Taking care of business – the Bikas way
“Saab, main Bikas bol raha hoon.” That’s the way every call from Bikas starts. Bikas is a carpenter we’ve used a few times – too many times! – at home. Every few weeks, he’ll call just to say hello (he says) and, in the conversation, figures out if we have work for him. He does not push me, he does not demand things – he just says hello, asks about everyone at home (“Memsaab” is important) and then waits expectantly. The model works – he picks up every bit of carpentry work we may have at home. He’s done this for two years now, religiously and effectively. And because he’s worked with us so many times, our ability to negotiate has weakened to a point where we grudgingly agree to pretty much whatever numbers he throws at us. To be fair, too, we don’t argue because we know he’s around – that, if something fails, he’ll fix it the next time he comes around. So, by ensuring that he calls me regularly, he’s not only picked up a lot work, he’s also established a pricing pattern that includes a premium. That’s the power of regular customer contact – more work at better prices.
Bikas does this well because he’s identified a set of about 20 customers and he carries their contact info in a little black book. He also remembers the work that he did in the past – for the most part! How would you do this if you have 300 contacts in 150 companies to deal with? How can you keep track of what you said to whom and when, so you can sound knowledgeable and connected when you call someone you’ve not talked to in weeks? Impel gives you a number of ways to do that, including account and contact classification, periodic activity reminders and opportunity tracking with pricing. The Activity Plan mechanism, though, takes this issue from art to science. At the end of every month, you can plan your activities for the next month by choosing whom you will call on what day. You can plan travel around those days, making sure you visit accounts in a specific city or region when you’re there. And, using relevant activity results, you can plan the appropriate combination of calls to new prospects, to existing customers, for cold calls, to dealers, whatever. Once you plan those activities, they’ll pop up periodically with reminders, so you can make your own “Saab, main ” calls. When you’re talking to a prospect, you can click through your past activities to recall everything that you (or someone else) talked to him/her about. Most importantly, you can go back and update completed calls, as also add calls that you made that were not planned. Periodically, you can go back and review the effectiveness of your planning process, so there’s more predictability in your activities, leading to more predictability in your achievements. Whether you have a hundred accounts or thousands, you can use Activity Planning in Impel to work your contacts periodically, making sure you get the same advantages that Bikas does – more deals, better pricing. Except, you get it with hundreds of customers and prospects. And you get a mechanism that you can analyze, improve and expand.
As for me, I’m looking forward to Bikas’ business growing to a size where he needs Impel. Then, I can call him to say “Saab, main Kishore bol raha hoon…”
