Consumer Behaviour - Way to bag large orders - Solution marketing

Sanjeev Duggal

 

Modi Xerox Machines

My senior batch of marketing students just popped in and asked for an extra class of Consumer behavior. That set off a train of thought process? What is consumer behavior? Is it something that is locked in the mind of the consumer and which can’t be explained, even by the consumer himself? It is something that the marketer can forcefully extract out of the consumer black box and get his or her proverbial pile of fortune! 

Savior this, why is that we are lees hungry when we are at the place of work and become hungry and ravenous at home. We are conditioned by the sounds and cues of cooking and we become hungry. This is the reason that explains the smell and sounds that the eateries make to make us feel very hungry. At the same time eating five star food however tasty and colorful becomes a pain after 1 or 2 days. We don’t tire of homemade food even after eating it for decades! Homemade food has got a word for itself. It is called comfort food. That is what makes consumer behavior so challenging. No one can accurately predict it. Some one’s food is somebody else’s poison.

I had in the past worked in the extremely competitive Office Automation company, NETWORK, and we used to market electronic typewriters costing between 50,000/- rupees to 1,00,000/- rupees way back in the late eighties. Our nearest generic competitor was Modi Xerox. NETWORK and Modi Xerox were famed for their extremely competent and innovative sales people. 

This incident that I recite is that of Sanjeev Duggal an ace sales professional from Modi Xerox. It was said that the company had set a very stiff target of selling over 100 Xerox machines for a quarter. That was the tine even selling even one in a month was extremely difficult. Good sales men used average at a maximum of 9-10 a quarter (3 months).

Sanjeev pulled off the impossible and achieved the target. He got a massive incentive and others were curious as how he could pull of such a big order. Sanjeev went on to explain” I knew that selling 100 Xerox machines is a herculean task. No individual buyer could buy that many. So I concentrated on MAJA (Major Sales) and LAM (Large Accounts). Only organizations that buy in bulk can afford to buy so many. I concentrated on government accounts”.

Sanjeev in his research found out that there were many police stations in his territory. He at that was working in western India. He went and observed the working conditions in the police stations. One of the things that he observed was that police stations have to take an inventory of all the belongings of the suspects who have to be kept in the police lock up. This meant lot of work for the police writer. The writer has to spend long time in inventorying the small and petty things that the criminals had in their pocket.

Sanjeev came out with a very bright idea. Why not simply deposit all and sundry belongings of the suspects that have be kept in the lock up in the Xerox machine and take a copy of it. This way time can be saved and the photo copy of the belonging can be kept as a proof and any accusation of pilferage of belongings can be avoided. Luckily for Sanjeev this idea was accepted by the police and the concerned authorities and Sanjeev got a large order of Xerox machines.

Sanjeev proved the point that when things get tough the tough get going. Way to go Sanjeev.