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Speaker: Dhaval Doshi

I'm sure you must have wondered about Patanjali, the company known for ayurvedic medicine
since the last couple of decades, which expanded to the FMCG market in 2014. In the next couple
of years, it launched a plethora of products ranging from toothpaste to noodles and currently it
produces about 450 different types of products gaining a large market share very quickly.

According to CLSA and HSBC, Patanjali is the fastest growing FMCG Company in India. Its asset
value goes up to rupees 13,000 crores. Do you think it was due to only the marketing efforts of
Patanjali through the endorsement of Baba Ramdev that it achieved this success, no right?

There were many other endeavours from the sales team that ensured that various shopkeepers and
outlets such as Big Bazaar stocked and post its products in the presence of strong and established
competition. Let’s now hear on how the sales team of a company adopts different ways to convert
consumers.

Speaker: Amit Rathi

Building a great marketing strategy and brand value of a product is just not enough. The final goal
of any organization is to generate revenue and for that you need to sell your product to the final
customer. A very basic definition of sale puts it as a transaction between two parties, one buyer
who receives a goods or service in exchange for money. However, a sale is much more than just a
transaction and is definitely a more complicated than this, as definition puts it.

There are three broad types of selling. Number one is direct selling, number two is industrial selling
or it is also called as B2B selling, and number three is retail selling. Let’s understand these types of
sales through example. When a Eureka Forbes sales person approaches Pooja, a teacher and a

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mother of two, to sell a water purifier, he would get in touch with her, pitch the product, and finally
convince her to buy it. This style of selling is known as direct and can be of multiple types. It could
be door-to-door selling, it could be telecalling selling, etc.

It provides medium for two-way communication, thus facilitates a better exchange of information.
Now suppose, the same salesperson approaches Sanjeev, the head of a procurement at a large
firm, to offer to install Eureka Forbes purifiers at the office complex. Here, the motivation of
purchase is very, very different and hence the way in which product is sold will also be different.
The salesman would be required to submit a formal quotation, engage in rounds of negotiation,
and, finally close the purchase order. This process is long drawn and relies heavily on relationship
building.

It is also known as industrial selling or b2B selling. Now the same water purifier are also available at
retail stores such as Tata Croma. They are also listed on online marketplaces such as Amazon,
Flipkart, Paytm. Now, when Karthik, a young professional, who has started job and is in first job,
decides to shift into his own apartment, he will visit the nearest appliance store or he can log on to
an online store. This is known as retail selling, which can be in both forms online or offline.

Speaker: Prashant Kapur

Let's take an example, Mrs. Sharma is purchasing Britannia biscuit from a nearby retailer. Biscuits
are FMCG goods like soft drinks, like namkeens, and shampoos. Biscuits reach retailer through a
distribution chain. It’s complete distribution chain in which Britannia bills to its distributor, distributor
sales representative carry goods and sales to retailer, and retailer sales to end consumer.

B2C is concerned with sale of a product to one consumer. In this case, Mrs. Sharma is a consumer,
who has bought Britannia biscuit from the retailer. It is necessity to build an effective distribution
network, which is the key to success in B2C distribution. Retailer is key in B2C sales process. He is
the key contact with the consumer and recommends the product which he likes.

Now let’s come to the sales process for Britannia biscuits. We know how the product reaches the
consumer through the complete distributed chain. There are three kinds of sales, which are
involved. Primary sales where Britannia bills to the distributor. Secondary sales where distributor
sales representative bills to the retailer, and tertiary sales where retailer bills to the consumer.
Company tracks primary, secondary, and tertiary on a very, very regular basis. Robust distribution
chain is the key to success of business. Distributor sales representative is critical as he is the face of
the organization in the market and all outlets pain India are covered by distributor sales
representatives only.
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B2B sales refers to company selling products, services to other businesses. B2C sales and B2B
sales are quite different with respect to following. B2B sales has high order value. It has longer
sales cycles. Multiple meetings with various department heads need to be coordinated by the sales
manager. Customize products, technology needs to be briefed by the sales manager to the various
department.

In a B2B sales, sales manager is a key. Sales is dependent on him. His efforts are critical in making
or breaking the sales as he is responsible to make multiple departments, which is end-user
department, commercial department, influencers, and various other departments, which may come
as part of the buying process. I'm sure all of you would have tried buying a product through an
e-commerce through Amazon or Flipkart.

Buying and selling goods and services over the Internet is called e-commerce sales. In this case,
product reaches customers through a complete logistics chain, which is not visible to the customer.
Digital and e-commerce channels are expected to grow the fastest due to increase in digitalization
in this decade. Let's understand the e-commerce sale process with the similar example.

When Mrs. Sharma purchases a smart phone through Amazon, immediately she gets a notification
on email, SMS, and app about the product and when the product is going to get delivered, the
tentative date is mentioned. On a daily basis, location tracker and other details are available,
notified about the product delivery to Mrs. Sharma.

Notification is sent on the day of delivery and OTP is sent to the customer by Amazon logistic team.
Message for delivery confirmation is received as soon as the smart phone is delivered. In this
process, logistics executive takes the OTP and gives the smart phone to the customer. Logistics
executive update logistic team and marketing team through the handheld as soon as the smart
phone is delivered. Within 10 minutes marketing team reaches out for product feedback to the
customer all through the process of digitalization.

So in this process, product is delivered, customer has received the product, and feedback has also
been asked by the seller. Everything through a click of button. So this is how the e-commerce
process is gaining momentum in this decade.

Speaker: Dhaval Doshi

You must have seen how companies like Eureka Forbes setup stalls in large housing societies and
family gatherings. They’re trying to convince the likes of Pooja, a high school teacher and a mom of
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two who prefer an Aquaguard to any other purify system in the market. While these events present
to great opportunity for brand building, there are also chance for the company to get closer to
customers like Pooja.

Similarly, telecommunication companies such as Vodafone and Airtel setup kiosk inside corporate
parks and near education institutes to pitch there some cart plans and services. These activities are
a way for the band to get to potential customers such as Karthik, the young working professional
and Sanjeev, the head of procurement in a firm also known as leads. In selling, it is known as
prospecting. Let's hear more about prospecting and its different types in this segment.

Speaker: Amit Rathi

Prospecting is the lifeblood of selling. During this process, the sales manager or the marketing team
identified leads and hand them over to the salesperson. The structure may differ from organization
to organization, but the essential process remains absolutely the same. The question to be asked
when you prospect are, does the lead have need that my product or service can fulfil. Number two,
can the lead afford my product or service. And number three, which is also very important, does the
lead have the authority to commission a purchase. The answers to these questions will get you
closer to identifying leads.

There are various methods employed for prospecting such as cold calling, asking for referrals,
searching on social networks, etc. They can be clubbed broadly into two types of approaches. The
one is known as hunting approach and the other one is called as gathering approach. The hunting
approach is all about on the lookout for and getting new leads. This requires a very aggressive
stance from sales team. However, the gathering approach is more concerned with brand promotion
and developing a strong brand proposition to make the consumers looking for you.

This of course requires higher involvement from the marketing team. Let’s now look at example of
Vodafone to understand this. When marketing team at Vodafone saw how Jio was eating into its
market share, it came up with the new more aggressively priced sim card plans with extra benefits.
The marketing team believed in its strong sales and distribution network to ensure availability at all
the relevant outlets and ramped up its advertising spends. This was done with an assumption that
consumer would buy into its proposition of great coverage, faster speed, cheaper plans, and more
importantly reliable services and come back to Vodafone.

The company here was employing a gathering approach. It build the brand, tweaked the marketing
mix to make it more appealing, and then expected leads to get in touch with Vodafone
touch-points. Now if I talk about its postpaid plans, Vodafone traditionally used hunting approach.
The sales teams would get data on prepaid customers who have high usage and are fit for postpaid
category or customers who have switched on to competition or reduced their data or voice usage.

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Then sales team would try to get in touch with all those customer through direct calling, telecalling
method to gauge their interest and generate new leads.

If the customer is aware of the brand and the values it stand for, you can expect them to come to
you and effectively be in a gathering mode. But if your product is new to customer, you will have to
actively work to communicate its attribute, its benefits, and then lead these to customer’s need,
thereby employing a hunting approach.

The hunting approach is to focus on quick acquisition. It is more transactional in nature. Wherein,
the gathering approach looks at long-term brand building. Most companies employ both
approaches based on consumer perception for their brands as demonstrated in the example of
Vodafone mentioned earlier.

Speaker: Dhaval Doshi

By now you've understood the concept of prospecting and the various approaches used for it. To
shed some more light on how prospecting is done in a B2B scenario, we have our industry expert
Anil with a case on D-Link.

Speaker: Anil Meghnani

D-Link is a well-known company that holds market leadership position in the small and the
mid-sized business segment and also the SOHO market. SOHO stands for small office, home office.
Most of us including myself would have used D-Link modems or routers in our houses or in our
offices where we work. Most customer of digital products are aware of the D-Link brand and the
product they offer. To serve the customer segment, D-Link uses the gathering approach.

D-Link advertises its routers, networking devices, etc. which helps them to sell the products to
retailers and telecom companies such as Airtel and Reliance. These companies bundle D-Link
products and their internet services and sells it to the subscribers. But when D-Link launched the
line of enterprise networking solution, they had to use the hunting approach. As it was a new
product for them and the people were unaware of it and they had big competitors such as Cisco
who is leading in that particular segment. Thus it was a big challenge for D-Link to create an identity
in this sector for enabling it to generate leads for its sales teams.

The senior management team of D-link lead the chief information officers, the CTO, it’s the chief
technical officers of other leading telecom companies including Reliance, D-Link shared various
equipment test results and benchmarking reports to convince them that it had developed a far
superior product then what Cisco did who was the leader in that segment.

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So this is how D-Link used the hunting and the gathering approach together by forcing the
customer’s perception and behaviour about its products.

Speaker: Prashant Kapur

Vodafone is selling location tracking services to Honda cars. Like Honda cars, Vodafone sales and
marketing managers need to shortlist some more clients at its niche category before prospecting
starts. So which kind of companies will he be looking for? He will be looking for car, auto
companies, fleet owners, logistics, and e-commerce companies, all companies which required to
track their vehicles.

What prospecting is actually? Prospecting is identifying potential customers who are interested in
buying the product. For B2B sales, prospects are identified through data collection. Data can be
collected through primary and secondary data sources. Field visits by B2B sales team to
commercial centres and key companies for collection of data will come into primary sources of data
collection.

Likewise, secondary sources will include industry focus magazines, data from stock market through
stock market magazines, industry bodies like FICCI, which is Federation of Indian Chamber of
Commerce; ASSOCHAM, FIEO, which is Federation of Indian Export Organisations. All of these
industrial bodies will have secondary ready data available of the companies, their key connects,
their email IDs and mobile numbers. Side-by-side, data can be brought from data selling agencies
like Wilson and other organizations which are available in the market.

After identifying prospects, contact is established by the sales manager’s team through direct calls,
emails, and interested customers are shortlisted. Post shortlisted interested customers, these
customers are categorized into hot, warm, and cold leads depending on their response after the
meeting.

Speaker: Dhaval Doshi

Eureka Forbes tried to identify potential customers like Pooja and Sanjeev by setting up stalls in
their residential complex. Pooja also ended up sharing her contact details with the salesperson and
Eureka Forbes. The next obvious step would be to contact Pooja and get her to install one of the

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Eureka Forbes’ products in her kitchen. How does the salesperson approach her, what story does
you tell her to convince her of the superiority of the products over competition. Let's find out.

Speaker: Amit Rathi

Once you have prospected and identified your potential customers, the next step is customer
contact. From the name itself, it is clear that it deals with establishing a contact with your leads. It
includes making calls, scheduling appointments with the leads and requires a salesperson to listen,
to seek feedback, and to be receptive, and to understand the needs of the customer. Once you
have established contact with potential customer, the next important step is pitching your product
effectively. This is called presentation and demonstration.

While you demonstrate your product, you should always keep customer rather than product at the
centre stage. As an example, the Eureka Forbes salesman would not focus on the UV filtration and
the material that goes into building the product, rather he would understand why Pooja is interested
in getting a water purifier installed. Is this because Pooja is concerned about the health of her
family, is it because all her friends have a Eureka Forbes installed in their kitchen and she feels
pressurized to get the same.

The benefit that salesperson communicates should depend on Pooja’s need in this case. The
structured approach to pitching your product effectively is AIDA. Now AIDA stands for attention, I
stands for interest, D is for desire, and A is for action. Let's understand AIDA model through an
example. Now Club Mahindra wants to sell its holiday timeshare packages to Pooja’s family. A
timeshare in a property that is distributed among multiple parties for a fixed period of time.
Mahindra regularly organizes seminars and will ask Pooja to come to one with her spouse.

The salesperson here will try to get her attention by telling her that there will be food, drinks, and
free gifts for all the attendees. Once Pooja decides to attend one of the seminars, the salesperson
will explain the timeshare concept, its benefits, and how it is catching on globally. He will tell Pooja
how cost-effective the program is for a family of 4 and all this will be done with the aim of getting
Pooja interested in the product.

Then the salesperson will inform Pooja about certain deals, discounts, and limited time offers. This
will be salesperson's final card at getting Pooja to desire the product. In the end, he will talk about
all the formalities and financing option to ease the closure of sale, which is the desired action from
Pooja.

In case of a new FMCG product launch, the attention can also be achieved by marketing team. ITC
launched its Engage On pocket perfume range in 2 attractive packaging and display formats, one a
dispensing carton, second one was a hanging sleeve in the already cluttered retail market. The
display format were supported with relevant point of sale material, danglers, banners, etc. This was

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aimed at gaining shoppers attention at the retail level. The next task was to generate interest by
explaining or highlighting benefits. Benefits like simple to carry in pocket, value for money, 250
sprays just rupees 60 and top it all a unisex product.

Speaker: Priyavrat Sanyal

Let's talk about SPANCO sale funnel process to understand how a sales manager or salesperson
can estimate the number of prospects and how they will convert ultimately to an order. Now there
are six stages in the sales funnel process. Starting from the suspect stage.

Suspect stage is a stage where the salesperson would like to keep most of their customers those
who can think of buying the product. Take an example of the automobile dealership. Now
somebody who has walked into the showroom, have asked about a product, have shown interest
over website, have interacted on Facebook page or have even called the dealership is a suspect.
So there will be a large pool of customers at the suspect stage.

Now the next stage is your prospect stage. Now from the suspect, the sales manager identified and
finds that there are people who can actually buy an automobile. Somebody, who was a need and
somebody who has a capacity to pay as well. Now from the prospect stage, the next stage is an
analysis stage where the sales manager needs to do some kind of analysis and find out whether the
customer really wants to buy the product.

Sales manager can do that with their own intuition, the behaviour of the customer, the questions the
customer have asked, and within the analysis stage, the sales manager analyses and defines that
okay out of my prospects, these many people actually are qualified and are most probable to make
a purchase. After the analysis stage, next stage is the negotiation stage. Now the customers who
have qualified and who really have a need, when they start asking the price, payment terms, and
how the product would be delivered, they are into the negotiation stage. Negotiation can be owned
in terms of price, can be in terms of variant, can be in terms of delivery as well.

So the number further reduces at the negotiation stage. Now after the negotiation stage is the
closure stage. At the closure stage, the customer has decided to go ahead with the product and
customer is ready to make a payment. They have identified a variant of the product. So from the
negotiation stage to the closure stage, you will find a reduction, but that reduction is not that
significant and after the closure stage, comes the actual order stage.

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So it has been found that 3% to 4% people from the closure stage defect and they decide not to buy
in the order stage. So order stage, the number is further reduced and these are the customer who
actually makes the purchase, pays the amount, and takes the product.

So if you see from suspect to the order stage, the number reduces at each and every stage and the
industry-standard says that the suspect to order conversion rate is 10% or less. So now you can
imagine if a salesperson has to make 5, if he has to make a sale of 5 cars in a month, they must
have more than 50 customers in the suspect stage.

Speaker: Priyavrat Sanyal

SPIN selling framework is also one of the proven techniques to analyse sales and to manage the
inquiries of the customer. Let’s take an example of a CRM software. Imagine you are the sales
manager selling a CRM software, how can you use SPIN selling to understand your customer needs
in a better manner.

So SPIN selling has four stages as the name suggest SPIN. So S talks about the situation. So you
ask different questions from the customer about the situation. Those questions can be what is the
current method of recording customer data. So somebody who is not using a CRM software, how
they are recording customer data as on date. Then why do they use this kind of methods to record
the customer data. So you get a hold of the situation why the customer is using the current method
and what can be done on that.

The next stage is the problem stage. So you ask the customer what kind of problems they are
facing if they are using the current method or what is the shortcoming of the existing method of
capturing customer data. Then comes the implication stage. Now at this point, the sales manager
offers a product and ask that has the shortcomings in your current CRM affected your business.

All the shortcomings which were identified in the previous stage in the problem stage, what kind of
implications they have and based on those implications, the salesperson can offer the CRM
software as a solution. And finally the need to pay off stage. So salesperson ask do you think if this
problem is resolved, how it is going to affect your business at large. They can ask about how it is
going to affect your revenue, how it is going to affect your customer management, or how it's going
to affect your customer loyalty.

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Speaker: Dhaval Doshi

In the first segment, you learned about different types of selling, which includes direct selling,
industrial selling, and even retail selling. From the examples you saw how the different types of
selling were employed by the salesperson to target different people such as Pooja, Sanjeev, and
Karthik. This was followed by a sales process and approach to selling a product or service.

The sales process consisted of four important steps, prospecting, customer contact, presentation. In
the second segment you go into prospecting, which was used to identify the right set of leads or
potential customers for a particular product. You learned about the two most important approaches
for prospecting. They’re known as the hunting approach and the gathering approach.

The hunting approach tends to focus on quick acquisition whereas gathering approach relies on
long-term relationship building. You also saw how companies such as Vodafone and D-Link used
the hunting and gathering approach for prospecting, depending on the customer's perception of
the brand or its product.

Once you had identified the right set of leads, the next step was to pitch your product effectively by
making contacts with those potential customers. This is what you learned in the third segment.
Once contact was made, it was followed by a presentation stage. During this, you pitched your
product effectively to the customer. An effective way of pitching your product was through the AIDA
model. AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire, and action. You saw how Club Mahindra and ITC
use a Aida effectively to pitch their product.

Hope this session was quite insightful for you. In the next session, which deals with sales strategies,
you’ll learn how a team of sales people is managed and what the other responsibilities of a sales
manager are. You’ll also understand how sales and marketing function in synergy to bring more
revenue for the company.

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