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Recently,
I came across the best seller "The
World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First
Century", by Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist Thomas L. Friedman. He argues
persuasively that globalization is doing
more than levelling the playing fields;
it's fattening them. By that, Friedman means
that powerful economic forces ranging from
trends like outsourcing and off-shoring
& easy access to Internet; are reducing
the costs of entry. Today, almost anybody
can have access to information anywhere
in the world anytime.
Easier
access to information (in real time) means
that all goods and services are in danger
of becoming commoditized. In fact, most
of my clients, tell me in this flat world
their No. 1 problem is Commoditization.
They say it's tougher and tougher to differentiate
themselves not just from their nearest competitors,
but from everybody else in the market. Almost
literally overnight, markets are being be
flooded with new players, or even old players
with new products. And unlike in the past,
when it was years for a newcomer to become
a serious threat, now many contenders enter
the market virtually on an equal footing!
As
the selling environment gets more challenging,
I strongly recommend sales-marketing engineers
focus on few key areas,
-
During customer interaction invest majority
of your time on listening & asking
questions rather than making sales pitch.
- Understand
& work out suitable strategies to
the rapidly changing macro economic conditions
for your customer & your organisation.
- Look
at the business horizon, there is price
pressure building up; start working on
reducing cost of sales & cost of your
product.
- Develop
skills to assimilate & make sense
of immense information available, especially
affecting your organisation (& your
Job!). If you dont know how to make sense
of this information explosion, it would
be information pollution for you.
- Information
collection & analysis should be like
breathing, continuous; without which you
cannot survive in this flat world.
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