How to speed up sales & win more business?

HelloMeets recently invited Ashish Tulsian, Founder and CEO at POSist for a Meetup on Selling B2B for SMEs & Enterprises.

Ashish ran his own restaurant before founding POSist — a restaurant technology company. The troubles of managing a restaurant made him hunt for an IT solution which could help automate and remotely manage most part of it.

With 4500+ restaurant customers across 90 cities and 5 countries, POSist started in January 2012 & in six years it became the largest POS company in India.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the event:

• Sales is the easiest task of the world if you know exactly who to hit — Figuring out the target is important
• Always focus on your main strategy as it’s easy to get side tracked when your customers are trying to suggest ways on how to improve or add-on in your product
• As a sales person having high optimism for closing leads is a drawback

POSist continuously realised that they had to narrow down their strategies in order to focus on their main business idea.

“ It takes a lot to remain focused.” — Ashish Tulsian

For the first two years, POSist was struggling with the fine dining sector. Then, they realised that there was some issue in the communication due to which deals weren’t closing with the restaurant owners. So they decided to focus on the QSR (Quick Restaurant Service) sector for a while as the sales in that sector were booming.

After 2 years of focussing on the QSR sector, they realised why the communication which worked brilliantly for the QSR couldn’t work the same way for the fine dining and devised a different communication altogether for the fine dining which then became a hit in that space.

For example: The problem of a food outlet would be very different than the problem of a restaurant having multiple chains. For the food outlet it could be the problem of theft and for the restaurant chain it could be managing all the outlets at once. So the communication about the products will have to be very different in both the cases.

You need to play the ball as per the customer!

Segmenting the Customer Right

• You need to segment your customers really well
• The right segmentation of your customers can solve 95% of your problems
• Don’t waste your time on things which are not working. First figure out what is working
• Design your communication & create customer personas around it

POSist built 81 different personas of its customers. This helped them in coming up with 10–12 types of different email communications around it.

“If you can crack the science of who you have an automatic no for, you’ve figured out your segments.”

Importance of Trade shows for B2B Model

Trade shows could be a great way to boost your sales. But you must understand that they don’t work in the short run. It’s a long term process.

Pre Exhibition Research

Researching about an exhibition is really important.

• Talk to the exhibitor
• Make a list of the other exhibitors coming for the event
• Do your secondary research well
• Figure out your break even point and make all efforts to achieve it

Getting it right depends on setting it right first!

In the initial years, when Posist exhibited at exhibitions, they did not get too many sales from the events. But by making their approach very pin-pointed and doing all the necessary research beforehand, they’ve been able to turn it around for themselves.

Some of the practises they follow at exhibitions:

• When a person approaches their stall, the first question they ask is if they are a restaurant/ food joint owner
• If not, they don’t even entertain that person
• As soon as they get the visiting cards of their potential customers, they feed it in their system along with notes of what the response was from the other end
• They categorise them into the different personas. And accordingly they decide which sales representative will take it ahead and what communication will be used
• So by the next day when they’re in office, they have a list of which sales person will be targeting which customer

Sales Team at Posist

Their sales team is comprised of people who can handle different customer personas. So when they get a lead, they have a qualification procedure through which they decide if the lead can be a potential customer or not. If not, they drop it for the time being.

At Posist they believe — Don’t waste your time on things which are not working: First figure out what’s working

When the qualification is done, based on the persona of the customer, the lead is assigned to the sales guy who can handle it.

Also, it was amazing to know from Ashish Tulsian that at POSist if a deal requires more than one person to close it, they all work in a team. If 3 people make efforts in closing a deal then all the 3 share the sales incentive.

From the event!!

Hope you liked reading this! Do share your comments below.

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