In the old days in India, it was easy to hire people who could go beat the pavement and sell. Today, customers demand that a salesperson be seen as a business consultant, financial advisor, someone who helps the company succeed. So pushing the product is no longer the issue. It s creating a solution for the customer to help the customer become more successful. Q You have talked about Indian customers being different from global customers.
Indian customers are different in their relationship with sales people.
In India, I want to buy from someone I trust, and whoever I trust the most gets the business. Indian customers tend to take a longer time to trust sales people than in most other countries and this is because the sales culture had a lack of guarantees, laws and so on. So an Indian customer feels it is more important to develop a trustful relationship so that he knows for sure that he is getting a good product. Take life insurance. This industry is now about to boom through the private sector in India.