Prakash Batna Show (PBS)

Greetings and a warm welcome to the Prakash Batna Show! I'm your host, Prakash Batna, and our mission is to transform sales and selling into an enjoyable and seamless experience.

Greetings, and a warm welcome to the Prakash Batna Show! I am your host, Prakash Batna, and our mission is to make sales and selling an enjoyable and seamless experience. We bring you the most brilliant minds and industry experts who have traversed the sales landscape and are now here to share their incredible journeys, success frameworks, invaluable experiences, unique perspectives, and profound learnings. Join us as we dive into the world of sales, uncovering the secrets to staying ahead in the game and achieving extraordinary success. Get ready to be inspired and empowered to elevate your sales prowess to new heights!

I use lot of elements in my live sessions to keep the audience hooked for anywhere between 60 mins to 6 hours, and believe me doing this day in and out is not an easy task.

After 500 hours of live sessions, 10,000+ trained professionals and delivering 300 hours of content I have some understanding on how this works and what tools you can try to do the same. Im laying out this for you to try this in your next session.

The typical challenges in the online sessions that one come across:

o Participants are less responsive during the online sessions

o Have a short attention span and are easily distracted by things around them

o Low engagement and response rate

These are some of the challenges faced by all during the online sessions. Let me share you tips to engage with the audience.

You should set expectations at the start of your session so that all participants know what will be happening. You should explain what you’re going to be doing and what the protocol will be (cameras on/off, muted/unmuted). As a general rule, ‘cameras-on’ will make people feel more present and involved (but be understanding that there are certain situations in which cameras can’t be turned on). Tell everyone that yours will be an interactive class and explain how you will be asking people to participate.

Many a times participants log in with their device names and it becomes difficult to communicate. Request the participant to change it to their First name and Last name and address each participant by their name

You are doing this for them. Hence everything need to be centered around them. Monologues are a strict No. This is a live session and hence interaction, participation is the key to the success of the live session

Comments made in chat, verbal dialogues need to be listened and understood. Ensuring that you understand and value every comment that is shared will encourage more participants to join and take part. A win-win

Ask questions regularly to see how much your audience is in sync with you. Involve them, check their understanding, wait for them to respond, listen to their answers. The whole objective is to keep them engaged and busy throughout the session.

Always remember if you do not enjoy, are excited, are enthusiastic then why will the audience will be. You should enjoy the overall experience throughout and only then the audience will connect with you at a deeper level.

These 6 points are the softer and finer aspects of engaging the audience during live sessions. Use them and try doing this in your next session for a greater positive experience and impact.

In the next section we will see the technical aspects of engaging the audience which includes the top 5 tools that can be used to make your session more meaningful, fun, interactive and engaging.

And that’s it for today. Do keep listening to my sales and selling podcast  and Don’t forget to follow, like hisales consulting on the Linkedin and FB platform. Also check out my website www.hisales.in for free resources and blogs.

Lastly, let me know what you think and I greatly appreciate it. Myself Prakash Batna reminding you again “ Selling is Fun, When you know How”. Take Care

F=A+R - Freedom comes with Accountability and Responsibility.

Freedom with no responsibility, accountability and the professional, team, Organisation becomes directionless and haywire.

Successful companies and sales leaders grant certain degree of freedom–providing that the salespeople demonstrate a corresponding degree of responsibility and accountability along with it.

E+T = F Trust is certainly part of freedom, too. Employers are only going to grant freedom in any degree to salespeople if they can be trusted. No salesperson will last long if they are collecting a base salary and spending their days on the beach making fake calls.

Experience precedes Trust. Trust is developed by the sales leader only when the experience dealing with the salesperson is positive, credible and consistent.

So the hierarchy is this –

E+T = F = A+R

Positive experience, creates Trust and comes Freedom. However Freedom comes with Accountability and Responsibility

Take too much freedom away, and the sales team revolts.

Give too much freedom, and you’ll lose potential sales revenue.

A Sales leader, does not have the luxury of spending hours in training classes, learning how to walk the freedom line.

Today, I’ll give you a brief on how to identify team members who deserve freedom, and those who aren’t yet ready for it.

The New Hire

This one’s pretty easy to judge: Track every new hire’s activity level and make sure the new employee has sufficient daily activity to meet sales goals—until they prove themselves. Only then should you give a little freedom.

The Seasoned Salesperson

If you have a team member who’s been around the block and outperforms everyone else, don’t micromanage. You’ll risk alienating someone who’s hitting sales goals time and time again. In this case, freedom should be freely given.

The In-Between

For everyone else, follow this rule: The less you’re selling, the less freedom you get. But if you’ve never before tracked a salesperson’s activity and you start, your team will probably look at you as a micromanager.

Measuring a Salesperson’s Freedom Potential

The previous point brings us back to the importance of tracking activity. You should justify the need to track sales activity for every person on your team because it gives you the insight you need to gauge sales objectives–before it’s too late.

Let’s put it another way: Tracking and not micromanaging helps your salespeople perform better, and it helps the company increase revenue. That’s a win-win for everyone.

Track the prospects, not necessarily the salespeople. If you track where prospects are in the sales cycle, and who’s been contacted, you take the direct focus off of salespeople. That way, you can present a tracking report covering untouched prospects in a positive way, and help the salesperson see the untapped potential he should target.

And that’s it for today. Don’t take your freedom lightly and enjoy this independence day.

Do keep listening to my sales and selling podcast and Don’t forget to follow, like Hisales consulting on the LinkedIn and FB platform. Also check out my website www.hisales.in for free resources and blogs.

Lastly, let me know what you think and I greatly appreciate it. Myself Prakash Batna reminding you again “Selling is Fun, when you know How”. Take Care

One of the best sales tactics is learning how to say “no.” That sounds counterintuitive, right? Well, it isn’t.

When it comes to sales, if you’re the one selling, your goal is to bring in revenue. But your customer has a different goal: to pay as little as they can and get as much as possible.

What I mean is You & the customer are trying to maximise the gains and minimise losses. Not in literal sense though.

The customers I’m talking about are the ones who ask for more and more – often after a contract is signed and deal is closed – and expect additional incentives, discounts, rebates etc for no additional business or cost. Those are the customers you have to learn to say “no” to.

The word “no” has the power to make your business more desirable to potential clients, weed out people you don’t want to work with and, most importantly, increase your bottom line. “Power of saying NO”, the most important tool we all salespeople and business owners possess. Many a times we do not realize the importance of these two letters.

To clarify, let me share a story with you. When we first started our consulting We wanted to get money coming in and so we were afraid of saying no.

What did that lead to? A few bad deals. By being so willing to say yes we were ground down on price and we allowed for unreasonable scope of work with couple of clients.

On one deal it cost us significant chunk of money and time over few months. The client had good manufacturing, production and other capabilities but on the sales aspect everything was missing right from team to systems and process to a well defined sales ecosystem. Everything was adhoc, forecasting was a challenge, absence of sales pipeline and a sales leader to drive the the bare bones team. Further the CEO believed there was no challenge and his expectations were not in sync with reality. We still took up the project for the money part and saying NO was not hard wired in us. In doing so we set the tone for the ongoing relationship i.e. we give and you take. It was ok initially but later on it caused uncontrollable scope-creep and copious hours of non-billable work which was sending us towards the hazardous rocks of insolvency and not giving attention and time to right customers.

If you start from yes you might have just given away time or money and every time you come to negotiate with that same prospect they’ll expect that same starting place, and believe me they won’t thank you for it and will push further. Hold the line and say no you’ll be much better off.

This power is often used casually, cautiously, out of habit and in many other ways without understanding the implications on the final outcome.

Today, saying no is one such strategy at Hisales. That is, saying no to the wrong kind of clients. Over the years I discovered that accepting the wrong business/clients or customers saps not only time and energy but profits, too. I also learned that saying yes to the wrong business slowly but surely kills morale. Employees become exhausted and confused; very talented people leave. Such damaging effects seem obvious now, but again, like virtually every entrepreneurial venture, we had to learn about them the hard way.

Use the Power of NO wisely and realise the immense benefits that comes with it.

In sales we create our own rules, frameworks, process, strategies and tools which works in our favor and discard those which do not fit the bill.

Similarly I have created my own frameworks, rules and tools basis the experience I have gained over the years working across companies and industries. One such rule I follow is the - 1-2-4 Rule in sales and selling. This is applicable to any salesperson.

All the problems he told me was because the day planning was not tight and measurable, the calls were random and adhoc with no call blocks which hindered in the pipeline creation process and meetings were not set dedicatedly to followup on calls which resulted in lesser conversions.

I suggested him the 1-2-4 rule which goes like this:

1 stands for ONE HOUR –

Everyday first thing in the morning - focus on PREPARATION and first thing to do is plan for the day

· Clients to call

· Proposals to send

· Followup calls

· Reporting work

· Meetings plan

· Route plan and so on

I believe that if you don’t plan your day, then someone else will and this is not advisable at all.

Once the planning is done go to 2

How to call block:

· Set an appointment with self using a google calendar for these 2 hours

· Switch off social media notifications, news alerts, watsapp messages etc which ever acts as a distraction

· Sit comfortably in a place where you will not be disturbed

· Let your colleagues, superiors know that you should not be disturbed in these 2 hours

Do this and see the difference in the productivity and efficiency

Last but not the least, the most important 4

If all the planning is done, calls are made and meetings are set then it needs to be followed up with meeting people demonstrating the value proposition and delivering solutions

1 hour - preparation

2 hours - Calling and building pipeline

4 hours - Meeting people, demonstrating value and networking

And that’s it for today. Do keep listening to my sales and selling podcast and Don’t forget to follow, like Hisales consulting on the LinkedIn and FB platform. Also check out my website www.hisales.in for free resources and blogs.

Lastly, let me know what you think and I greatly appreciate it. Myself Prakash Batna reminding you again “Selling is Fun, when you know How”. Take Care

Hello and Welcome to Hisales consulting podcast. I’m your host Prakash Batna, and I believe in the philosophy - Selling is Fun, When you know how.

As a salesperson, failure is inevitable. You will fail, repeatedly, every single day. That certainly doesn’t mean that all failures are of equal significance. when a sales call ends in denial, most salesperson simply proceed to the next call. After all, the only thing one stands to lose from such a seemingly inconsequential failure is time.

Unfortunately, those who don’t analyze these little failures have forgotten the old adage, “time is money.” These small, common, failures combine into significant costs

“Time is Money” and this is so true in #sales.

Money can be earned, Time Can’t.

We often like to pretend we have an unlimited supply of time, but unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Every minute spent failing is a minute not spent succeeding.

The key to finding the value of your time lies in finding the difference between what you gained from failure and what you would have gained had you succeeded. For example, suppose a thirty-minute sales pitch wins over potential clients and your business earns 100,000. Whenever your sales pitch is rejected, you have lost more than just thirty minutes of your time. You’ve also lost the opportunity to earn that extra 100,000.

Also when we look at our monthly or yearly targets we feel we have lot of time to achieve the same, but you know that is not true. After you account for the holidays, vacation, Leaves, meetings, travels, time wasters you end up with less selling time and still far away from your numbers.

We all have 24 hours with us and a successful person knows how to use time to his advantage and make it work for him.

Wasting time is not an option. Staying focused on the most important things always must be the goal of the day! But it's not easy. As a salesperson, you must keep a lookout for these 5 time wasters

· Travelling for the sake of travelling

· Too much time in reporting

· Excessive documentation

· Doing everyone else’s job

· Spending too much time in planning and detailing

I have no doubt that Time and Timing is very important in sales, in personal and professional lives as well.

And that’s it for today. Do keep listening to my sales and selling podcast and Don’t forget to follow, like hisales consulting on the Linkedin and FB platform. Also check out my website www.hisales.in for free resources and blogs.

Lastly, let me know what you think and I greatly appreciate it. Thank you.