How Current Events Impact Global Sales with Praveen, This Week We Talk about Covid and Containers

Welcome to the Global Sales Mentor Podcast for conversations that drive growth. When you are ready to grow your international sales, join the conversation with your host, Zach Selch.

Hi, I am here with my old friend Naveen, and we're going to talk a little bit about what's going on in the news and how that's going to impact international sales. Naveen, you want to introduce yourself?

Great. I'm a sales professional, 20 years More mostly in international sales, everything from IT services, product solutions, and telecom across 4 continents. That's the—

That's right. And Praveen's been on my, uh, my podcast, so you may have seen episodes with him. And we like to get together every month and talk about the news and how this impacts sales. So what's the subject we want to chat about today, Praveen?

The bargaining issue. in the world today, COVID in India, and how that's going to affect the economy, the world, and most importantly, from a sales perspective, what does that mean for us? So since I'm on the site, on site, so let me start it off.

Tell me what you think, Praveen.

I think most people didn't expect this. It really hit us really quick, and it really has a hockey curve The growth of the virus is a hockey curve. I think a lot of startups would be happy with that curve if they had that. But it is what it is. This is difficult times, but it's not as bad as they make it on TV, though. One of those things I like to talk about is what is the impact of COVID happening in India vis-à-vis world economy and salespeople, right?

Yeah.

One of those things that came out yesterday, I think, was the S&P decided to downgrade the GDP growth of India to 9.8% from 11%. Now, we must look at this in the context that India is the 5th largest economy in the world, which is big. For a large economy of that size going down, even a percentage point has impact. There are a whole bunch of people here, 1.4 billion. That is a lot of people, a lot of consumers. That is right. Let me take one single industry and talk a little bit about it. For instance, the pharma industry, everybody is interested in the pharma industry. So India is the 3rd largest pharmaceutical industry in the world, and in terms of volume, 11th in terms of value. We're the largest— 70% of vaccines are produced in this country. That's a whole lot of vaccines.

And let me just mention how that works, what you just said. So you're the 3rd largest in terms of volume and the 11th in value. Which means you're impacting a large amount of low-income countries, right?

Correct.

You're not impacting necessarily Germany and the United States. You're impacting 50 to 70 low-income countries are dependent on India for their healthcare products. And that is a huge thing. I'm already seeing this. from reports from Africa where people are telling me that things are getting mucked up, totally unrelated, because of problems in supply from India. Sorry, go on.

Correct, and you nailed it because 20% of generic global exports come from India. That's a whole lot. Generic drugs means typically goes to low-income company— low-income countries. Sorry, I don't— I'm trying to be politically correct here— developing countries. And that has impact on their health, and therefore it has impact on their economy directly or indirectly.

And everybody's connected. So if a factory in Bangladesh is shut down because 20% of the people are sick because they couldn't get vaccines, does that mean that the factory in the United States that needs that component from Bangladesh isn't getting their components? Are they shutting down for a month, right? We're all connected, you know?

Absolutely. And I learned— I'm learning this the hard way because I come from the software industry, right? For us, we could do anything remote. Production is on a PC, right? Right now I'm engaged with an electronic vehicle company. For them, production means it's in the workshop, and the supply chain is seriously damaged.

Yeah.

Because some of the electronic components and sensors come from China, Taiwan, international.

Right.

We suddenly found out we're not getting some of these components. That means our production is hit.

Yeah.

Our prices have doubled, tripled. Our bill of materials suddenly jumped.

Yeah.

That impacts our pricing, our profitability, and it's hitting my sales plan.

Right, yeah.

And so we're building up, I mean, we're building a plan based on a prediction that everything's gonna be normal. 2020 was an aberration. 2021 is going to be life as usual, business as usual. No, sir. Now everything is upside down suddenly. I mean, from just a sales executive perspective, right? If I had to sell some of the products we have face-to-face, especially in India, face-to-face in the workshop, showing him the product run is really important as part of the sales process.

Right.

Even more interesting, it's a very real important part of the buying process of the person who's buying or the team that's buying.

Right.

Now, neither can they buy because they're not in the workshop or in the office.

Right.

Now, I'm going to try and figure out how the hell am I going to do this remotely. It's not a software. We talked about it in 2020, but now we've got to actually do it. And the worst part is now we've got to begin to plan an assumption that we're going to have multiple waves in the next few quarters. It's a very interesting problem to solve from a sales perspective.

Yeah.

But it's not something you want to enjoy when you have a sales dream.

No, and I'll tell you what I was going to say. I remember in 2011 there was a tsunami out off of Japan, and I, I wasn't selling Japanese products, I was selling American products, but those American products had Japanese components, they had Korean components. And what happened was about 3 months after the tsunami we couldn't get chips that we needed for our systems.

Right.

So, for about 6 months, first of all, everything was delayed. Maybe it wasn't delayed by months, but it was always delayed by weeks, right? Our price of goods sold went way up because we had to buy— we were buying secondary market chips because the manufacturer of what we needed wasn't back up to speed. And I remember that 10 years later. And I think what we're going to see here, people don't get how much this is going to impact. Last year, a lot of China was shut down. This year, a lot of India is shut down. And I think India is going to be shut down for 3 months, more or less. And those are the 2 big manufacturing hubs. I don't know exactly. I think Korea is doing pretty well. But people are doing a lot now in Bangladesh. They're doing a lot in Sri Lanka. They're doing a lot in other countries. And all these countries have problems. This is going to impact our supply. We all have to know that in a few months, where everything's going to be running late. And I would be building this up. Not, not that I want to live by excuses, but I'd be telling people, hey, you know, probably what we're going to see in August is a start of a delay that's gonna last for about 3 months. Maybe, you know, if you plan for this, you can use this to your advantage. Maybe you could say to people, hey, we probably, the world is gonna experience a delay in shipments. It might be a good time for you to put in early orders right now, right? You know that—

Correct.

I didn't think about that until we started talking, but we are going, I'm sure we're gonna see delays in shipments and we have to be prepared for that 'cause you don't wanna be explaining this In, you know, September, October, everybody's going to have forgotten what happened in May, right?

Correct.

I want to tell people in May what's going to happen in September so that you're prepared for that.

Correct. And it's also, uh, and everything's not doom and gloom. As a salesperson, you— oh yeah, now we train to look for opportunities. There is an opportunity, especially in, let's say, the picking solution in a warehouse. especially in India, it's very labor-intensive. They pick, let's say, garments based on order, and they have to go from one place to the other and so on and so forth. The solutions that we are involved in does that. Now, there's a fantastic opportunity in the sense that labor shortage is phenomenal right now because nobody wants to go in and get themselves in trouble, but the companies have to still fulfill those orders.

Right.

And if you can find a solution to solve that, That's a fantastic opportunity.

Oh, I think you're exactly right. People should be looking at ways to solve these problems that are coming up, because these are objective, serious problems, and they're going to be around for this year. And who knows? Because you think about it, China had a problem last year. A lot of countries had problems with face-to-face contact. But slowly, Europe and the United States are getting out of this. China is slowly getting out of this. But what we're going to see, we might see now a wave. India has a problem, other South Asian countries might have a problem, and we're all interconnected. So this could be going on for a couple of— maybe not a year, maybe not a couple of years, but maybe a year, certainly many months. It's going to impact supply. And the thing is, it's not a catastrophe. It's just something that has to be prepared for and for you to be ready to deal with, right?

Correct. And just to take that point a little further, in fact, this morning we were having a conversation with the team guys and we're brainstorming what is the worst-case scenario from buying process and the sales process. And we said, what if this is a continuous wave and we're going to see this on and off every 2 months? 1, 2, we're going to be shut for the next 90, 180 days.

Right.

Worst case, we still have to hit our numbers. Now, we are ready to sell, but are the buyers— do we now have to look at how to reeducate the buyers to buy?

Right.

Maybe that's the way we must look at it. That includes things like maybe de-risk their business in terms of buying purchase. Take small chunks of the contract, not the big contract.

Right.

change the demo and the pilots of it, remove them completely and talk about no questions asked, complete returns, whatever happens.

No, I'll tell you what, whenever there's a crisis like this, the way out of the crisis is through using your imagination and coming up with new ideas, right? And that's the thing, we can't do things the way we did last year. We have to think of new ideas and be more flexible, or we're all going to sink. Because yeah, people are worried about their cash flow. They're worried about—

Correct.

If they're not sure that they can do— that their factory is running, why would they buy a whole lot of materials right now, right?

Correct. And the interesting impact, and maybe most people will not notice this because of COVID is that availability of good salespeople in the market.

Yeah.

And I— if you go to my LinkedIn, I'm saying I'm hiring. Where are the people who want to be hired?

Right.

Because they all want to keep their jobs. A known devil is better than an unknown one. And that impacts, uh, both in sharing of knowledge between people moving from one to the other. 2, it'll impact your sales plans, growth plans, and then suddenly you find out you gotta do something different. The second thing that comes to— second challenge that we are facing right now is how do we help our partners?

Right.

Because they have made promises to their customers.

Oh yeah.

They are in trouble.

And nobody wants excuses. Nobody likes excuses. So the best way to do this is through good information flow and getting in front of it, right?

Excellent.

So we should be telling our partners, you should be telling your customers, to expect this impact in a few months, right? This is coming, there's no way around it, everybody in the world is experiencing it, you have to be prepared for this. So I gotta cut this a little bit short today, it's been good talking to you. For you out there listening, Praveen and I do this on a regular basis, I have a podcast which is called Conversations That Grow Global Sales, and this is sort of a little, you know, first of all, Listen to the podcast, comes out every week, but this also comes out on a regular basis. We're going to try and make this a little bit more regular, talking about issues in the news and how they impact sales leaders. Thank you very much, Praveen.

Thank you, Zach, for inviting, and all to your audience, go to our website, www.salesadda.org, and please visit us on YouTube and like and share some of our videos.

Exactly.

Thanks for being here today, Zach. It's a pleasure.

Please look for Conversations That Grow Global Sales, Global Sales Mentor, or www.globalsalesmentor.com. Have a wonderful week and good luck dealing with the crises that come up that make it difficult for us to get purchase orders.