The art of selling
: Street vendors in India can be as customer savvy as any
famous marketing guru we read about. With barely any basic schooling,
definitely no higher education, they live and operate by their wits. Their
livelihood tools are speed, being hands-on, thorough understanding of who their
customer is, a persuasive personality with a ready smile, keeping an eye open
and using some differentiating method to score over other street vendors, and
the ability to be at the right place at the most opportune time. What more do
you need to be able to sell?
Those who live in economic crisis
often figure out a way to earn life’s daily basic needs, perhaps that little
extra too, with smart tactics. Invariably in Mumbai’s traffic jams are young
vendors peddling books and magazines, some pirated, others genuine. Their offer
spans English and vernacular fiction, biography, management, sudoku, comic
books, magazines on films, automobiles, sports, home decor and almost porn
that’s always kept discretely. One day I observed a street bookseller proposing
a set of publications, rushing from one car window to another car window, and
every time reshuffling the order of the books in his two hands. This aroused my
curiosity; I had to unravel the secret of his selling approach.
In another Mumbai trip, at that
ephemeral traffic signal, I again saw deft shuffling of books within the short,
valuable time the street seller has to sell his wares. Here, he works within
the discipline of street lights, adjusts with the time car passengers take to read
book blurbs, and simultaneously extract money from them while they’re on the
move. I bought three books from a vendor called Mohan and negotiated to have a
chat with him at the street corner. To my question of why he shuffles books,
Mohan laughed saying he changes the book display order even for different
passengers on either side of the same car. Then in all seriousness he explained
about understanding diverse kinds of customers. They have to quickly identify
the customer type from looking at the car, how the driver is dressed, the back
seat passenger’s mood at that intersection, whether irritable, bored, happy
chatting with co-passengers or the mobile phone, or pre-occupied with the
computer or reading. Even the colour of the newspaper makes Mohan smell a
specific prospect for a specific book. From Mohan’s description of passengers,
their attitude towards book purchase when travelling with companions of
dissimilar age and gender, I understood he literally possesses the fine art of customer identification.
I realised that within an instant he can gauge customer behaviour and character
under diverse conditions. He shuffles his books depending on on-the-spot
recognition of customer type. How many frontline sales managers of corporations
do you know who can absorb such sales techniques and apply them in their jobs?
Around that time I was conducting an
executive training programme for a corporate client on the customer handling
process at the point of purchase of high-value products. After in-depth
customer research across the country we’d designed a highly relevant programme
to train professional MBAs on how to proactively read and anticipate customer
behaviour and character when they come for a big ticket purchase for personal
use. Along with soft skills techniques, they were taught to gauge within three
to five minutes of the customer entering the store, what that customer stands
for. The intelligent MBAs gave fantastic answers on theoretical questions. In
the real life act, they had a hard time winning the game. Barely would the
customer speak, when they’d start hard-selling the product’s technicalities
like robot salespersons. After the training and customer interacting evaluation
we presented the management two kinds of scores on how participants absorbed the
training session. As per the Indian university-centric score, participants got
high marks. But in the developed country standard score, they failed miserably.
If these employees try taking on the global challenge at the time of
deployment, how can they deliver the global standard?
I’ve heard comments on why do we
need Western standards in India? On the other hand Indian companies talk of
going global. How can that happen when people are reluctant to drive as per
global standards? This is our country’s real crisis of collective mediocrity.
When stuck in a business bind, we hire appropriate manpower with high-flying
degrees. The job market is still open for people from reputed Indian
institutions, but what they can deliver is not questioned, it’s the degree that
matters. On customer centricity, how come Mohan is ahead of the professionals
who attended our executive training program?
In the political arena, all parties
fight in the name of poor people like Mohan, you barely understand who’s left,
right or centrist. They try blocking reforms even after the 1991 economic
liberalisation brought in massive positive change. For example, all politicians
love to have a foreign car. They profess to be anti American, but to their
states they aim to bring IT development centres where USA is the major
customer. So how do you understand why they are anti-FDI, when FDI will enhance
capability and competence of our people? Their actions make it clear that
they’re not interested in guiding the likes of Mohan who are so starkly visible
everywhere. In reality instead of
facilitating Mohan gain a decent livelihood, they just want to keep poor people
poor and uneducated while politicians stage the Indian political zigzag drama
at the country’s expense.
Watching
Mohan on the street endorsed my belief on how essential customer experience is
in formulating the art of sales. In his small, street-smart way he was making
his livelihood. But aren’t the lessons he gives us on self urge, motivation,
instantly addressing customer behaviour and character, his sales approach,
invaluable? Actually, if you listen to his procurement process you’ll be even
more surprised on how he manages his inventory cost.
Shombit Sengupta is an international
creative business strategy consultant to top management.
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