Cube Yogi

Well … truth be told, there is no magic in anything … not at work, not in life. But why did I con you by naming this post with the words ‘magic’? Something can 'appear magical', though truly, behind the scenes, lot of work has gone into it meticulously to make it appear so. Your co-salesman might be ‘magically’ appearing to close almost every prospect coming his way. If you asked him, he would lift his collar and say "That’s the magic, dude!" and leave you with more awe. But what is unsaid is a lot more … lot of hardwork he would have put in behind the scenes to make every deal work out, lot of shitty stuff that would have happened under the cover, which no one wants to, or neither would, speak of. So time to create the magic yourself!  According to this Harvard Business Review article , a whopping 44% of sales executives think that their sales process is poorly managed! The key is to define your sales process really well, and it is well worth spending that initial ti...

Getting in Leads into the system is only half the story. Now, for the better half - following up with leads. The key to following up with Leads is to maximize conversion, as we know. It’s an ongoing challenge. Market situation may change. Competition landscape will undergo its own changes. So it’s not just enough to have a lead workflow, but it is crucial to measure its ongoing success rate as you keep using the workflow. Let’s talk about this in more detail. 
 Things to Remember Bucket-Based Followup So now we have categorized Leads into buckets, based on strategies we discussed in the previous post. It might be useful to come up with a different workflow for different buckets. Someone might have a 90% chance to convert to a customer, whereas someone else may have only a 20% chance. You may want to treat these leads differently when following them up, so that you allocate your salesperson to do more followups with those leads who have higher probability of conversion.  
 Modes of ...

So now you are in meditation . Meditation on your business processes and workflows. Since we are now focusing on CRM,I will consider on of the most common workflows almost every business owner has to chart out : lead followup workflow. I would suggest using a drawing tool as Draw.io ( https://www.draw.io/ or https://www.samepage.io/ ). It forces you to get into the finer details of the workflow. Also you can connect draw.io with other storage systems like Google drive, Dropbox, and few others so you can maintain versions of your workflows and also easily share with others. So let's get to it. Here are the things you might want to think about deeply and chart out a workflow. I will share a template for this workflow next week. Meanwhile, it's useful to try this exercise yourself. Feel free to write to me if you have questions or feel stuck. 1. Lead Source Do you have different sources from which you get leads? How do these sources differ in: a. The quality of leads they brin...

When you start a business and are few months into it, you find that many other business owners are using something they call a CRM software to manage their business. So you are compelled to think you also somehow should follow the herd effect and start using a CRM as the first step. Why do I call it a 'herd effect'? We will come to that in a separate post. Right now, let's say you decided you want to use a CRM. You sign up for one of the popular CRM software in the market like Zoho CRM, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and start entering data. I see that business owners put in a lot of effort to do a detailed comparison of the various CRM software in the market. But they don't put as much effort to find out how to use the software they finally choose. Actually the effort should be in reverse. To be frank, in today's competitive software landscape, almost every CRM in the market is equal, at least the top players. They necessarily have to keep upgrading their features...

One of the first things almost every business owner asks me is "How do I use a CRM? Am I using it right? Am I using it to its full potential?" My answer to this is : flip your question. Are you worried that you haven’t used every button in your coffee machine or your washing machine? Then why do you worry about this? The question should rather be "Am I automating my business right? Have I increased my employees’ productivity using the systems I’m using now, or have I only made it more messy?” So how do you go about deciding to use a CRM? Here are few questions you could ask yourself Are you a marketing-driven firm? Are you a company which depends heavily on marketing to bring in new customers? If yes, then you surely need a CRM right away, so you have better conversions and tracking. However, if marketing is just another function and not so crucial to your kind of business, then you don't need to consider using a CRM. Do you get lots of new leads everyday? Does your ...

In the earlier post , we saw about Zoho’s launch of arguably one of the biggest suite of business apps in the history of software industry yet : Zoho One. Now you are a business owner and wondering if you need Zoho One. After working with businesses across the globe in automating business processes and workflows for the last four years, these are few things I would suggest you consider, before making this decision. 1. Is an Excel sheet the bread and butter of your business? Are you maintaining all your data in Excel? Are you then sharing the Excel through email and then struggling to find out / control who changed what? Is data integrity a nightmare? Time and again, I've been both awed and shocked to see countless business owners making a mess out of their most important thing in their life ... their business, by using Excel to manage it!  Time to #StopExcelAbuse.  I will make a separate post on interesting cases we have come across on Excel abuse. 2. Are you employing so...

Zoho One.  Arguably the launch of the biggest software suite of Apps in the software industry yet.  When I first heard of this, I was not paying attention because I thought to myself "Just a rumor". But when I saw the launch today, it was mind-blowing! How could someone give away a suite of almost forty enterprise-ready apps for such a drop dead price?! But it's true and it is happening.  Drop-dead Pricing 38 cloud-based Apps + 55 mobile Apps. Must be a whopping price for so many Apps, right? That’s what I thought until I heard the price of $30 / month / user! That works out to about just $1.36/day/user, or rather, a little more than 15 cents/working hour/user! Cheaper than a cup of coffee! One for All. All for One. It’s is a very powerful concept. Come to think of it. All for one. All the business apps that you needed so far and possibly will ever need. One for all. One Suite. One login. One place for all your data so you can start connecting them together and making b...