Tag: perspective

Are you Sold to the Idea?

Are you Sold to the Idea?

Here’s a first post under a new category called ‘Management Mumblings’.

I recently addressed and interacted with about 70 really smart MBA students, with whom I was sharing experiences from my corporate career, and about starting up and growing, with the objective of encouraging entrepreneurship.

In comparison, I’ve always found it easier to interact with people from industry, comfortable with discussing anything from industry problems, current affairs, new ideas, etc. Interacting with freshers, often makes me a little nervous. They are highly impressionable minds after all, often easily influenced. That leaves us with a great responsibility when advising them on matters such as career, ethics, values, etc.

One popular concern among these students was fear of the possibility of landing a job that might involve sales. 

A lot of us are not too fond of marketing, and many detest sales. Selling has always been that inhuman task of lowering ourselves, often to the point of unimaginable desperation, to close a deal, before moving to the next one.

Salesman

Source: here

I attempted to change their impression of marketing and sales with a simple change of perspective. I hope you too find some benefit in it that helps in some aspect of your career or business.

We have come a long way to the times we currently live in. From times when we had a limited set of friends, and everyone knew what was going on in their lives. To now, when friends are in the hundreds or thousands. Mostly online, many strangers, some we’ve never met, and most we almost never interact with.

Given this reality, whenever we want to convey events, achievements or updates about us, we post things online. We tweet it or blog about it, or convey it in some such way. Be it selfies with a Starbucks cup, a new job, a marriage, loss of a family member, a holiday, a new pet, anything. We convey it online to our friends.

If you have done one or more of those, ever, don’t you think what you’ve been doing is a form or part of marketing? As is with our resumes and the confidence with which we speak at interviews. Which means we are already marketers to some extent, and have been doing a decent job with marketing ourselves. How cool is that? 

Now all we need to do is extend that skill to our jobs if it demands so. Identify what differentiates the products/ services we are trying to sell from that of our competitors, and convey the same to prospective customers with the logical and convincing points that we’d like to hear, were we being convinced to buy that product/service.

This won’t make you a killer salesperson just yet. But hopefully it will warm you up to the concept of marketing and selling.

Qualities of Salesman

Source: here

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Look forward to your views. And if you liked this one, consider following/subscribing to my blog (top right of the page). You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and on Twitter.

I Wonder If You Can

I Wonder If You Can

Think about any random man-made problem that the world faces; financial meltdowns, corruption, greed, poverty. Also, inequalities, ethnic violence, crimes against women and children, “man-made” natural disasters, and so on.

Wouldn’t it be easy even to just grasp the magnitude of these problems if they all had just one or a few common causes? And simple causes too? Then just preventing those causes would cause miracles. If only life was that obvious.

No, I haven’t been drinking (or just blabbering). In an endeavor to find simple answers to problems, after much brooding, I have concluded that most of these man-made troubles have two common causes or roots. Yeah, just two.

They are, Perspective and Imagination [the lack of both, I mean].

Imagination is the faculty or action of forming new ideas, concepts, etc., of external objects not present to the senses. Perspective, simply put, is a point of view.

Putting it into simpler examples, say you’re waiting patiently behind the wheel, say fifth in line at a signal light. Another vehicle, drives past you in the wrong lane, and as the light turns green, tries squeezing into your lane, increasing the chance of you missing the light. You’d get pissed, right? Now imagine another situation where you are with friends, it’s Saturday night, and you’re late for a party. Taking all desperate measures to reach sooner, you find yourself revving away in the wrong lane, hoping to cut your way through the fleet of cars waiting at the light. That would surely tick off some drivers around you, right? That’s about perspective. You identifying wrong when you are being wronged, but you choosing to ignore wrong when you aren’t affected (or rather, when you are benefited) by it at someone else’s expense.

Perspective 2

image: link

There are situations where perspective may not work. Because ‘perspective’ requires two or more people to be involved in the same or similar/related situations. For instance, you may have been born into a comfortable middle-class household. You wouldn’t have the faintest clue about what it is to stand in long queues merely to collect water for home. Or about what it is to wait in line to use a common bathroom. When employers haggle regarding employee salaries, in their defense, they might not have the right perspective. They might not be able to perceive employee standard of living, their hardships, etc. That’s where imagination comes in. What you don’t have much clue about something, you need to discuss, probe, get more information. And then create an image to better understand another’s perspective.

Imagination

image: link

If people could imagine or have perspectives on the implications or repercussions of their actions on other individuals, they would most likely not do something wrong. Because, they’d be able to imagine what being at the receiving end of their inequality or injustice would be like.

[Imagine – Lennon]

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Look forward to your views. And if you liked this one, consider following/subscribing to my blog (top right of the page). You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and on Twitter.

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