morning boy's letters on serious matters and commentary on funny things aplenty
Salesman connects with prospects, interacts and closes the deals.
There’s this who fetches the leads or helps the seller connect with prospects. The onus of deep interaction and closing the deal lies on the seller.
Architects, contractors, Interior designers are salesmen? May be aggregators too. They take a huge cut and have been steadily increasing the rate of the cut with every passing. Seller is just a stockist now.
A jeweler competes with another jeweler, so goes the automatic thinking.
What competes with the activity of cycling? Sleeping, laziness, Tennis, watching TV? What competes?
Jeweler is competing with cheap sex. Jeweler doesn’t get this often. Jeweler talks and reads books on economics. Jeweler doesn’t get it that he is competing with cheap sex.
So you are able to collect a lot of data on Window-shopping.
Now you believe, that this data, in combination with easy debt, can make you sell 10 times or 20 times or 50 times of a category that would usually not sell as much.
Ha! That converts any category into an FMCG-like thing… Fast Moving XYZ. Fast Fashion, for once, a solid example.
So this huge quantity of data on Window-shopping has offered every marketer a chance to spray ads and reminders (with obnoxious abstract English and meanings) on Gmail, FB, Insta, Google, Whatsapp, and whatever other ad-dependent app frequently used.
Am pretty sure there are ‘Negative Returns’ once the frequency of Window-shopping crosses a certain limit, for the buyer and for the marketer both. And therefore, there would be ‘Negative Returns’ on data collected on Window-shopping too. And there would be ‘Negative Returns’ on all the processing and mulling done on the data collected on Window-shopping.
There can be a burst in ‘buying’ of a certain category, but beware of the thinking that tends towards FMCG-marketing. Enjoy the bursts, but can anyone stop the data-processes?
Returns on Window Shopping, that we must call as RoWS.
Negative Returns on Window Shopping, that we must call as NegRoWS.
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For those curious, I run Mississippi Earrings (https://www.mississippiearrings.com)
A new message extracts a new business plan.
But folks don’t have messages.
And some folks don’t talk either.
A certain absolute amount is necessary for one to stay in business or to stay in a good spirit to continue pursuing one’s curiosities.
At what volume of business or work do you secure that absolute amount?
The sequence below is hypothetical but powerful in its simplicity to reveal the tragedy that is garment selling and shopping in India.
Sometimes even tailors got the fit wrong in spite of all the measurements. And most of the times, tailors didn’t have the fancy skills to match the desires, visions and fashions.
In-store readymades changed that. Plenty of variety, plenty to try in front of the mirror and variety of looks to pick from. The errors in ‘tailoring’ and ‘making’ got obscured by the sheer number available to try and fit into. Even if one unit didn’t fit, you could try another unit of the same design and it would fit.
When they started with online readymades, they kept the errors in ‘tailoring’ and ‘making’, removed the facility of ‘trying’ any number of things to get into a good fit, and instead started tom-tomming variety of lacs and crores of units.
Selling fashion online is tragic for a lot of people, sellers and buyers both. But then tragedies consume time and the time spent in contributing to tragedies eventually flips them into happiness. Starting up over and over is happiness too.
How big a part does big software take from an employee’s working time every day?
Is there a way to compare such times?
My hypothesis is that an organization that demands a lot of such time every day is already less effective or will be less effective very soon.
As good as the argument above sounds, it still feels vague but important nonetheless. Still a few terms to be defined and observed.
Is there a person whose descriptive title may be Shadow Partner?
In my mind, this person is your partner and shadows you all the time.
When you prepare a catalog for purpose of ecommerce, you need a shadow partner. I am not sure, if shadow partners work in plural.
I will write more about this. Let me find one at least, first. Well, I had one. That shadow partner though left too soon. Did she even know she was a shadow partner? If she had known, would she have left?
SaaS, how beautiful the word looks. No?
The full form is Software as a Service.
Didn’t I tell you in an earlier post that software is a machine? Remember?
Right, so then it should read Machine as a Service.
That sounds like the business of selling and servicing cars. No? Machine as a service! ‘Service’ earns more than the machines for the car companies. Recurring. Except that the upkeep of cars does require ‘service’.
Now I can debate that ‘software requires service’ is as true as ‘car requires service’.
Machine as a Service. Hmm… Assuming the idea conveyed by this expression is digestible, what’s the cost of such a service? Answers are unpleasant.
Late realization! But then I am so often late.
Start-up is a unit.
Start-up is a unit of stock.
Start-up is a unit of stock that can be stocked by a stockist.
Start-up is a unit of stock that can be stocked by a stockist, and bought and sold based on opportunities.
Start-up is a unit of stock and start-up founders are creators of stock for the purpose of trading.
Software attempting to be faceted and 3-dimensional and spending monies over years and years and yet found wanting…
Software failing to be idiosyncratic, in fact turning amazing idiosyncrasies into idiocies…
Businesses trying to softwarize almost everything in their attempt to capture data and pumping in attention and resources into the activity of softwarizing, in the process forgetting or compelled to ignore their reasons for existence.
Hypothesis: Software is a nightmare for many many businesses.
‘Informationalizing’ a physical product for the purpose of ecommerce is a huge skill.
Inferior informationalizing and huge promotional spending may make the sale happen once, but encouraging repeat buying may become a real challenge.
If you have sold physical products online, you may understand what I am saying. What’s been your experience?
‘Website’ is a misnomer. But what we call ‘website’ ought to carry a name.
Someone called it a website once and after that everyone felt like calling it a website. So we call it a website.
Plenty of our buyers tell us your website, www.mississippiearrings.com, ought to be glam.
We started selling the kind of earrings we sell so that your faces look glam, your looks look glam.
We did not start the website for the website to look glam.
Okay, let me put this in some other terms. Website is not a physical building that stands in some space, and that tries to stand out in that space. Website is just a background against which you view something, in our case our earrings.
Imagine paper trying to be glam! What will happen to the writing? For colorful glam pics, paper can be glossy but that’s that. Paper ought to be background and remain that way.
Now you would say, website is a structure too. But I would say, structure isn’t website. Structure is exactly that, structure. Or let me say, structure is a structure against the background of website.
Does it resonate with you? Does this makes sense? To me it does. When I have better words and explanations, I will write another post.
Seeing, and converting your seeing into words, these are 2 important skills for ecommerce.
Combined, the 2 skills might be called ‘Informationalizing’.
Have trouble pronouncing? Try speaking ‘nationalizing’ and retry speaking ‘informational-izing’.
Yeah?
Wrote this in response to a Linkedin post on ‘how meetings should be conducted’. These are my words in the inverted commas; you can choose any variants of words for titles on this theme. Here’s my comment:
Decisions entail changes. If the number of meetings = number of changes, that in itself ensures that most meetings will be non-productive.
In the same breath, every decision, every change is an experiment; how meetings contribute to or hinder experiments is anyone’s guess.
In case you are curious about the post: https: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/parth-agnihotri-47259ba_management-leadership-manager-activity-7042673914296111104-utDv
Mississippi Earrings, so far, has been a business based on and driven by variety.
As if just the variety in designs of earrings wasn’t enough, there’s a variety of pictures to be clicked and handled for every design.
Now am grappling with a variety of Whatsapp marketing software, apart from a variety of things to be studied to conduct business online.
Just insane! Variety is wearing me down.
Autopoiesis of volume, that’s what trading businesses get into and that’s what a lot of B2B businesses strive to get into. O, feels so depressing to think of it. Volume is such a voluminous concept, a voluminous imagination.
So many platforms have no idea, no control over quality being sold through them but are valued as unicorns. I find that strange.
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