Client Relationship

Clients are the most precious assets for a business. Without clients, there can be no business. With poor quality of clients, the business will be poor and if you manage to get very good clients and retain their loyalty, your business will only go up and up. This all sounds very exciting. But it is not easy to get very good clients and all the more difficult to retain them. After all, whatever you do, your competition is trying the same and may use better techniques to get business. Are there any innovative approaches to client relationships?

We are talking about direct sales in this discussion and not about selling merchandise to large consumer base. For example if you are a contractor maintaining air conditioners in clients work places. Or a direct seller of computer hardware to business buyers, and all such businesses where your sales to individual clients are large, and you are in direct contact with clients.

The first need is of course client satisfaction. If the client is satisfied with your response time, after sales service and can depend on you, pricing may become secondary. All clients do not buy from a supplier whose sales at the lowest price. If your product cost is a small percentage of clients total expense or if your product is essential for your clients, you are onto something good. How to retain such clients despite all the competition? What are the other factors than client satisfaction?

Relationship is one such other major factor. Do you relate with your clients only professionally, or are very good friends? Both these extremes can hurt. For a long-term business relationship, good friendship is not good for health of your business. Any problem in the personal friendship will directly affect your business. What if you relate to your clients mechanically in a professional style totally devoid of personal touch? You know the answer yourself.

What is needed is a relationship that does not border on personal friendships, but crosses mechanical approach. A fine balance between personal and professional.

Have good sales!

Public Social Networks

As a Marketing person Public social contacts is very essential to make good sales and achieve company targets.

External public social networking services, such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster, can be valuable sales, marketing, and support tools. These services comprise extensive networks of users who are self-organized into groups and communities.

Users establish connections directly with other users to form a personal friends network. Users also join groups and communities that are organized around attributes such as products, lifestyles, entertainment, institutions, politics, and geographic locations.

Social network users also build their own extensive demographic profiles by connecting to dozens or hundreds of affinity groups, not just connecting to other users. This self-segmentation phenomenon is why social networks present marketers and advertisers with such a potentially lucrative audience for promoting goods and services.

There are several ways an organization can benefit from using public social networks, including:

* HR recruiting
* Product marketing
* Services outreach
* Promotional application
* Market intelligence
* Professional networking

Companies are exploiting public social networking sites for valid business purposes. However, a lack of enterprise-class controls makes management of users akin to herding cats. By adopting strong policies for business use of public social networks, small and midsize businesses can maximize value and safeguard against inappropriate connections between personal and business contacts.

Forming a Company in India

The Companies Act of 1956 sets down rules for the establishment of both public and private companies. The most commonly used corporate form is the limited company, unlimited companies being relatively uncommon. A company is formed by registering the memorandum and articles of association with the State Registrar of Companies of the state in which the main office is to be located.

Foreign companies engaged in manufacturing and trading activities abroad are permitted by the Reserve Bank of India to open branch offices in India for the purpose of carrying on the following activities in India:

-To represent the parent company or other foreign companies in various matters in India, for example, acting as buying/selling agents in India, etc.

-To conduct the research work in which the parent company is engaged provided the results of the research work are made available to Indian companies;

-To undertake export and import trading activities;

-To promote possible technical and financial collaboration between Indian companies and overseas companies.

Application for permission to open a branch, a project office or liason office is made via the Reserve Bank of India by submitting form FNC-5 to the Controller, Foreign Investment and Technology Transfer Section of the Reserve Bank of India. For opening a project or site office, application may be made on Form FNC-10 to the regional offices of the Reserve Bank of India.

A foreign investor need not have a local partner, whether or not the foreigner wants to hold full equity of the company. The portion of the equity thus not held by the foreign invest can be offered to then public.

SPANCO Process

Selling is an art of good customer relationship and influencing the customer to buy or avail a service based on his/her requirement. It has to be combined with the necessary factors for success, motivation, incentives, training, etc. not forgetting the methodology. They are many processes in sales, I would like to share the one I learnt from my seniors at work .They follow a process which tells everything about sales and how it works on.

“SPANCO” stands for:

•Suspect - Definition of the target
•Prospect - Identification of the lead
•Approach - Analysis Evaluation and qualification of requirements, identification of the solution
•Negotiation - Negotiation process
•Closing - Finalization of the order
•Order Ongoing - Account follow-up (up and cross-selling, etc.) Order management and sales monitoring

SPANCO enables organizations to display sales figures with KPI's (Key Performance Indicator as well as to generate, manage and convert leads into customers. Areas of difficulty which may arise in terms of the various phases will be clearly highlighted, so that corrective action will be all the more effective and thus improve the performance of your sales department.

Following this method will help sales people to bring more sales to their company and improve their sales skills. Many organizations insist on this method to their sales people to increase sales. My organization follows this method and found very useful in bringing more customers and sharping the sales skills of the employees.