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I have put down here just a few of my thoughts on what goes into making someone a good salesperson.

Firstly, a salesperson needs to be very organized and systematic. This is the only way to ensure that time is managed well, follow-ups are done promptly, sales calls are planned at the prospect’s convenience etc.

Being organized and systematic also means the salesperson has to be clear about the desired outcome of each and every call / meeting with a prospect. For instance, the objective of the initial contact would be to just get an opportunity to make a product pitch; it would be a mistake to try and close the sale at that stage.

Persistence is another key quality required. Selling is a tough job that can often prove heartbreaking when prospects are unresponsive, or postpone decisions, or go back on verbal commitments. At such times, the salesperson has to find a way to perk up and move on to the next call.

Then there is the whole area of interpersonal skills. This is indeed crucial for a salesperson, but there are several aspects to this.

There is a lot of emphasis placed – quite rightly – on communication skills but this is too often confused with merely using good language and flowery speech. Actually, good selling has little to do with using big words and a lot to do with communicating clearly and concisely.

I also think that the concept of “present ability” is often confused with looks. Having spent 22 years in the industry – selling – and buying – products and services – I can say with confidence that looks have very little to do with selling. What is really needed is a certain “like” factor. The best salespeople have this in abundance. We cannot quantify what exactly makes a person like able, but I am sure we can all think back to the people whom we liked instinctively; it could have been because of a pleasant smile, or a friendly greeting, or because the person vaguely resembled someone we are fond of….and so forth.

A salesperson also needs an excellent memory for names and faces; the reasons for this must be quite obvious.

Another crucial interpersonal skill is the art of listening. I think this is often ignored; very few people are really trained in how to actually listen to the other person. I wish more attention was paid to this in schools and colleges.

Next, we come to the art of persuasion. If the salesperson can put a tick mark in each of the above boxes, then the persuasion is already partly done, but the prospect could still have some concerns, some objections, some questions. The salesperson has to gently nudge the prospect towards a purchase, while politely hearing out and addressing the concerns and objections.

One more quality – honesty. The best salespeople are scrupulously honest; they do not persuade and close a sale when the product really doesn’t suit the prospect. They know that it is always more important in life to create goodwill and relationships than to close a sale here and now.

Simply put, a social entrepreneur is a person who brings an entrepreneurial outlook and approach to a social cause. The entrepreneurial outlook and approach can be considered to include many, and perhaps all, of the following

- clarity about the end result
- long-term vision
- concern about brand image and perception (of the social organization among its “consumers”)
- professional management principles in marketing, HR, operations planning and all other functions
- maybe, corporate funding
- rigorous and transparent accounting guidelines
- proper financial disclosures
- and, above all, tremendous personal commitment and drive

The causes could be varied – it could be about education of under-privileged children, it could be about rural women’s self-employment schemes, it could be about protection of domestic help’s rights, it could be about providing the unattended elderly with dignity and safety, and so forth.

Typically, a social entrepreneur’s organization is a not-for-profit entity; this is not really a requirement but most such organizations register themselves as a trust or as a society.

The BBC, some years back, coined a term “for-more-than-profit” but it did not really catch on. For-profit organizations such as any corporate or business entity can also take up social causes and – more often than not – do an excellent job of it, but such initiatives are commonly termed as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

It is an indisputable fact that the world today, especially relatively poorer nations like ours, need social entrepreneurs. We all expect an entrepreneur to be someone who passionately believes in what he / she is doing, and is determined to do it well, often sacrificing personal time and money in the process. When a social entrepreneur takes up a worthwhile cause, and brings such passion and devotion into play, the initiative is better managed and leads to better results. While the various government bodies are also doing their bit, social entrepreneurship plays an important role in augmenting such activities.

We can all think of some very well-known social entrepreneurs. It would not be wrong to say that Florence Nightingale was one, right? Mother Teresa was undoubtedly one of the foremost social entrepreneurs who lived amidst all of us. The Bangladeshi Mohammed Yunus of the Grameen Bank, who has done so much for micro lending, is another.

There are several more who are doing their bit, but in a smaller, less famous fashion. Which sections of society do such people come from? Pretty much from all over; some are people who have faced their own share of problems and now wish to help others avoid such problems. Others would like to do something for their hometown / village / school. And some have had a long and fulfilling career in corporate or business life, and now would like to do something “more worthwhile” to quote one such entrepreneur – Usha Sridhar, of The Interface. Some of these have grown to be organizations of repute, such as The Banyan.
It is also an encouraging trend that many of today’s youth, working in the IT and other sectors, have developed a keen social awareness. Some of these youth are banding together and initiating activities aimed at helping specific villages or groups to become self-sufficient, or to get adequate medical attention etc.

One last word; the drive, passion, and managerial skills of a social entrepreneur can bring results all the more, if they are allied to the support from a prominent person. Thus, our cricketers and film stars, when they ally themselves with a cause, help a lot by brining in great visibility. Visibility leads to monetary contribution, with the credibility of the celebrity to provide assurance that the money is used well.

Therefore, let us take a look at one of the key aspects of statistical analysis – significance testing. Let me try and explain this without using mathematics at all.

Whenever we measure anything through a sample survey, such as the percentage of people who use a particular brand of soap, or the average amount of money spent on eating out each month, or the satisfaction level of customers with a brand of TV sets, the survey finding will be somewhat accurate but not exactly accurate. There are formulae that will help us to determine what the likely level of accuracy is (note: likely level of accuracy). One of the key elements in such formulae is the sample size. The bigger the sample size, the greater is the likelihood that the accuracy level is good.

However, the point is that the figure measured through a sample survey is not exactly accurate; in other words there is some error in measurement because of the fact that it is only a sample survey.

Let us assume a Scenario 1; where we measure the awareness for a brand through a sample survey, and then do it again after six months. Since each figure will have some degree of error associated with it, the two figures will probably not be the same, even though nothing has happened in the interim to actually affect brand awareness.

Let us now assume Scenario 2; that we measure the awareness of a brand through a sample survey, and then run an ad campaign for six months.  At the end of the campaign, we once again measure the brand awareness through another sample survey. Here too, the two figures will not be the same. However, now the difference could either be because of sampling error, or because of the fact than an ad campaign has been run.

This is where significance testing comes in useful. If we run an appropriate test (for difference in proportions, in this particular example), we can calculate how likely it is that the difference is because of the campaign and not simply because of sampling error. We can then conclude whether the campaign had any impact or not.

This is also where a note of caution has to be struck when it comes to interpreting the results. If the significance test says that the difference is probably because of the campaign, it does not automatically mean that the campaign is a success. The campaign can be treated as a success when the extent of difference justifies the expense behind the campaign. Significance testing cannot answer the question of whether the difference is large enough or not.

To gain a better understanding of this subject, the best reference book is probably the statistics textbook written by Prof. P K Viswanathan. For courses on statistics, The Market Research School can be contacted (www.tmrs.in)

The concept of mentoring has been around for centuries in human society. The ancient Indian gurukul system was one very good example of a functional and successful mentoring system, and so was the apprentice system of many guilds – such as blacksmiths – in Europe.

The textbook definition of mentoring is that it involves providing guidance to the mentee in a wide variety of areas – subject matters / work matters, some skill-related matters, and some larger issues related to life, relationships management etc. To this extent, it goes beyond merely teaching / training / coaching.

As recently as 15 years ago, the concept of mentoring had not really taken hold in our corporate world. Companies were still relatively small, and one’s immediate boss often functioned as a mentor, though the terms itself was never used. Certainly, I expected this from my immediate boss in the first two-three years of my career; many people were informally mentored by a professor with whom they developed a good equation.

So what did I look for as a trainee / junior executive from my boss? I took it for granted that he would teach me the work itself. I also took it for granted that I could count on him for guidance on how I could avoid political faux paus in inter-department interactions; on what kind of skills I needed to develop to make myself more effective as an executive, on what kind of reading I needed to do to speed up my knowledge acquisition. Looking back, I realize that I also relied partly on my boss to help me get through the adjustment from a student life to professional life, and from life in a sheltered home environment to living alone in a big city. Quite a list!

As companies have become larger, the workplace has become more demanding in terms of deadlines and work pressures. The role of the immediate boss as a mentor is no longer so much in evidence, possibly because they simply don’t have enough time, and also possibly because they themselves lack the seniority and perspective to provide the mentoring.

However, young executives require mentoring far more than ever before, thanks to the work pressures. Hence, many companies now look to have a formal mentoring system in place. The mentor could be a relatively senior executive, who is assigned a group of mentees; it could be someone from outside the company who has been brought in just for this purpose; or it could be someone in senior management who takes on the mentoring role for particularly promising juniors.

A few enlightened colleges have also put in place a mentoring system for their students, with the aim of preparing them for life in the corporate world. Being a good mentor calls for so many qualities – knowledge,, a strong sense of values and ethics, good communication skills, patience, a temperament that can rejoice in seeing others grow and prosper, and much more.

Unfortunately, the use is not always in the right context. One of the best examples of successful use of viral marketing is that of Hot mail. And another one is the enormous popularity of SMS among today’s youth.

Often, when people say they plan to use viral marketing, they mean that they intend to exploit word of mouth and references rather than using traditional methods such as advertising etc. While there can be no doubt at all that word of Mouth is a very effective and important marketing tool, it is not to be confused with the specific term viral marketing.

So let us examine how people start using email services, and then the concept of viral marketing will become clear as a consequence.

When Hot mail was first developed, the developer had to make someone use it – probably the developer himself. Now, for him to use email / Hot mail, he would have needed someone to whom he could send the email. So he had to get someone else – at least one other person – to use it too.

Now, for the second person to use this facility fully, and not be restricted to communicating only with the developer, he / she had to get some other friends to start using it. And so on and so forth.

This is exactly what viral marketing is all about– the only way for a customer to use a product / service is by making other people use it as well. Clearly, this applies to SMS as well. And this is also applicable in case mobile-to-mobile calls are made free but mobile-to-fixed line calls are expensive.

Actually, the term viral marketing itself contains this explanation. A virus has no existence unless it gets a host and then spreads.

There is also one other requirement for viral marketing to succeed. The cost of trial or the cost of failure should be fairly low. For instance, it is quite cheap and easy to start sending SMSs once a person has a mobile phone. On the other hand, if a mobile phone is very expensive, and mobile to land line calls are very expensive, then the mere act of making mobile-to-mobile calls free is unlikely to ensure that viral marketing takes hold. In other words, entry barriers must be fairly low for the prospective user.

Let us look at this concept of test marketing in a slightly more formal light.

Test marketing a new product is not quite the same as carrying out a phased launch. A phased launch refers to the situation where a new product / brand is first launched in one or the geographic zone or area, say only in the southern part of the country or only in the metros, or only in certain kinds of outlets, for instance. After some months, the launch would be extended to other zones or town-classes or to all kinds of outlets. This phasing out could be for the purpose of testing the waters (in which case the phased launch works much like  a test market does) or it could be imposed on the marketer due to budget constraints which do not permit a wider, simultaneous launch.

A test market, however, is run only for the purpose of testing the waters. Typically, the output required from a test market exercise is feedback on the following broad lines

• Is our marketing mix doing enough to induce a large number of consumers to try out our product?
• Is our distribution strategy and implementation good enough to ensure that consumers have access to the product when they want it?
• Is our product performance good enough to induce the right kind of consumer to adopt the product in large numbers?
• Is our budgeting efficient and well-utilized?

Therefore, a test market is run like a regular launch but in only the selected locations. A test market will see multi-media advertising, distribution, packaging, pricing etc. just as if it were a full-fledged launch. The test market could run for anything from three months to nine months.

Based on the results from the test market exercise, the marketer could tweak the marketing, distribution, or product mix before the nationwide launch.

For a test market exercise to be successful and effective, it ideally needs the following conditions to be fulfilled

1. The test market location (city / town / region) should contain a good mix of all kinds of consumers, so that the feedback from the test market can be extrapolated to the national market at large. For instance, if the product being launched is a cooking oil, then the test market should have a representation of consumers hailing from different parts of the country, so that the suitability of the oil for different kinds of cuisine and dishes can be assessed

2. The test market location should have local media facility i.e. there should be media vehicles which cover the location well but do not spill over into other locations (since – for one reason – that could make consumers in other locations go and ask for the brand only to learn that it is not available)

3. The test market location should have its own distributor network, and should not see products spilling over into retailers in surrounding areas or nearby towns (since that kind of off-take could confuse the sales figures for the location)

4. The test market location should have consumer and / or retail research panels that enable tracking of the product performance.

5. And the test market location should be a relatively small and low-stakes market since it is not a good idea to do testing in a large and important market

Clearly, carrying out a test market is a useful practice. Nonetheless, it does have its drawbacks, chief among them being a long-drawn and well run test market invariably alerts the competition to the new product launch and gives them time formulate their response. This drawback led to the development of sophisticated simulated test market models, of which we shall see more later.

As we keep hearing right through our lives, success is the exclusive privilege of those people who manage their time better and failure is the inseparable companion of those who don’t manage their time well.

From my own observations, there are just a few lessons that we need to learn in this context.

The first lesson is one I learnt from Peter Drucker’s book “The Effective Executive”. He says that the biggest barrier to better time management is that we generally “don’t know where the time goes”. His prescribed remedy is simple. Keep a diary that has half-hour slots. And keep writing down what we did in that slot. This habit will serve two purposes. First, it will tell us where our time is going. Second, and probably more important, it will make us more conscious of how time is slipping by un utilized. Looking at our diary and reading the slots that have “did nothing” / “chatted with xyz” / “sat through pointless tele-call” / extended tea-break” written in them will hopefully shame us into doing more with our time.

The second lesson is that we need to understand ourselves better in terms of what times of day we tend to have maximum mental energy and when our minds are slower. For instance, my job profile includes some thinking work like writing proposals, questionnaires, interpreting data etc. It also includes project management elements like following up for status from field vendors, updating clients on time lines etc. It also includes servicing elements like sitting through meetings, taking client calls etc. And finally, it includes administrative elements like solving the UPS issue, banking work etc. I have discovered that the morning hours are my best time for thinking work, and afternoon hours are when I am pretty lethargic. So, I tend to write proposals in the morning, and do follow-up activities and client meetings in the afternoons. Now, please remember that this works for me and for my job profile. Each of us has to work out what time planning suits the individual and the job requirements best.

Following directly from this lesson is the third lesson, which is to classify the work into different kinds of work and rate them on how much mental energy they take, how much emotional energy they take etc. We also need to classify work in terms of which elements are important as well as urgent, which are either one or the other, and which are neither. This classification will lead directly to sensible prioritization. For instance, upgrading my company website is important to me, but perhaps not urgent.

The fourth lesson is really hard to follow; irrespective of how much pressure there is on you, take the time to do things right the first time. Don’t take the route of “let me send this off for now, and while the client is studying it, we can improve it in version 2”. The principle here is this – if you don’t have time to do it right the first time, you will most definitely not have time to correct it.

The fifth lesson is to remember that there is only so much in our control. There will be occasions and situations where we won’t be in a position to manage our own time. We have to learn to accept those situations with equanimity, and just get used to “controlling the control-ables” as the England cricket captain Alec Stewart used to put it.

Finally, we also need to remember that NOW is the starting point of the rest of our lives, and so we can manage our time better starting now onwards, irrespective of what we have done so far.

However, except to those in related professions, ad agencies themselves maintain a fairly low profile.

Let us take a quick look at how they work:

Traditionally, most agencies have four main functions – client servicing, media planning and buying, creative, and account planning. This is apart from support services which are there in any organization, such as accounts, HR, administration etc.

The creative department is the one that really drives an agency – they are the people who think up the brilliant (and not so brilliant, too) ads that we end up seeing. They have people who are very, very good at thinking of an unusual and interesting (i.e. creative) way of conveying to the consumers the message about the product. This includes thinking of the words (copy), visuals, choice of the models, choice of music, decision on whether to have humour or not etc. etc. There are so many things go into it which would not be visible to us from the outside, when we see just the finished product. This is s highly specialized job, and I am one of those people who believe creative skills cannot be taught from scratch. You are either creative or you are not; if you are, then those skills can be honed through training and wide exposure.

The client servicing department is the one that does much of the interaction with the client. Senior client servicing people act pretty much marketing consultants to the client. They sit in on strategy meetings, give their inputs to how the brands positioning can be taken forward. It is also their role to act as an interface between the client and the creative, in the sense that they translate the marketing objectives into a brief that tells the creative the kind of output being looked for, the kind of message to be conveyed etc. Management graduates tend to join in this function in ad agency; the skills called for here are excellent people skills, good project management skills, and a sound knowledge of marketing strategy.

The media function has undergone a sea change in the last decade or so. But essentially, it is the media planning department’s role to evaluate the various options available and decide where the ad campaign is to be placed. For instance, they would have to decide how many insertions to place in The Hindu and how many in the Times of India, and which pages these insertions are to appear on, and so forth. This is a job that calls for a high degree of comfort with numbers and skill in reading research reports such as readership studies and TV audience studies. It is not all number-crunching however; some degree of gut feel is also required.

In recent times, media planning buying has become an independent function and is done by quite a few very large, specialized companies. Some clients have set up their own media buying units to ensure that they get the best rates.

Account planning is a relatively more recent function within ad agencies. The role here is to essentially think on behalf of the client, and also to prepare the agency itself for pitching to a new client. The skills called for include a sound knowledge of market research techniques and consumer behaviour.