In our pursuit to help startup and SMEs in their digital transformation journey, we often come across with very generic sales problems, and most of the problems are due to lack of basic understanding of customer engagement and pitching the solution or product poorly. In this post we have listed some of the points which we practice to overcome these problems –
Understanding the customer –
When you try to help the customer even before tagging them as customers, You should really understand them. That means you need to study the their environment and how they operate in their business ecosystem, their geographical situations and their pain points. We had our success rate increased multifold just by practicing this. To understand this better let’s get into what it means on the ground. One of our client who is an independent career counselor, a typical sales package looks like “A Promotional Website, Mobile Application and a lot of social marketing” at first glance. On a careful consideration it was realised that only doing this will not help them instead might increase operational overhead, hear us out how and why –
A Promotional website need to be targeted to audience and the place this client of our operates from, the audience are still not tech savvy which means their reach to technology is limited to Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram at most and not even to twitter, hence a promotional website is going to be a dead investment for a long time. Same time an app may solve a lot of problem but is costly due to the fee they charge to their customers is very nominal and the profit is not enough to cover the investment. People who know about career counseling will agree that this job is difficult to manage remotely and therefor social marketing through electronic media will attract the leads which will be difficult to convert into sales.
Solving the real problem –
Now once we understood the customer portfolio, it is important to solve the real problem and one should identify it before that. The pain point is, it is not going to be obvious and customer wouldn’t be able to tell you the exact problem. If we rely on customer, almost all the time, all the customers have one single generic problem and that is “Sales not happening or Sales is not increasing as expected” that is it. If you take that problem and try to solve it, you will not succeed because that is never ending pursuit, it is a symptom not a problem. The actual problem may be wrong market segment, non-scalable business model, a generic product or non innovative solution, hence it is important to understand client really have sales not happening is a by product symptom of it.
Keeping the business always in context –
You understood your customers, you identified the problem too, you have a solution just right, however have you consider that make sense for business or not? For example there are all the great equipments and machines to do the farming, you get that to the farmers with subsidised rate all set to work and plow the field, but if the most fertile land and farms have water logging problem all your investment will sink into it and for sure that wouldn’t grow into any kind of corps, what could have been a better solution is to create a sustainable ecosystem of animal husbandry keeping livestock such as cattle, poultry and fish will yield better result and can be utilised in the fertile farms to do farming for double profit and that is what it means to keep the business always in context.
Offering real value –
Work towards the common goals and don’t promise unrealistic non-practical benefits. A website in any forms only has certain goals to achieve, it is not a silver bullet and can not make the business succeed overnight. As we always say “Technology is a business enabler” , it can only enable business to grow and sustain, for example, without proper research on main objective and content of a website, which is to have engaging content and services to offer. it doesn’t make any sense to throw out a lot of add-ons like SEO, SSL mailbox and other because these doesn’t have any individual value of its own. The point is don’t sell technology in the name of solution. Offer them real solution which adds value to their business and let the technology facilitate and help achieving that.
Train them to utilise it for maximum gain –
Offering technology solution is just not enough. It is important to train the customer to use it. Not always your customers are going to be tech savvy and technology might be only solution in such case it is better to teach them how to use it effectivity. For example which phone would you suggest to a 60 + years of indian customer ? The answer is there is no phone which target this segment specially and this segment have their own challenges i.e touch screen phones doesn’t give them taptic feedback out of the box so they don’t know the action they took happened or not, on the other hand phone which gives taptic feedback i.e the phone with keyboards have really small display and due to their poor eyesight that means by the time they realise who is calling the call would be dropped. In this case the only solution is to teach them enabling taptic feedback present in the touchscreen phone with vibration and key tone and help them to adopt it.
An ordinary artist with extraordinary craftsmanship, a living embodiment of the miraculous fine portfolio of paintings, pottery and jewellery, yet sadly have painful need to knock each door, just to sell his valuable, handmade articles. Imagine how far can his feet can walk, each step forward results into loss of energy and his most valuable possession i.e “Time”.
Technology today is the foundation for all success. Falling behind the Technology Curve, that compares the linear growth of technology and the rate of change is simply not possible. Today industries have become obsessed to achieve maximum efficiency at minimal cost. Modern businesses can’t afford to be technology laggards. Bridging the gap between today’s technology and tomorrow’s innovations is essential to transitioning seamlessly. 
Improving ROI by infusing technology has always been a primary purpose for any business. Starting with the goals we want to achieve, and then plan backwards, finding a suitable technology that supports and improve performance to expected benchmark. This is what makes business and technology work hand in hand. After all “Technology doesn’t drive success: people using technology do”. Staying abreast of the latest trends allows a business to pivot before competitors can react. 
Today Enterprises can no longer afford to think only in terms of efficiency and the 10-year plan. The new business model relies on fluidity: a company poised to pivot is one that’s best prepared for the future. We need to focus less on tomorrow and live in the present as that would make an impact. 
A careful crafted plan on approach of marketing product and services, is the need. Do we need a website and if yes what kind of website? Is having mobile application at this time is right thing or should we wait? Worry not we would soon cover this topic in detail about what needs to be done and exactly in what order ? Since the commercialisation and use of technology became more widespread throughout the world, the adoption of advanced products can generate new business opportunities and various benefits.
The market today stands long-term visible capability of the decision makers.The wise ones choose a developed product with considering below points –
Few Instances of technological boost is once there was an era where it was all cash, then it was credit cards, and now it’s time to start to accept mobile payments. These make daily transactions much simpler. Similarly today current tech can help business keep track of all the necessary documents, invoices, deductions, and expenditures and made that all a little less painful by generating and tracking invoices way more better than manual work. Hence the best business growth is with trending techs, you need it you get it.