Guest Lecture – Mr. Aravind Kumar Kotte

Guest Lecture – Mr. Aravind Kumar Kotte

on

Sales Techniques for generating leads

Date: March 6, 2021

Speaker: Mr Aravind Kumar Kotte, Associate Director – Lera Technologies, Hyderabad

On 6th March 2021, IBA students had an interactive session with Mr Aravind on the topic “Sales techniques for generating leads.” Mr Aravind has 15 yrs. of experience in sales and channel management of domestic and international sales, is highly motivated and consistently meets his sales targets. He is also specialised in hunting new logo through relationship building and creative solution. He handles SAP sales, cloud apps and oracle cloud heading end to end sales management teams and is presently working for the US and domestic markets.

The session started with a few bits of sales fundamentals discussed with the participants:

• Earning profits is the ultimate goal of every business. How to make profits?
• You earn profits if you sell more products/services. How do you sell more?
• When you have a lot of customers, you will be able to make more profit. Agree/ Disagree?
• What is a Lead? – A potential Customer/Company who have shown interest to buy your services/products by providing their personal information like mobile number/email/time for a call.
• Why is Lead generation important? Lead generation is essential for both marketing and sales teams because it helps to obtain new sales leads.

Mr Aravind explained that lead generation refers to identifying potential customers for the products or services of a business. The sales talk then continued with making participants understand what the sales cycle is all about. Mr Aravind explained that the sales cycle is the process that companies undergo while selling a product to a customer. He shared a few images in his presentation that helped the students understand the 7 step process of lead generation and their conversion into the Customers–Sales Process. The sales process includes finding leads, connecting with them, qualifying them, making presentations, handling queries, closing the deal, and nurturing them.

Mr Aravind Kumar Kotte also gave real-time examples to explain the sales process. How leads get generated by Inbound marketing and Outbound marketing activities like conferences/trade shows, content marketing, direct mail, display/retargeting, email marketing, field marketing, outbound calling, paid search/, PPC, partner marketing, SEO, social media, traditional media, webinars, word-of-mouth, and referrals.

He also explained lead generation techniques: professional social media sites, LinkedIn sales navigator, Twitter, sales automation softwares like Lusha, Apollo.io, Inside view, Hunter, Lead 411, seamless.A1, LeadiQ, etc. Lead generation is the art of convincing the unconvinced, Mr Aravind quoted in the end. The session was highly interactive, and Mr Aravind answered every question raised by the students.

In the end, Prof Smita M Gaikwad, Assistant Professor of Marketing at IBA, gave the vote of thanks on behalf of faculty members and students to Mr Aravind Kumar Kotte for such an insightful session.