 Namaskar. I am Professor Devade Purkayastha from IIT Bombay. Welcome to my course, Business Fundamental for Entrepreneurs Part 2, External Operations. This is the sixth module in the third week of the course. And this is about sales and selling, B2B sales, B2C sales. But before I get into the module itself, let me very quickly recap the course flow. So I started in the first week with how you can study, research, understand the market, trends, technology, customers, competitors, players, products, etc. Then I talked about how you can study your customers, customer segments and create great customer value propositions. In the second week, I talked about value-based marketing. How do you create value for yourself? How do you create value for the customer? How do you deliver value? How do you communicate value? We talked about branding and advertising and positioning, etc. With that, we now come to the art and science of selling. Sales is all about people. How do you interact with people? People in companies that you want to sell to or crores and millions of individual consumers, farmers, poor people, rich people, old people, young people, students. How do you interact with them? How do you get a pulse of them? How do you sell them your value proposition? So we'll talk about that. We'll also give you a glimpse of sales force automation, the more traditional ones, but also the emerging artificial intelligence tools. And then we'll talk about sales skills because sales can be a very rewarding career because all companies, all businesses need salespeople. So with that, let's get started. Let's talk briefly about the sales process. And as you can see on the screen, there is pre-sales, then the sale itself, then post-sales because you can't just stop by selling and then resale because if you have sold once to a customer, you'd like to sell again. And it's always easier to sell to an existing customer a new product or a new solution that you have versus getting a new customer. So let's start with pre-sales. What is pre-sales? Pre-sales is about identifying your customers, generating leads. Leads are potential customers. So the companies and the people who can potentially buy your product. So where are they? They're across India. They may be across the world. So how do you identify them? That's pre-sales. As you move from pre-sales and identifying your customers, you start understanding their problems and then you start understanding what kind of value proposition can you sell to them. That takes you into the sales process, which is where you start talking to them, writing to them, giving them a sales pitch, etc. And then leading them to placing the order so they buy your product, you collect the money and the sales process ends. But then you get into post-sales because if you buy, let's say, a phone or a TV or a washing machine, your customer may need after-sales service. So that's post-sales. Also you need to build loyalty and advocacy. That's also post-sales. And finally, resale. If a customer has bought product one from your company and you have a product two, how can you make the product one customer also buy your product number two? That's resales. So let's deep dive and let's start with the B2C, which means selling to individual consumers and customers. So there are many approaches to B2C and B2B selling. The one I'm going to talk about is called the funnel approach. What it basically means is that you go through consumer step-by-step till they buy your product. So it starts with building awareness. So you may be targeting 1 crore or 10 million farmers, 1 crore or 10 million students, 20 crore or 200 million women, 5 crores or 50 million old people or students. So first you have to build awareness. They're not aware of your product. So you have to build the awareness. So that's step one. So build your awareness, let's say, with 1 million people. Next is once they're aware, you have to give them enough information so they can decide whether to buy your product or not buy your product or whether to buy your product or someone else's product. And then you have to keep nudging them because not everybody will be interested. So you have to keep nudging them towards your value proposition and how it is better than anybody else's. I'll show some examples in a while. And then when a few, let's say you start with a million who have become aware of your product, I'll show you how, maybe 50% of that, half a million, one more information. You have to give them more information. Maybe 100,000, which means 10%, now want to buy your product. So you have to help them buy the product. Maybe 50,000 actually want and have decided to buy your product and they buy the product. They place an order on you. And then maybe once they place the order, you have to deliver the product to them or install them or service them. And if it's a software, you have to help them download it. So that's kind of the funnel. You start with a million on the top, but maybe only 10,000 buys to whom you have to deliver. So that's the step-by-step funnel approach. Let's look at some examples. How do you build awareness? The first step in the funnel. You can build awareness in many different ways. Today with social media, you could build awareness through a Facebook channel. And this is an example of a Coca-Cola Facebook page. You could do Instagram. You could do it on LinkedIn. So building awareness. All of you, especially those who are younger, will probably have an Instagram account. And if you look at what's in the screen, you can find that that's the Instagram account of Samsung. The earlier one was a Facebook account of Coca-Cola. This is for Samsung. And you can make them aware of your product. You could also build awareness through your portal. So if you look at it, this is again a Microsoft page to build awareness. Remember, awareness is still not too much of information. It's just awareness of your brand or your overall product. Recently, WhatsApp has become WhatsApp for business, has become a good and important channel. And many of you will be getting WhatsApp messages from businesses. So you can also build awareness by pumping out WhatsApp messages. Facebook, Instagram, Internet, WhatsApp. Those are digital. You could also build awareness on television. So if you're watching a cricket match, IPL or World Cup, or a cereal, Hindi cereal, Bengali cereal, in any of the channels that you see on the screen, there'll be television advertising. And it's building awareness. So you can do television advertising. You could also advertise on the newspaper. So if you open any of the newspaper, and you can see an example here, you'll find lots of small, small ads. And big brands will have big ads. But you could also advertise and build awareness through the newspaper, classifieds, which is the advertisement page of newspaper. You could build awareness through outdoor media. In this case, a holding, a billboard. So if you look at that, that's a McDonald's. Billboards, anybody who's driving past can look at it and say, oh, there's McDonald's and there is something that I can eat, which is called a burger. So you can do it on digital. You can do it on television. You could do it on print. And you can do it on outdoor advertising. When you walk into a supermarket, like Star Bazaar or Demat, you'll probably see pamphlets and posters. And they also build awareness. Because as soon as you enter the supermarket, you'll get a pamphlet and you become aware of the brands. Now let's look at the next step of the funnel. I've become aware and I'm interested. So I need some more information to decide. So here's an example of a mobile phone. You will not buy a mobile phone just because you're aware. There's so many phones, Samsung, Apple, OnePlus, Vivo, OPPO. All these phones are there. So you'd like to spend a lot of time actually deciding based on information that you collect on the phone. Or if you're buying a car, or you're buying a scooter, or a washing machine, or fridge, you will need more information. So build awareness. Now you have to provide information. How do you provide information? One of the ways that you can see is put it up on the web page. Create a web page and put it up there just like you see a Samsung web page. And you can see all the specifications, comparison. Similarly, you can also go to an e-commerce site. And you can compare. And you get more information. If you're booking a flight ticket in Make My Trip or Expedia or Clear Trip, you can compare prices and flight timings. If you want to book a restaurant, you can go to a restaurant booking site. Or if you want to order food, you can go to Sugey as a matter of some of the sites. If you want to go for a movie, you can go to Book My Show. And basically, you're getting more information. So become aware. Now you need more information to decide what to buy. So that's one way to provide information. So I talked about cars. So if you go to Toyota Car Page, you'll find that all the specifications, length, breadth, width, height, engine, horsepower, everything is there. And you can decide. And you'll probably spend a lot of time seeking information. And the more expensive the product, the more information you need to decide. Once you have provided information, remember the funnel. You build awareness. You provide information. Then you have to create intent. How do you create intent? You create an excitement. Because I may want to buy, but I may not be ready to buy now. I may want to buy one month later, two months later. We'll buy sometime. But you have to create that excitement. And one way to create intent to buy now quickly is events that you can do physically in a physical channel. Or you can do it on the internet as you can see. So you can do a promotion. In this case, Flipkart, a billion-dollar days. Or you can go to Amazon at Diwali Damaka. Or you can go to a mall at Diwali event. So you're now creating an intent to buy now. So again, this is an example of offers on top brands. Now I've created the awareness. You have provided the information. You have created the excitement and the intent. Now you have to assist the actual purchase. Because some products like a biscuit packet may be very easy to buy. You look at all the biscuit packets. And you choose one, a sweet one, a salt one, a big packet, a small packet. And you can very quickly decide which biscuit packet to buy. But if you're buying a more expensive product, an electronic item, a phone, a headphone, a headset, a cable, a wire, you have become aware. You've got the information. You've got the intent. I want to buy it now. You may still need some purchase assistance to actually place the order. And here's an example of physical channel in an electronic store where the people who are standing there as you walk in, they will assist you to place the order. They'll give you a demo. They will answer your questions. They will say, OK, do you need an EMI? Do you have to pay now? Can you pay later? Can you pay in installments? Is there a credit scheme? What is the interest rate on that credit scheme? And so on. So this is how you assist the actual purchase order. Then there is also payment. If you're paying cash, it's easy. But mostly today, many of us do not use cash. So you then have to assist the purchase in terms of paying up for the product. So is it UPI? Is it credit card? Is it rupee? Is it GPAY? Is it Amazon? Is it contactless? That's also purchase assistance, where now we have assisted in placing the order and making the payment. So that's an idea of the sales process. Pre-sales, sales, post-sales, resale. We'll come back to post-sale and resale later on, but so far we have talked about pre-sales and sales in the context of B2C, which means selling to a lot of consumers like you and me. I'd like to pause here, take out your course journal and make a few notes on what you have learned and think about some of the questions that I put on the screen. Think of when someone sold you a product. As I said, it could be a laptop, a school bag, a dress, a refrigerator, a pen, whatever. It could be a service that you bought, some app, paid for app. Reflect on the process, reflect on what the salespeople are doing. How did he or she approach you electronically, physically, website, social media, store? How are you approached? What process did he or she follow to sell to you? How did he make you aware? How did he or she give you more information? Did he or she give you a booklet? Did he or she give you a demonstration? And then, how did he assist your purchase? Did he talk to you in the store? Was there a chat? And then think about did you buy or did you not buy? And if you bought, why did you buy that product at that time from that channel? And if you did not buy, chances are you'd have bought one and not bought many others, because you looked at many and bought only one. So if you did not buy all the rest, why did you not buy? What was missing? You're not aware? Was it that you're not aware? Was it that you did not get information? Was it that you're not assisted when you wanted to purchase? Was it that you placed an order and you did not get delivery or you got a bad delivery? So think about the process because as you think about it you learn and write it down and after the course you can look back on your course journal and think about what you have learned.