The Hindu Business Line : Get ready for silent selling

Selling is on the move, it seems. Everybody is on the move. More so now than in the past. There is very little time during the working weekday for anybody to think of a really sedentary life. The day starts in a rush. Breakfast is to be grabbed on the way. There is a café down the corner that has readymade sandwiches for you to grab at as you take your car out of the garage. There is coffee to go as well. You can pick it up at your corner petrol bunk. It's hot, comes in a neat take-away tumbler and has a thoughtful lip-tip that will not let you scald your tongue!

You carry a mobile on the go. All your transactions happen on it. The US prediction is that by 2006, 74 per cent of mobile users will be mobile Internet users as well. And with the Internet comes every conceivable opportunity of working, entertaining and educating you. Again on the go! Everything you do, every breath you take, and every step you take, will be on the go.

The on-the-go culture is here! Almost! In India as well! Particularly so in the large metropolises that clutter our landscape.

Products, services and their peddlers will therefore have to morph their offerings to cater to the mobile needs of the mobile consumer. Take-away petrol cans of 20 litres sold out of bunks to avoid the long waiting time at these retail points, take-away things to eat, to drink, even take-away things to defecate in (as Japan has actually offered in its super-markets; mobile toilets to bide your time through all those traffic jams)! The take-away culture is here!

Manufacturers and entrepreneurs behind products and services in India, particularly in urban India, need to focus keenly on the new need of a whole lot of people who will demandproducts and services that offer velocity and speed. A burger that will be hot and ready to take-away in a minute, piping hot biryani available as a take-away from a drive-in point, packaged fruits, drinks and ready snacks that can be grabbed by people in cars and on scooters at street-corners, are going to be offerings that will hold relevance to a whole bunch of people. They will be small in number in the beginning. However, their numbers will grow.

The impatient consumer on the go will have a short span of attention on things that he grabs at the junction-points of his busy life. His demand is for high quality at a geographical point of convenience. The sandwich-wallah, the café, the bookstore and retailing enterprises of the kind need to be at arms length of his desire. If the quality on offer for his brief stint at your retail-point is up to expectation, his franchise will return. Just as long as you keep offering a range of offerings that do not cause that flavour-fatigue knocking off his custom, you have a lifetime value of sandwich buys in your pocket! Don't forget, this could run into thousands of rupees of business in the long-term!

Plan then for this customer on the go. The guys out there in the Indian marketplace are looking for that quick-grab on-the-go product to accompany them in their busy lives. The clever marketer will address this need and brand it as well. The clever salesman will sell it in his own style.

The salesman of today in the `on-the-go' market will need to be a salesman who is out there at the right place at the right time. A salesman who is going to distinguish his offerings more in terms of visual merchandising ability rather than on the merit of the sales spiel he will let loose on the customer. Remember, the customer has no time to listen. He will just look, assess in those nano-seconds it takes for the mind to process visual information vis-à-vis need, want and desire, and pick the product or service he wants to franchise.

This is a quick-generation which has no time to stand and stare. No time for the sales banter. The new era salesman in these markets needs to customise sales offerings, completely basing the selling strategy on the two counts of location and visual appeal through merchandising and point-of-purchase material. Silent selling then!

If you ask me, this trend is already alive in the large metropolises of India. Particularly in Mumbai, where grabbing a sandwich, a vadaa-pau and possibly a sachet of neera, is a culture all of its own. Only this time round, the market is skewed towards the yuppie of Corporate India. This guy will not be seen dead grabbing a vadaa-pau from an unbranded joint round the corner.

Silent selling with its appeal tags of visual merchandising appeal, hygiene, convenience and point of purchase glare is here to stay. The salesman needs to redefine his abilities, and get silent for a change in these kinds of markets.

And that's a difficult one!

(The author is a business strategy consultant and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc. He invites questions on sales and distribution which he will answer in his column.)

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