The Marketer of the Month

The One Man Silicon Valley of India

On a look out for the entrepreneurial instincts which can match those of the Silicon Valley Yuktee met Mr. Ashok Atre of Transparent Engineering Services Pvt. Ltd. He is full of self belief, still as passionate as he was when he founded the company thirty year ago at the age of 27 and immensely futuristic in his approach. A passionate techno-wizard with an astounding capability of asking unusual and jolting questions with a child like ease has already created multiple companies under his leadership. He talks about the issues which have a deep impact on how you run the business:

Culture in Business…

Industry today is battling with three cultural barriers:
One is excessively price sensitive outlook and near zero importance given to intangible value of the product or service.
Two is an attitude that you can fool around with people and still get away with it. What some companies are practicing under the concept of “Smart Business” is nothing but street smart opportunism and unfortunately getting away with it.
Three is the lack of hunger for knowledge in ones own industry and business area.

How are you Tackling these Cultural Barriers?

In our company we attach a great value to three things:
Our salesman is a customer co-ordinator. We insist that our prospects visit our installed machinery. Once we demonstrate how we build our solutions and how they perform on the field it becomes easy for the buyers to understand the value of our product.
We gauge a prospective buyer’s state of dealing with us through hard facts like financials, company set up and also soft factors like ‘what is the company culture like within their organisation’. This has protected us 80% of time from wasting our efforts on customer who are trying to practice “smart” business on us!
Thirdly we are an extremely passionate organisation when it comes to technology. We have an internal learning budget for buying books online!

Internet transforming business…

Information access made possible through technology of web and mobile has changed the vendor-buyer relation.
A manufacturer can craft a solution by looking at a broader and global reference.
A marketer can easily communicate value to customer through multiple channels. Today I can fight back negative marketing much more convincingly, for instance when we decided to launch condenser boiler where we were tapping the heat from water present in the fuel the market was infused with opinions and assumptions against it. The grades of material we used, the technical basis we designed upon were doubted upon. Our communication effort by using right sources and credible ones have settled all the doubts.
There is no scope for opinion leadership today, though leadership is possible and truly beneficial one!

Branding in B2B-Your Take:

B2B Brands are more precious because your customer takes it as seriously rather more than you do.
In capital intensive industry what services you as an organisation deliver determines your brand’s value in the minds of customer and the product is merely an extension of that. Make the brand Organisation focused and not product focused.
Back in 80’s one of the huge Boiler manufacturers from Pune launched a new boiler and marketed it heavily by claiming a lot about that product. The product was not up to the mark and it failed. What the company later realised was that this failure also tarnished their brand image as a company which can’t succeed in that particular technical niche.
Today in general customers have a global outlook regarding the brands they interact with. They are willing to take a chance, and they have to just see an incentive to take that chance. I believe that an organisation should try to identify and communicate that incentive clearly.