UT Career Desk, [ Sunday, November 04, 2008  ]

Selling is always tough. More so if you are selling something intangible. More so if what you are selling is something the customer may never see. More so if what you are selling might not be delivered in time. More so if the customer knows he might have to shell out more to get what he actually wants in spite of negotiating the price. More so, if in spite of all precautions the product is delivered with known defects. More so if you do not have the capability to actually produce the product.

It is with these known challenges in mind that I start out a typical day in my life as a sales manager of a top Indian IT services firm. Selling software services is like selling concepts. There is nothing tangible or concrete about it. You are practically selling promises.

I am based out of London with my offices near Liverpool street tube station, close to some of our biggest customers the Deutsches' and the UBS’s of the world. Being a salesman for the financial services vertical of our company, the location of our offices is apt saving us considerable amount of travel time.

My day typically starts with checking up on my mails around 8-00AM. This usually takes up about an hour. Even though my blackberry is my constant companion, I relish the sheer expanse of my laptop’s contours. I divide my emails into long term and short term, based on the need for an immediate response or attention. Prioritizing helps me save a lot of time.

I have the mails from my presales team back in India with the collaterals I had requested for. Collaterals are basically presentations and supporting documents such as account mappings that we use to showcase our capabilities and experience in developing the systems the customer needs. We just live out of presentations. I’d have to sanitize or clean the presentation though, for any proprietary information that we would not be sharing with the customer.

This collateral was for one of our existing customers whom we’d been serving for quite some time.

My calendar for the day today is thankfully light. In a couple of hours I’d be off to having a lunch with a prospect, the head of the fixed income products for my account.

Our sales force comprises of a number of farmers and hunters. As a farmer, I basically sow seeds of our capabilities and experiences within existing customer’s landscape looking to mine the account for more businesses. I had been an hunter initially, with my arsenal including an assortment of mails, phone calls, box of chocolates and the most potent of all: the lunches. Backed by a fair measure of greeting cards that we send out to our customers on festive seasons I used to make it a point of being constantly in touch and yet stopping short of nagging.

I confirm the lunch with my prospect and head out for a coffee with a colleague who is a hunter which practically implies looking for new businesses. Over coffee, I learn about the new deal that we’d won - a US$ 20 million deal spread over four years. It’s the result of four months of persistent efforts starting from an RFI which a new customer had requested.

We typically get about 3-4 RFI’s or “requests for information” from customers every month. These RFI usually seek information about our company, our experiences and capabilities to cater to the customer’s business. The presales team back at offshore helps collating the same. A direct fallout of the RFI is an RFP or a “request for a proposal”.

RFP’s are more detailed highlighting the actual needs of customer around a particular line of business, software system or projects. RFP’s are responded again by the pre sales team along with the help of the delivery teams who form the backbone of our business.

As a sales guy, I own the responsibilities of the response to the RFIs and RFPs. This involves a lot of liaising with various teams : the presales teams to ensure that the response is coming out in the desired shape; the delivery teams to ensure that the various facets of the solution such as resource loading, transition etc are in shape.

By now its almost 11-00 AM and time for me to start cold calling. I have a list of prospective leads generated through the registrations of an event that we held in London last month. The event was a conference of sorts with existing and new customers participating. We have events now and then with the primary purpose of establishing our brand in the industry. I had helped the marketing teams define the underlying theme for event: “Need for effective risk management systems in the wake of Subprime Mortgage Crisis”. The events also help us to establish thought leadership in the relevant space.

After ten calls, only one of which looks promising, I head out for the lunch. I utilize the discussions with the prospect in trying to understand what changes are being planned out in the bank, making notes of key leads on which we would revert.

Post lunch, I accompany another of my colleague to his customer to share my experiences in another engagement. We chat for half an hour listening to various initiatives in the bank and explaining how we could fit in. We also spot the sales guy of another rival Indian IT firm in the customers offices, from whom we’d snatched two deals last quarter.

By now, it’s 3-00 PM in the afternoon and time for a review with our geo sales head. I always dread these sessions, some of which actually turn into a pants down sessions. I am evaluated on multiple counts: the number of calls made, the number of personal meetings, the leads generated, the conversion ratio of my calls, status’ of various RFI’s/RFP’s in progress, all thrown in good measure.

After spending a couple of years in the same function, I have learnt the fine nuances of tackling such sessions. Being good in numbers definitely helps. More so if you have the right numbers on your fingertips.

By 4-00 PM, I am off to meet the vendor management officials of my account for clearing some of the past invoices. The invoices are basically spreadsheets detailing the efforts which we had put in the past month for various requirements of the bank. Involving a lot of number crunching this is one of the most tedious tasks of mine. Often, this takes hours as I reconcile the number of resources in our records with the lines of business in the customers records, adjust the discounts which we’d doled out and the rates quoted as per the master service agreements.

After pushing the invoices out, I catch up on the long term emails. There’s an upcoming customer visit at our Bangalore offices in which I’d have to participate. This is my third travel in the month but getting rarer thankfully due to cost cutting measures imposed by the company.

I respond to a few queries on the costing for a proactive proposal from the teams at offshore, which we are planning to send out to few customers. Apart from these are heads up pertaining to setting up meetings between various customers representatives and some of our traveling senior management who’d be in town in near future.

At the fag end of the day, I catch up on the financial and technology dailies. These help me keep abreast of the latest trends also ensure that I don’t make a fool of myself in front of knowledgeable customers, speaking the right lingo.

Finally, I call it a day and head home though a series of calls would keep me busy till late night.

 

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