Product vs Service - Strategy Execution

 

Weekend Reading

 

• Indias Success in Exporting Goods (China in View)
• Micropayments for web content
• Who gets to decide the Truth
• Salesperson - Nature vs Nurture
• Better to Sign up 1 Whale or 15 Minnows
• Acts of Courage that Led to Growth

Weekend Reading

• Is Revenue and Profit Growth Rate Meeting Expectations
• Building a culture of learning at work
• Effective Sales Prospect Messaging
• Strategies to Increase Profit
• Key to Adding Value to Every Sales Encounter

Weekend Reading

• How to see a revenue shortfall 
• How biases and ego trump your Strategy 
• What do you want your customers to do 
• Things to make your life better and sell more 
• The art of asking questions
• Two funds, four unicorns, $45 Bn Value
• Post COVID - Indias Weakest link Maybe the Informal Sector

Why Buyers and Sellers Behave like this ?

Sharing some of the Sales Tips in tweets from my new book 

• A buyer who is emotionless has an advisory tone, impresses upon care and nurture during the discussion, is lazy in communication, often prefers that the status quo is not challenged. Learn why do they behave like this in my new book on #B2B #Sales. #marketing #uxdesign #salestips 
• Sellers who are open to grievances but don't address the root cause of the objection because they lack depth & are impulsive, get emotional & angry on too many objections. Learn why they behave like this in my new book on #B2B #Sales. #marketing #salestips #negotiations 
• Sellers who are sharp, data-driven, emotionless, driven by the limelight from winning a deal or being seen as visionary often end up making concessions through the bargaining mix. Learn about this in my new book on #B2B #Sales. #marketing #uxdesign #salestips #negotiations
• A Seller who writes email in bullet points, uses action-centric words, likes visuals & slices the data many times, tends to be a rainmaker. Why this happens, learn about it in my new book on #B2B #Sales. #marketing #salestips 
• A Seller who writes email in bullet points, uses action-centric words, likes visuals & slices the data many times, tends to be a rainmaker. Why this happens, learn about it in my new book on #B2B #Sales. #marketing #salestips
• A buyer who is stylish and asks a lot of queries like a journalist during sales meeting ends up paying more for a solution. Why this happens, learn about it in my book on #B2B #Sales. #marketing #SalesTips

To learn Why Buyers and Sellers Behave like this? Read in my new book - Sellers from Mars and Buyers From Venus - Elements of Nature Meet B2B Sales

Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading

--

• The New Elements of Digital Transformation 
• Begin With Trust
• People Buy Tomorrows Dream
• Military Strategy to Defeat Your Dream
• A Framework for the Innovation in the COVID Era
• In Sales Time is Value not Money
• The Sales Process Was designed to Solve The Sales Organisations Problem

Telecom Industry - Revitalise and Generate Revenue

 Telecom Industry - Revitalise and Generate Revenue 

B2B Sales Tips - from my new book

 B2B Sales Tips in tweets from my new book - Sellers from Mars and Buyers From Venus - Elements of Nature Meet B2B Sales

--

Sellers need to anchor their conversation on Price, Risk, and Functionality only when selling to CIOs in Traditional IT (commodity). #Sales #salestips #IT #B2B 

Sellers need to unpack the information asymmetry across different stakeholders at the buyer's end before articulating a value proposition. #Sales #salestips #B2B #marketing 

Sellers need to share commercial insight and educate buyers about it. #Sales #B2B #salestips #B2B #marketing 

B2B Persona Mapping enables sellers in navigating other people's mind. #B2B #Sales #salestips #marketing 

Buyers trap #sellers through the RFP process as it leaves sellers with no BATNA and minimal leverage in negotiations. #sellers #salestips #B2B #marketing 

To sell services in a post COVID and Digital world, building buyers' persona and applying the intelligence is key to success. #Sales #salestips #B2B #marketing 

A fiery Seller brings a vision for the future, agility, excitement, data-driven decision making, whereas a metal Buyer is about boundaries, order, wisdom, logical and emotionless decision making. Fire’s energy movement moves up and seek the limelight, whereas metals movement is inward and non-exuberant. Together, they don't connect at an emotional or physical level. In sales, these two find it hard to start a conversation. Both find each other operating at a different tangent. (2/3)Fire’s agility, rapid speech and disregard for boundaries make a metal native to raise a red flag and a signal to stop and leave the conversation. (3/3) #salestips #Sales #marketing 

A Seller who acts like a broker, open to making concessions through the bargaining mix and fond of discussion, prefers to keep multiple options in hand like a swiss-army knife. #Sales #B2B #Negotiation #marketing #FunFacts #salestips 

Fire requires air as a fuel source to burn & spread; without the supply of air, fire ceases. By governing the speed & supply of air, fire is controlled from being wild to gentle. On the other hand, fire controls the intensity, impatience, & rebellious nature of air by burning it. Show this thread. In sales, when these two transact in a buyer-seller engagement, they act like friends in a symbiotic relationship. Collectively, they can reduce the sales cycle & create new & incremental revenue growth at both ends. Most closed deals will be short term and high margin because both like to wrap up deals swiftly and end up paying more for a service or a product. Airy natives overspend more than fiery natives. #Sales #B2B #salestips #product #marketing 

Buyers who open up in conversations quickly & have no hidden agenda; end up sharing information with the Seller side & makes it difficult for them to leverage the option of BATNA (use an alternative). #Sales #salestips #Negotiation #marketing #product

Mistakes Made in Building a Cloud Strategy

 Mistakes Made in Building a Cloud Strategy

1. Assuming it’s an IT (only) strategy, not involving business 

2. Not having an exit strategy 

3. Combining a cloud strategy with cloud adoption/migration/implementation 

4. “It’s too late — we’re already executing,” redoing everything 

5. Equating a cloud strategy with “we’re moving everything to the cloud” 

6. Our cloud strategy is our data center strategy/it’s “all in” or nothing 

7. Our strategy is by executive mandate 

8. We’re a shop so that’s our cloud strategy/we need a single vendor cloud strategy 

9. Outsourcing your cloud strategy 

10. We are “cloud-first” and that is our strategy

PS: How to map cloud journey and avoid mistakes in execution

Source: Gartner, BCG, Mckinsey

Weekend Reading

• 4 D's of Investing
• The growing use of Robotics
• Master the Leadership
• Why Warren Buffet never bought Google stock 
• The One Metric that Identifies Qualified Buyers
• The B2B Lead Gen Stumbling Block
• The India Opportunity

Telecoms - IT Strategy, Managed Services and Implementation View

 

Telecom Verticals - IT Strategy, Managed Services, and Implementation View on 1Page.

(source: Gartner)

Hype Cycle for the CSPs Network Infrastructure 

Post COVID - FY22 Australian Economy Update

 

Export to China primarily iron ore is bringing Revenue 3 times what was estimated in the budget (from USD $55/tonne to $200/tonne). 

Once Brazil overcomes labor supply and Chinese mines open for business in Africa, Australia will see the impact.  

While household debt and savings are rising. Frequent and strict lockdown in major cities of Australia means less spending by people.

Australia is still behind other OECD countries when it comes to green energy.

Australian Vaccine rollout is abysmal compared to US, UK, Canada and EZ. This means a conservative approach of the elongated lockdown applied, threatening its economy in a globally connected world.    

Frequent and elongated lockdown in major cities of Australia, primarily Sydney and Melbourne threatening FY22 Q1 and Q2 (likely) with downward growth.

Source: CBA

B2B Sales Journey Context and Background

 

Weekend Reading

 

• What is required in Sales Process for Startups  
• Strategies Buyers Use to Negotiate Price
• Weekly Habit that will push you to peak performance
• You Don't have to Memorize the Presentation
• 3 Networking mistakes that you need to avoid
• Map your buyer in prospective Journey

Vodafone will get a lifeline from Retrospective Tax Withdrawl

Key Players in the Indian Telecom Industry

 

Vodafone Tax Issue Timeline

   

 Indian Govt Decision on Retrospective Tax 

   

Key Issues and Arguments

• Vodafone acquired Hutchinson/Idea/Max in 2007 - 67% share by $ 11Bn
• Hutchinson Vamco, based out of HKG sold 67% of shares driven by assets in India
• Indian Tax Department called out that Vodafone has to pay Capital gains Tax (calculated as Rs 7K Crore in 2007, today it's Rs 20K Crore liability)
• Vodafone said the transaction was made by 2 foreign entities (Hutch/Vodafone) in a tax haven country
• When challenged by the Tax department, Vodafone went to the Supreme Court  (SC) and won the case by saying that assets transferred in a foreign country can be taxed
• FM Pranab Mukherjee was hurt (probably ego) by this SC ruling, and hence he applied his power in the government and legislation to circumvent the SC ruling and prevent the tax from being backdated retrospectively

Removal of Retrospective Tax by the Indian Govt. will give a lifeline to Vodafone India, which is struggling financially in a JV with Hutch/Idea. The tax was ill-conceived by FM Paranb Mukjherjee, even though it was opposed at the time by PM Manmohan Singh and his cabinet colleagues like P Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal (law minister) in 2007. The tax was imposed from the backdate (can claim nearly 60 years) after Vodafone won the case in the Supreme Court (as described by Shekhar Gupta from ThePrint). By rolling out the retrospective tax, FM exercised typical abuse of power, intimidation, and legislative superiority to ensure Vodafone fell in line.

Why Vodafone is Indispensable
 
India has a few major players in the Telecom sector. The failure of any key player is detrimental to Telecom and is key to India's IT-driven Service Sector. Besides this, it will cause twin balance sheet issues for the financial sector as Indian Banks will lose their invested capital.

For Vodafone India, on the verge of bankruptcy in FY 22, Rs 20K crore liability will give a lifeline and infuse cash to survive in a capital-intensive industry during these challenging times, when the demand profile has changed.

In short, this decision by the government is late, but sometimes politics can weaken strong leaders resolute to reform. As Shekhar Gupta (from ThePrint) called out correctly, if a mistake goes long, it does more damage, but it needs to be welcomed if it's corrected.

Credit: Shekhar Gupta from The Print, ET, The Hindu, WSJ.

Update on Liability for Vodafone India is around 60K crore, (share price is around - Rs7).  

India's telecom sector is mismanaged by bureaucrats and is destroyed by some of the ludicrous policies on taxation, like AGR for spectrum. The amount of money owed to the government and banks by 3 telco companies (VI, Airtel) is around 1Lakh crore. The government needs to assist this sector, which has laid the pathways for the future. Time is running out before it's too late. 

   

Brief Context and Background on Sales

 

Sales 

Origin 

Word sale came from the old English word sala - "a sale, act of selling", which originated from a Scandinavian source such as Old Norse sala, which originated from Proto-Germanic source "salo". The use of this word first appeared in texts around 1866, and by 1910 word Sales Representative was defined. 

Definition 

A sale is an activity between two or more parties in which the buyer receives tangible or intangible commodities, services, or assets in exchange for money. It is a commitment between the buyer and the seller to be exchanged for monetary consideration. When this activity is repeated multiple times for goods, it is defined as a Sale. Sale is a successful transaction between a buyer and a seller reaching a zone of potential agreement (ZOPA). The interaction between the two individuals or parties underpins the success of this transaction. If two individuals are comfortable interacting with each other, they will transact or do business. In other words, relationships play an essential role in closing a sales transaction. 

Sales Today 

Today, a sale can be executed in multiple ways through a direct, indirect, electronic, agency, B2B, B2C and other channels. With the rise in technology adoption underpinned by digital enablement, sales in B2B and B2C segment is becoming more technology-enabled and less human-centric. However, buyers in the B2B domain still prefer human interactions for complex and large deals. In the context of business, sales are the lifeline of any business, and to succeed in B2B sales or convincing others, one must learn how to navigate other people's mind. 

Beyond Sales 

Today selling has become an integral part of our daily life because we sell every day to others. How to influence and win over others is a skill that is fundamental to success in life and every task we undertake. Selling is everyone's business, and this is something that is not taught in any school. To succeed, the art of sales needs to be learned and practiced from early childhood. 

 

Weekend Reading

 

• How to Map your Buyers Journey
• How to Start with Why
• Secrets of Sustainability
• How to Prepare for a Client Conversation
• Posers vs Top-Performing Sales Rep
• How do you Ask Good Questions

Australian Fibre Roll Out - Cost Envelope

Australian Fibre roll out for digital enablement across the country (continent) is going to cost $57Billion AUD.

 

Difference Between Fire and Water Type Seller

Fire Seller 

Fire signifies charisma & brilliance it removes the darkness by brightening our surroundings. Similarly, #sellers with charisma & brilliance attract others & enlighten them with their brilliance & action. They are persuasive & convince others easily with their thoughts and vision. These #Sellers love to have an audience, like how Fire brings people together during the evenings in winter. They attract buyers with their charisma and energy. They prefer to use an audience to position their offering #Sales #salestips #B2B #product #marketing 

Water Seller

Water has depth, like an ocean or a silent river. When water starts flowing from the mountain top, it has purity, crystal clear visibility, and is drinkable. The sound of flowing water mesmerises everyone, which implies that these #sellers are honest and pure at heart. Besides, watery #sellers think at a very deep and philosophical level, pay attention to detail, and have a sweet voice that captures other people's attention. Among the five elements, Water is the least mobile after Earth because it prefers a horizontal position. Therefore, these #sellers like to lie down on the couch or bed, speak and walk slowly, and take a lot of time to act. They are best described as a turtle in action (slow-moving). #B2B #Sales #salestips #product #marketing

More sales tips from my upcoming book can be found here.

Australia Future Outlook - FY2022

 

What is ailing Indias Banking Sector

 

Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading

• Do Product Roadmap needs a Date
• Seven Myths of Business Experimentation
• Difficult Conversations at Work 
• Closing the Cultural Gap
• Sales Prospecting Tips

How to Identify Buyers Persona and to Sell Them

My upcoming book - Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus - Elements of Nature Meet B2B Sales outlines a unique way of identifying Buyer and Sellers Persona, and how to apply them in various scenarios across Buyers Map.  

Excerpt from the book

--

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 buyers and sellers end in different scenarios.

--

Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading

• How to overcome sales objection
• How Leaders Build Trust
• How to deal with legacy buyers approach
• Technology saves the world
• How much time should sellers be selling
• How 5G can kick start next gen factories

Weekend Reading

• Only 52 Companies in Fortune 500 since 1955
• Employees Drive Competitive Advantage 
• Story of Waze - for Startups, Founders and Others
• Sales Trigger for New Opportunities
• How To Sell More
• How to Implement Digital Factory
• Build your Social Media Marketing Strategy 

Tips on B2B Sales

Sharing some tips on B2B Sales from my upcoming book - Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus

• Emotional people are not best suited for #sales. They are better suited for HR roles. More on this in my upcoming book on #B2B #Sales 
• A buyer who speaks sweetly listens calmly with patience, constantly observe the opposite side, pays attention to detail & use empathy to impress upon & don't like to take control, they are primarily price takers in negotiations. #B2B #Sales 
• A buyer which is agile with a short attention span and lives in the present state and has polished behaviour and style, prefers short term engagements, positioning a long team deal is futile. Positioning a high margin short term deal will be a winner. #Sales #B2B
• Buyers which are good at building and maintaining relationships with friends & family members are collaborative and gel with others easily. They prefer bottom-up engagement, their risk appetite is low and the status quo is their mantra. #Sales #B2B
• Sellers who are data-driven, action-oriented, use strong and action-centric language and bring money into the business. They are best suited for Hunting. #Sales #B2B
• Sellers who are, well-disciplined but lack patience, speak rapidly with conviction and respond swiftly and timely, employ intellect and style to impress upon will make multiple offers to close a transaction. #B2B #Sales #FunFacts
• A Sponsoring Executive (Buyers end) who is action-centric, futuristic, data & visual driven, like an audience & connecting with higher authorities will reach out to innovative & agile suppliers, or internal teams for selling the biz. case. RFP is the least preferred. #B2B #Sales

More tips can be found here at this handle

Emerging Technology Trends Radar

 

Source: Gartner

Tweets for Book Promotion - Sellers from Mars and Buyer from Venus

Sharing some of the promotional tweets for my upcoming book - Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus

• Emotional people are not best suited for #sales. They are better suited for HR roles. More on this in my upcoming book on #B2B #Sales 
• A buyer who speaks sweetly listens calmly with patience, constantly observe the opposite side, pays attention to detail & use empathy to impress upon & don't like to take control, they are primarily price takers in negotiations. #B2B #Sales 
• A buyer being reserved, emotionless, future centric and striving for perfection but has fear of failure will walk away from the deal if the solution offered is not perfect and of the utmost quality. #Sales #B2B 
• People who respond or communicate at their own pace or are slow and carry a deep voice, are best suited for farming activities in #Sales. More on this in my upcoming book on #B2B #Salesforce People who write an email in bullet points and use action-centric wording brings money to the business. #Sales #B2B 
• A Leader is paid for courage and vision, not for time and effort #thinking #leader
• A buyer with visible and big nostrils will be ideal for sellers for closing a high margin sales deal #B2B #Sales #funfacts
• A buyer who writes short and crisp emails is driven by perfection and the utmost quality and will walk off from the deal if the solution offered is not perfect and robust. #Sales #B2B
• A seller who looks straight into stakeholders eyes will bring money into the business. #Sales #B2B #FunFacts
• Sellers who are, well-disciplined but lack patience, speak rapidly with conviction and respond swiftly and timely, employ intellect and style to impress upon will make multiple offers to close a transaction. #B2B #Sales #FunFacts
• A Sponsoring Executive (Buyers end) who is action-centric, futuristic, data & visual driven, like an audience & connecting with higher authorities will reach out to innovative & agile suppliers, or internal teams for selling the biz. case. RFP is the least preferred. #B2B #Sales

More tweets can be followed here at this handle

Weekend Reading

 Weekend Reading

• mRNA for other Vaccines Could be Bigger than COVID?
• Why Skype is struggling to match with Zoom
• Secrets for Sucess in Sales
• Improving your Thinking Agility
• Why Small M&A Works Better
• Resources flow where Power is
• Improve Customers Life Time Value
• Creately for Marketing - My previous coverage of Creately and Its Co-Founder's view in the early stages of their journey.  

Telcos Monetising Assets - Connectivity in Play

The telco towers bonanza is still in full swing, with two incumbents on opposite sides of the world each announcing deals on Wednesday with investment funds keen to cash in on the demand for connectivity.

• Australian incumbent offloads 49 percent of InfraCo for nearly A$3bn 
• Similarly Telia sells 49 percent of Norway and Finland tower ops for more than €700m 
• In both cases, investment funds are the ones that want a piece of the action 

More here

Key Tips on Negotiation

 Key Tips on Negotiation from the book, Never Split the Difference, by Chris Voss.

• A good negotiator prepares, going in, to be ready for possible surprises; a great negotiator aims to use her skills to reveal the surprises she is certain to find. 
• Don’t commit to assumptions; instead, view them as hypotheses and use the negotiation to test them rigorously. 
• People who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible. 
• To quiet the voices in your head, make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say. 
• Slow. It. Down. Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard. You risk undermining the rapport and trust you’ve built. 
• Put a smile on your face. When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem solve (instead of fight and resist). Positivity creates mental agility in both you and your counterpart

The Promise of 5G - Accelerates Digital Enablement

 The Promise of 5G - Accelerates Digital Enablement 

Use cases example:

• IOT, Surveillance
• Networking redundancy option
• Industrial Automation Robotics
• Edge Architecture, AR/VR 

Source Credit: Gartner

Customer Experience Principles for Business Growth

The ten principles behind great customer experiences defined by Matt Watkinson in his book 

• 1. Great customer experiences strongly reflect the customer’s identity 
•  2. Great customer experiences satisfy our higher objectives 
•  3. Great customer experiences leave nothing to chance 
•  4. Great customer experiences set and then meet expectations 
•  5. Great customer experiences are effortless 
•  6. Great customer experiences are stress free 
•  7. Great customer experiences indulge the senses 
•  8. Great customer experiences are socially engaging 
•  9. Great customer experiences put the customer in control 
•  10. Great customer experiences consider the emotions

Weekend Reading

• This synthetic bio startup raised $52 million to make tumours reveal themselves
• The best books on The Age of Revolution
• Is your differentiation based on outcome or features
• New eCommerce paradigm - look at boxes trucks and bikes
• Why NPS doesn't mean Retention
• Five golden rules for coaching 

Creating Value by Digital Transformation

 Mckinsey writes how Boards can create value via Digital Transformation.

Digital transformations aren’t about being digital; they’re about creating value. That aligns with the board’s most important mandate, and the board can be particularly helpful in assessing value across three vectors: 

• Scale. The typical aspirations of digital transformations often lead to changes at the margins (5–10 percent increases over the previous year). This is fueled by an insufficient understanding of what digital can do. As a rule of thumb, digital initiatives should have the potential to change at least 20 percent of operating profits. Boards can push their CEOs to shoot higher. 
• Source. Technology is often an efficiency conversation about cost savings. But the greater value of tech is in its ability to build value. Recent McKinsey research into cloud economics, for example, has shown that as much as 75 percent of the $1 trillion at stake in cloud will come from business innovation. Directors can make sure that management is exploring ways to tap tech to create new sources of value. 
• Scope. Short-term pressures can overtake any business, especially when the market is volatile. Digital transformations, however, require long-term commitments to reap the full rewards they can deliver. Boards can press their CEOs to make sufficient expenditures for long-term initiative

More here 

Quotes - How to Shape Vision and Leadership

8 catchy quotes to shape your vision of leadership and management by Leslie Petrequin:

1. “Play chess not checkers”. 

2. “How you handle *the bus* says a lot about your management style.” 

3. “How you handle *the bus* says a lot about your management style.” 

4. “The currency of real networking is not greed but generosity.” 

5. “Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor.” 

6. “You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with ~Jim Rohn”. 

7. “Hire for attitude, train for skills”. 

8. “You can’t find people you are not looking for”. 

More here

Weekend Reading

• Accelerate Your Sales Success
• A Virtuous Cycle of Entrepreneurship
• How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life
• The Truth About Mental Models with Shane Parris
• How to Do Hybrid Right

Weekend Reading

 

• Innovations inspired by Nature
• Why smart and hardworking people don't succeed
• Inspiring books to read
• Accelerate your professional services business
• Framework to grow your business

Strategy elements under the hood

 What every strategy design needs to consider and address by Jeroen Kraaijenbrink  

• Value Proposition: What products and services you offer, how you offer them, and what added value they have for the customer. 
• Customers & Needs: The organizations and people you serve and which needs of them you fulfil. 
• Competitors: Others that your customers will compare you to in deciding whether or not to buy your products or services. 
• Resources & Competencies: What you have, what you are good at, and what makes you unique. 
• Partners: Who you work with and who makes your products or services more valuable. 
• Revenue Model: What you receive in return for your offer, from whom, how, and when. 
• Risks & Costs: What financial, social, and other risks and costs your bear and how you manage these. 
• Values & Goals: What you want, where you want to go and what you find important. 
• Organizational Climate: What your culture and structure look like and what is special about them. 
• Trends & Uncertainties: What happens around you that affects your organization and what uncertainties you face.

More on this topic at Forbes

Australias AAA Rating is Safe

From AFR 

The world’s biggest credit rating agency gave a vote of confidence to Australia’s ‘‘strong’’ economic rebound and suppression of the COVID-19 virus. 

The endorsement removes the threat of a downgrade since S&P put Australia on a ‘‘negative’’ outlook at the peak of pandemic panic in April last year and which could have increased the cost of borrowing for the $1.6 trillion in federal government debt projected over the next decade. 

S&P forecasts the federal budget deficit to shrink faster than the government’s projections because the rating agency assumes the iron ore price will be higher than the government’s conservative assumption of $US55 a tonne.

Books Wish List for Next Six Months

 Books wish list for next 6 months.

• AI First Company
• Amazon Unbound
• Noise - A Flaw in Judgement 
• Doughnut Economics

Weekend Reading

 

• Aussie Startup acquired in the US for $2bn  
• How to write a B2B sales proposition
• Humanity is stuck in short term thinking?
• How to retain your customers
• Build things that can last 1000 years
• What do prospects think when salespeople fail
• AIs Competitive Advantage

Digital Enablement - Automation to HyperAutomation

 

Source: Gartner

B2B Sales - CIOs Persona Mapping

Applying the Persona Mapping framework, on CIOs, from my upcoming book at Amazon.com - "Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus - Elements of Nature Meet B2B Sales".

 

B2B Sales Tips

• How to Avoid no Decision Deal
• The New Sales Imperative
• Sales Blocker?
• Revenue Target needs 3x The Sales Pipeline
• Overcoming 3 Common Sales Objections 

Types of Digital Ecosystems

 

Source: Gartner

Weekend Reading

 

• How B2B brands benefit from collaborating with influencers
• Selling against the status quo  
• Edge computing opportunities 
• Nine books for every content writer
• Investor for startups - good/bad
• Will Apple get into Electric Car Business? 

Why Buyers Persona Matters in B2B Sales

Does Buyers Persona Matter in B2B Sales and Marketing Execution?

Read here, here, here and here why it matters.

Elevate Your B2B Brand with Emotional Connect

How B2B Technology Vendors Can Make an Emotional Connection With Their Customers

Most B2B technology businesses focus their marketing communications messages on features and benefits. Beyond promoting features and benefits, B2B technology businesses can differentiate themselves by connecting emotionally. 

Following questions to ask yourself when assessing if you're making an emotional connection with your customers can be read here.

Building Digital Business - 6 Archetypes

Mckinsey writes about 6 different models for building the digital business.

More can be read here