is http://www.processregister.com  which has a section on projects, which gives the location, value, status and the promoter. The website even has the projects classified sector wise. What else do you need?)

 Different types of projects classified typewise

 

(2) Job Portals: These give out information in the form of “Project Managers required for…” or “We require for our new project…”

(3) Websites of Consultants: Consultants often give out details of new consulting jobs they are working on, or have bagged.

If you think that you will get full details of a project from tapping into the above or similar resources, you will be disappointed. What you will get is “leads”. You will get all your detail information then by doing some web research on these leads.

Industrial Marketing &Selling initiated by researching the web, has been named SBR (Selling by Research)-by yours truly because it appears that I am the first person to discuss about this site in public, for which unfortunately processregister.com is not paying me anything.