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Billy Mays-Death of a true salesman

The passing of Michael Jackson had overshadowed all other news but I thought we should not miss out celebrating Billy Mays. I find Arthur Miller's play somewhat unkind to the sales profession and thus the "true" for Billy Mays. Billy Mays was a true salesman and a great pitchman on TV.

What makes personal selling so effective is that when you speak directly with a prospect,face to face and one to one, it has the biggest impact on closing the sale.To do so via television is very difficult and Billy Mays was very good at it . You wanted to believe him and put out the $20 or so that he suggested you spend to acquire a product that sure looked useful.He did the "convincing that it is useful" really well. To do so for a mass TV audience is a rare and remarkable skill.  My guess is that Billy Mays was not only able to sell the products he pitched but the products "stayed" sold. Probably customers who bought Billy Mays pitches returned less product as he upped the satisfaction levels right at the sell stage.

Here is a clip from the Tonight Show to learn enthusiasm from Billy Mays:

Change in ancient cultures- "The White Tiger" by Aravind Adiga

 

Aravind Adiga has won the Man Booker Prize for his very first novel. Curious, I had placed a hold on the book at my town library and sure enough the book is in big demand and is on a strict 15 day turn-around.

Adiga has written a gripping tale and covers both India and China with the protoganist Munna  or "The White Tiger" writing from Bangalore as a now powerful taxi operator who provides taxi services to the call centers of big brand companies like Microsoft and so on. Munna is an "entreprenuer" writing to the Chinese Prime Minister (throughout the entire novel)  who is visiting Bangalore and wants to meet local Indian entrepreneurs to understand their story. The book is about Munna's evolution as an "entrepreneur" from abject  poverty based roots as a Rickshaw Puller's son.

The most fascinating thing about the book is the understanding that Adiga brings about the changing  ancient social structure in India. He does so in a sort of cynical manner highlighting rare betrayal by the servant of the master.  I rather prefer the lighter approach  of PG Wodehouse called the "feudal spirit"  where Jeeves is pretty much always loyal to Bertie Wooster. 

To Adiga's credit however, he does bring out continuity and change in the Indian social fabric as the economy booms and "catching up"  with China is on peoples' minds. Adiga's incredulous observation that dependable "servants" literally drive the economy is masterful. He mentions the diamond trade among others  where trustworthy assistants move around with millions in diamonds or cash with literally no "legal" controls and almost no problems. While "The White Tiger" or Munna is a deviant - you do get the feeling of continuity and stability in a  bizarre sort of way. Definitely worth a read.

Is your CEO more willing to meet customers than suppliers?

For quite some time I have been trying to figure out the practical differences between supplier  and customer relationship orientations in B2B relationships. In other words, the differences between upstream and downstream relationships that a firm must have.

Firms are becoming more and more alert to having good supplier relationships having realized that they need to have great suppliers who are part of the team. But the focus is always downstream to the market. Consider how easy it is to get your CEO to go meet a customer than go meet a supplier....

Why is this so? Because organizations are market facing and without customers who pay the bills you can't pay your suppliers !

It is for this reason there is much more IT efforts on the front end of the customer face with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA) softwares  rather than the slower growing Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) modules in ERP systems. The Supply Management department is generally on top of critical supplier relationships because a supply gap can be catastrophic, career wise for the supply or procurement professional. While the same logic applies to the Marketing department, the CEO lends a helping hand because the specter of competition for good customers seem much more real than good suppliers.

Outsourcing call centers - an ethics question?

I recently bought a Dell computer and during the buy process I needed to call and it was a US salesperson. In fact, the Dell website was very careful in guiding US customers in the early part of the buy process to US persons, or at least US numbers.

You guessed it ! The person who spoke with me was outstanding but did have a foreign accent and did not grow-up in the US.

So I found Bruce Weinstein's recent article on ethics, noble but out of touch with how things really work in this industry. Yes it is ethical and good business sense to give top customer service to customers so that they come back for more. But the assumption that a US worker will be more service oriented is wrong. The fact is that a decent US worker does not want to work these jobs even if the pay is higher because these are taxing jobs also called the "McDonald jobs" of the service sector. You can pay maybe 12 -20$ an hour compared to about $ 2 an hour in India but the motivation and attitude of the "dead end"  call center worker in the US is just appalling. Just go to an US call center and compare with an Indian one in the dead of night. Check my 2006 post here.

The point is that the Call Center industry is very highly developed and is geared to addressing customer issues depending on the phase of the sales or service process. For tech support Call Centers are paid differently for different levels of support ( Level 1 vs level 2).  The cultural training is also enormous as I have seen, although gaps do exist.

Thus the ethics question that Weinstein raises is really one of efficiency and industry is always trying to improve.  For example you are unlikely to find lead paint in Chinese toys in the future but Chinese toys will be back and US manufacturing will continue declining for purely cost reasons. But America and Americans are innovative and I think overall the world will be better off. I got this previous line's idea from Brink Lindsey's great book that I am currently reading called "The Age of Abundance." More on that later....

Barry Diller and the IAC

Fifteen years after Barry Diller had gone to see QVC the home shopping network, he was on CBS 60 minutes today. Within minutes of being on 60 minutes the Internet search engines were buzzing with searches for "Barry Diller" ! How much the media consumption experience has changed over the last 15 years !

And Barry Diller a former media executive  guessed that there would be some kind of technology convergence in consumer buying behavior. I liked the way CBS showed the QVC format which historically involved infomercials,call centers and computer screens. Add the Internet and you have the huge and growing IAC portfolio. You would have used at least some of the famous IAC brands like Expedia,Ticket Master if not many others.

I also  enjoyed the admission by Barry Diller and the clarification by his wife Diane von Furstenberg that he starts with only a fuzzy idea of where he is going to go. He "fakes it till he makes it" - I suppose all kinds of visioning is like that- you have to believe in something and see how you go, but keep going. In parting, Diller made a wonderful and thoughtful comparison between Google and IAC.While Google was a mega brand people didn't know about IAC but if IAC became like Procter and Gamble ,which has so many famous brands - it would be great.I thought , this was a rather neat way of looking at a portfolio of Internet brands.

Skype in Salesforce.com

The news that Skype is available with Salesforce.com is interesting for two reasons. First, Sales Force Automation (SFA) systems can be introduced with or without ERP particularly if they are web based like salesforce.com. Second, innovators  who really use SFA will certainly try Skype particularly calling computer  to phone.  I use red italics for "really use" because there is large evidence that Sales Forces are wary of SFA adoption- but perhaps the Internet and easy applications and the benefits of collaboration might be helping the adoption of SFA along. I am sure that time will tell but going by some of the comments on this interesting development on the web, the jury is still out on how the Skype and Salesforce.com alliance will pan out.

Super bowl ads "people power" and "global outsourcing"

The Superbowl ads are always a great reflection of our times and more importantly changing times. For the very first time viewers have created an ad- The Crash the Superbowl-Doritos ad. The empowering of the amateur ad person i.e. "You" is a catclysmic change in the way clients and advertising agency creative people will work in the future.

The outsourcing phenomenon finds a prominent place with "Bud Light" and an accent training call center class in what could be India. The ad closes with a clearly geeky Indian IT professional in an American bar who just cannot pronounce "Bud Light."  But seems to be enjoying his Bud Light anyway.

Consumer Data Privacy and British Channel 4 TV Sting Operation

At a recent talk at the North East Supply Chain Conference on Global Sourcing  (I will report with photos of this great conference at Marlborough MA soon), the audience had a great deal of interest in the privacy and IP protection regime and culture in India. I emphasized India's democracy and free media. Quite simply no other low cost country in both English speaking and so raucously democratic. You" see what you get" in India and you do have the option of going to the media who will willingly lap up your story - if your story  has any elements of interest.

But since all this probably wastes time for managers and the media needs to generate stories Indian media frequently has "sting" operations. However, I was a bit surprised that Britain's Channel 4 ran a "sting" operation where an individual offered to get customer data through call centers and then aired the "sting" on British TV. Two important points are of interest- first that the British Television Channel was allowed to operate a "sting" operation in India- many countries would not allow such "sting" operations. Secondly, the TV station did not choose to involve local police as media "sting" operations should (as in the US). Despite this the apex association NASSCOM chief has assured that the guilty will be booked- if the particular individual can be traced.

Going by the enormous number of "phishing" emails and very targeted junk snail mail and junk phone calls- I cannot believe that any data is really private whether or not call centers are overseas. In fact, Indian kids see call center jobs as a career and frequently have college degrees unlike the "McDonald" type status and hourly wage call center worker in the developed world.  Frankly, a real call center worker in India has just too much to loose compared to her/his western counterpart. It is not only a career and livelihood but major social disgrace in a very social and contextual culture. I would therefore tend to feel that data is probably more secure in India both because of the social context of the call center worker and the likelihood of real crooks getting hold of the data. Crooks would really have to fiddle around with data in Indian call center customer countries and because of good repatriation treaties between India and customer countries- we can expect some effective deterrence.  This customer privacy question , will however continue to alarm sourcers and would need good management and the implementation stage of different projects.