India China Relations Changing Landscape

The changing landscape of India China relations.

Image Credit - Diplomatist

Weekend Reading

 From 7 Rules of Power: Surprising — but True — Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career. His seven rules are: 

• get out of your own way — that is, 
• speak with confidence and do not undersell yourself, 
• break the rules — do the unexpected, 
• show up in powerful fashion — with conscious body language and actual language, 
• create a powerful brand, network relentlessly, 
• use your power — do not be afraid to wield power once you have it, 
• and finally, remember that “success excuses (almost) everything” — the powerful attract and retain support.” 

 

Why Buyers chose your Customer 

When buyers were asked to select their top 5 reasons for choosing the winning vendor over other vendors they considered, the top response was that the winner demonstrated a stronger knowledge of the buyer’s company and its needs (68%). (In fact, lack of knowledge of a company and its needs has separately been cited by buyers as their top deal-killer.) 

Focus on Outcomes 

Growing faster than the market - what questions the C-Suite Should ask 

Where is my growth going to come from? 

How do I grow now and tomorrow? 

How do I set up my growth engine? 

17 Common Virtual Selling Mistakes to Avoid

Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading: 

How to kickstart and scale a consumer business: 

 Here’s what’s in store: Step 1: INSIGHT: Come up with your idea ← This post Step 2: AUDIENCE: Identify your super-specific who Step 3: HOOK: Craft your pitch Step 4: REACH: Find your early adopters by doing things that don’t scale Step 5: RETAIN: Iterate until enough people stick around Step 6: SCALE: Build your growth engine

 
Marc Andersen on Technology and Web3, Crypto 

I think this is a foundational technology change, a new architecture for building an entirely new generation of computing systems. We have become convinced that Web3/blockchain/crypto is foundational. It’s a big hill. It’s as foundational an architecture shift as the ones from mainframes to PCs, from PCs to web, from web to mobile, or from traditional software to AI. It’s a fundamental shift and building this out is a 25- to 30-year process.

 
How Companies can build In-House Consulting 

“Management consulting is expensive. The median billing range for India-bred consulting firms and the Big Four is 0.7-1 million per consultant-month. For international firms like Accenture, this range can be 1.5-2 million. For MBB (McKinsey, BCG, Bain,) the range is 2.5 million plus, and can cross 5 million per consultant-month (Indian arms of MNCs often pay global rates.) This translates to gross margins of more than 50%. Given this increasing need for consulting services and the high costs, many companies attempt to build consulting teams in-house. At its core, management consulting requires three things: One, top talent. Two, access to information sources such as research reports and expert networks (e.g., GLG—Gerson Lehrman Group.) Three, the institutional knowledge on domains and problem-solving methods.”

 
Align Sales and Marketing for Revenue Growth 

Strategy Alignment: Both Marketing and Sales functions must dramatically change their revenue strategies to better align with the new buyer. The Marketing strategy of brand awareness and demand generation, and Sales strategy of opportunity management and closing, is no longer adequate. Marketing strategies and Sales strategies must be integrated into a common, comprehensive revenue strategy that focuses on shortening the entire buyer journey, both online and offline. 

Process Alignment: Both Marketing and Sales groups must dramatically change their revenue processes to better align with the empowered buyer team. The marketing process (aka funnel) and the sales process (aka pipeline) no longer aligns with the customer’s purchasing process. The separate Marketing processes and Sales processes must be integrated into a common comprehensive revenue process that focuses on moving every buyer team member through each stage of their purchasing process resulting in a decision to purchase. 

Execution Alignment & Empowered Collaboration: Both Marketing specialists and Sales specialists must dramatically change how they design and execute revenue campaigns. They must leverage their unique professional skills, experience, and technologies to collaborate on designing and executing an integrated marketing and sales campaigns that accelerate the buyer to the next stage of their purchasing process.

 
What’s Standing in the Way of B2B Companies Providing A Great Customer Experience?

Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus - Attractive and Action Oriented Seller and Buyer

Persona Mapping with Elements - Buyer and Seller 

In the world of business-to-business (B2B) sales, the buyer and seller relationship plays a significant role in winning or losing a transaction. Creating and nurturing these relationships across multiple stakeholders is a challenging, lengthy, and time-consuming process.
One of the critical activities and constituents of a sales plan is to build the buyer's stakeholder persona that will assist in the relationship-building process. Mapping of these stakeholder personas reveals the type of levers that can be used to develop and nurture long-term relationships with the intent of winning and expanding the sales pipeline. Without the intelligence of the buyer's persona, the sales execution effort will be challenging and profoundly inefficient and ineffective.

 
Besides, it addresses the risk of losing a sales representative because by capturing and documenting the buyers' persona, you can ensure that gathered intelligence and levers applied in building relationships and influencing negotiations are not lost with a change in guard at the sellers' end. 

The framework for creating and destroying five elements is applied to overcome the challenging task of mapping and building the persona. The inherent attributes of each element are used to map and develop the personality of each stakeholder at the buyer's and seller's end in different scenarios. 

Let us explore how these elemental attributes assist in building persona maps.

Fire means Action and Excitement

 

Fire signifies purity and divinity. It comprises bright and vibrant colours like red and orange. Similarly, natives with prominent fire element are ethical and straight shooters. Diplomacy is their weakest link; however, they are full of energy and zeal.

 
Fire signifies charisma and brilliance, and it removes the darkness by brightening our surroundings. Similarly, these natives attract others and enlighten them with their brilliance and action. They are persuasive and convince others easily with their thoughts and vision. These natives love to have an audience, like how Fire brings people together during the evenings in winter. For instance, in aboriginal culture, a Sacred Fire is lit before a gathering; similarly, the Holy Fire is lit for a Hindu marriage ceremony. In sales, these natives attract buyers with their charisma and energy. They prefer to use an audience to position their offering.

 

Fire rules the heart, small intestine, and pericardium. The key function of these organs is to regulate the internal body temperature, and together these organs are known as triple heater or burner. The heart is the source of expression, joy, and excitement, and it is reflected in these natives' persona. They are expressive, joyful, and enthusiastic. Their eyes are bright with a shining sparkle in them. As Fire shows us the path in darkness, similarly fiery natives bright eyes become the vehicle to see this world and remove the darkness of ignorance.

 
Fire needs fresh Air (agile) as fuel to ignite or spread. It is extinguished when the air supply has ceased. Similarly, prominent fiery natives are constantly looking for new experiences. They are always exploring to meet and mingle with different types of people. Meeting people or trying new things keeps them energetic. Fiery natives need a constant feed of new challenges in life to keep them going, or else they stagnate and become hopeless.

In sales, a fiery seller will reach out to multiple stakeholders within an organisation to position an offering. Since Fire moves quickly and rises upwards only, these sellers' inherent approach is top-down because they prefer to close a deal quickly. They don't have the appetite to build consensus from the bottom up. These natives use their charisma and data insights to impress upon sponsors and executives to position their offerings and let them cascade to their respective stakeholders. In short fiery sellers like the spotlight, visibility, and engagement at the top serves that intent.

In everyday industrial life, Fire is sharp and is used for cutting or moulding glass or metal to give it a new shape or meaning. Similarly, in sales, these natives share new insights to enlighten others and build their arguments by slicing and dicing the data. A Fiery buyer or seller will underpin their business case or position an offering using data and analytics. Selling to a fiery buyer means you need to develop new data-centric insights, else there is likely to be no mindshare or further engagement.

In Nature, Fire is bold, and during high wind, it can be ferocious. It burns everything in its path, and it's not scared or worried about any consequences. Therefore, these natives are bold, adventurous (risk-takers), and impulsive. They are prone to making mistakes because they often don't anticipate the aftereffects before starting any activity.

Fire's inherent energy is to rise in the upward direction and move quickly. Therefore, these natives are swift movers and are always aiming for higher positions or growth in life. Their desire to win in life is high. Consequently, they put their heart and soul into every task assigned to them.

 
Fire represents heat, which implies that these natives are anger prone. They lose their cool quickly and panic under pressure because losing or finger-pointing in life is something they can't comprehend. It's advisable not to pick fights with these natives because they retaliate or rebel strongly without thinking of any potential consequences. In sales, their desire to win and risk appetite is high because not only do they want to proliferate, but it's the feeling of accomplishment and winning which keeps their spirits alight. Having said that, when a deal is lost, these natives lose their cool quickly and can become hopeless.

Fire represents the future, and it controls the firing of neurons in the brain. These neurons trigger new thoughts and the ability to think ahead in fiery individuals. These natives are visionary because they are hungry, courageous, and can think ahead to the future. Fiery sellers are regarded as rainmakers in sales because inherently, they are hunters, bold and action-oriented. They ensure that the organisation's top line is in black. In terms of potential deal duration, they prefer short term deals because they can't sustain their enthusiasm and energy levels for a longer duration. Multi-year deals with a longer sales cycle are best suited for an earthly seller.

Fire and Water cannot be together because Water extinguishes Fire and becomes a barrier between the Fire and its fuel (Air). Similarly, in price negotiations, a prominent watery buyer cherishes price peddling, whereas a fiery buyer struggles with price negotiations' back and forth nature. They lack patience like a watery buyer and often let others talk on dollars or end up with an overpriced deal.

Generally, fiery natives have medium height sized bodies with slim hips. Fire's inherent sharpness is reflected in these natives' facial features, like pointed eyebrows, eyes, nose, chin, ears, and sharp teeth. Since Fire moves rapidly, these natives speak and walk quickly and have an easy laugh. Fire is bright and vibrant; hence, these natives prefer bright and colourful clothes to wear.

 
In Astrology, Fire represents the South direction and is owned by Mars. Mars represents a soldier and the commander of the army. The Martian person is brave, confident, action-centric and follows the order of the King Sun religiously. He is anger prone and hunts on his own like a lone Wolf. Being the King's army commander, he governs and commands his troops by applying the top-down approach.  

More can be read in the book at amazon.com

Telecom Industry Australia - Status Check FY 22

The Telecom sector across the globe has been struggling, with industry performance in the bottom quadrant. 

In Australia, most of them are recovering or heading in the top quadrant driven by the change in demand profile since COVID. 

Most telecom companies Beta < 1 (less volatility).

 

Telecom Opportunity

• Key Trends Telecom industry across the globe is recovering from being in decline or stagnant in the last 5-10 years. This recovery is driven by the change in demand profile because of COVID.
• Since early 2020 demand for digital enabled services like self serve, self care, mobile first, remote work and collaboration has grown by 3-5 times. This has resulted in a spurt in demand for data (x3), high speed internet and mobility. 
•  Industry's focus has shifted from Revenue Generation to Revenue Protection and Generation. The Customer engagement has shifted to non negotiable CX (intuitive and simplicity), Resiliency and Stickiness.
• Fulfilment of this demand is enabled by accelerating digital transformation (simplify offerings and services) across the business. 
• Industry is rapidly adopting technology enablers like Cloud, AI/ML, 5G, IoT, Security, Platform (API) and SD-WAN to fulfil the growing and elastic demand.

Three Key Lessons from NBN's Rollout in Australia

 Three key Lessons from NBNs (Fibre) Rollout in Australia 

NBN - Threats to Fibre Revenue Stream

NBN - Threats to Fibre Revenue Stream from 5G, Idle Network, Space Technology Driven Disruptors like Starlink and Kuiper 

 

Highlighting > 2Mn services are  <=25Mbps and 82% of services are on <=50 Mbps.

Today the avg speed is 52 Mbps

Loss Making to Continue for another 2 Years 

Disclaimer: All discussed thoughts & opinions are my own & not that of my employer/others

Digital Transformation Spectrum - 2011 to 2022

Digital Transformation Spectrum - 2011 to 2022 

• Sales Trigger has evolved with the Evolution of the Digital Transformation Journey from early 2011 to post-COVID. 
• The spectrum of Primary Sales and Transformation Triggers is highlighted below.

This is my 1st draft of the digital transformation spectrum, keen to get some feedback.

Core Components and Enablers

Digital Transformation - Economic Model

Digital Transformation - OPEX Lens from Efficiency Dividend to Enabling Revenue Generation  

Digital Transformation - Pathways

Digital Transformation - IT Services Landscape  

Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading 

Why Bioscience can change the world

“Eric Schmidt…thinks the next big thing is the “bioeconomy”, not the internet. This catch-all label, Schmidt explained to me at the Aspen Ideas forum last month, describes “the use of biological processes to make use of things that we consume and manufacture… advances in essentially molecular biology… plus advances in AI have allowed us to do new techniques and grow new things.” Helpfully, he listed a few innovations this economy might include: new plastics that naturally degrade without polluting water, “biologically neutral” cement that does not hurt the environment, soil microbes that reduce fertiliser use, soy-based roof-coating that reduces urban heat and, my favourite, compostable dining ware such as edible forks. Put another way, the bioeconomy is based on stuff that is grown using synthetic biology.”

The phases of Fit - "Product market Fit for Startups"

What can Influence Sellers Decision

What Students need to learn in school but dont get exposed to or taught:

Dear students, please learn the following in your school days :

1. public speaking 
2. writing well 
3. storytelling (see 1-2) 
4. personal finance 
5. critical thinking (not cynicism) 
6. active listening (hear unsaid) 
7. networking (trust and giving) 
8. good customer service 
9. how to sell 
10. to fight against entitlement 

source: Vala

  Millionaire Migration

IT and Digital Sales Business Case Drivers - Single Page View

IT Sales Business Case Drivers - Single Page View

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The nature of the IT Industry has evolved in a post-digital era. Today, IT is primarily divided into 2 domains: Traditional (including legacy) and Digital. 

Traditional technology and domain are about cost management, risk mitigation and functional fulfilment, whereas Digital is about revenue protection and generation (demand generation), taking risks and creating new seamless experiences. 

With this segmentation of IT and its business function in play, the positioning of Sales Business Cases and Calibrating triggers has changed in the Digital Era. 

Key factors to influence are highlighted below: 

• Growth Enabler 
• IT is Linear 
• Digital is Exponential 
• Complexity Resolution 
•  IT is about Predictability 
•  Digital is through Resilience, Adaptability, Scale 
• Competition 
• IT - against the Companies 
• Digital - against the Companies and their Ecosystem 
• Spending 
• IT - CIO driven 
•  Digital - CXO, BU Head and CDO driven 
• Economics 
• IT - Increase in Marginal Cost leads to an Increase in Marginal Revenue 
• Digital - minimal increase in Marginal Cost leads to higher Marginal Revenue (true network effects and platform economy to be in play) 
• Pricing 
• IT (Commodity) - Price is the key driver, as long as the Risk of doing business is minimal and Functionality is fulfilled 
• Digital (Premium) - Price is not the key; it is Agility, Scale, Resiliency and CX. 
• Saying “No” to price discounts or relief, and to being pressurised for work, is key to maintaining premium positioning. 
• Insights 
• IT - know their problems and look for bargains; operational insights are valuable.
• Digital - needs Commercial Insights, not Thought Leadership (it's a commodity now).
• Roadmap Know How 
• IT - IT Strategy is driven by Business Strategy. 
• Digital - Corporate Strategy spectrum and then Business Strategy. 
• Commercial Engagement 
• IT - MSA or BSA driven 
• Digital - 30 to 40% reduction on MSA or a skeleton of MSA being leveraged, in some cases, non-existent

First published on LinkedIn 

Source: Gartner

Why TPG Stock Dropped after FY 22 First Half Results

 Why TPG Stock Dropped after FY 22 First Half Results - Quick view

Telecom - OSS and BSS Leading Systems Capability and Sales Positioning

Telecom - OSS and BSS Leading Systems Capability and Positioning 

 

Telecom Industry Australia - Where the Money will be Spent

 Telecom Industry Australia - Where the Money will be Spent in the next two to three years.

My other post on "IT Services Opportunity and Spend Profile in Telecom sector" can be read here

Disclaimer: All discussed thoughts & opinions are my own & not those of my employer or other parties.

What NBN Co Needs

 What NBN Co Needs to increase the uptake of high-speed internet - Follow the Kiwi Model

• Comparing the typical RSP price point between NBN Co and Chorus NZD (Fibre Wholesaler), NBN Co lacks not only price parity and affordability but also the avg speed and higher speed tier simplicity.
• The new SAU proposal by NBN Co is a good start. Reducing the price by $5 to $10/month on 100 Mbps to 1Gpbs lacks the imagination and will to spur digital growth & intake of high-speed internet. It appears to be shackled by the serviceability of $27 Bn debt for any aggressive pricing & cost relief. 

Open Reach is following a Simpler High-Speed Tiering model with Economical Pricing like Chorus NZD. In terms of Fibre Access type, it is leveraging FTTC, FTTP (Gfast) & EE (10Gbps) for Enterprise. More than 360 Retail Service Providers in play

Future of Telecom Network - Smart and Intelligent