The participants of IIM Indore Mumbai Campus had with them
Mr. Vikrant Mahajan, Marketing & Sales Manager at Schlumberger on Friday, 4th March 2016 to interact on the topic "Marketing and Sales essentials". He began by talking about the basic difference of sales and marketing. Marketing is all about creating customer satisfaction and providing input to the R&D department whereas Sales focuses on the product in hand and its benefits, providing input to the marketing team. Mr. Vikrant talked about the factors influencing buying strategy of the consumers. The buyers’ reading strategy includes awareness, liking, knowledge, preference, conviction and purchase. This helps us in understanding why consumers buy any product. He then divided the session into marketing and sales.
He then continued with the marketing process and was quick to remind that SWOT analysis is the key to any company enabling us to align to the customer objective. Once the SWOT is analysed using various SWOT analysis tool, marketing mix is done to analyse frontal, flaking, fragment or defend marketing strategies. Mr. Vikrant said that customer profiling, client analysis, opportunity management, pricing strategy, bidding tender and negotiation are important aspects of sales. Developing trust is the key factor of sales and it is not only about customers but also about the company or product. He gave 4 golden rules of sales – deliver on promise, develop relationship, create mentors, create differentiation not similarities. He then divided the customers depending on their buying profiles into convince buyer, price buyers, values buyers, relationship buyers and divided on technology – innovators, visionaries, pragmatics, conservatives, laggards. Social profiling is one major aspect of sales and treating the customers the way they want them to be treated.
He talked about various pricing strategies. Depending on the cost price, a
bench mark is set and average price is set depending on the
prevailing market price and other strategies include customer price ceiling, unique business value, differentiate pricing and then final pricing. He concluded by talking about bidding strategies and negotiations. The enthusiastic participants asked questions related to sales and marketing in the recent times. Their queries were patiently dealt with by Mr. Vikrant.