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July - 2007 - issue > Movers and Shakers
Leveraging customer’s plans
ST Team
Monday, July 2, 2007
An understanding of the customer’s plan and adding value to it is the starting point for a sales guy to become successful,” says Rafiq Somani, the newly appointed Country Manger, PTC, India.

He began his career with PTC in 1996 and hopes to drive India’s growth in manufacturing and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) across key verticals such as automotive, publishing and life sciences.

He explains that to be a successful salesman, one has to be patient enough to listen to the customers’s needs, a prerequisite for good salesmanship which most marketing men tend to forget. In this context, he believes in a mantra called ‘internal facing’ and ‘external facing’.

He further says, in ‘external facing’ the most important aspect is passion shown for the customer, product, value, and customer relationship which he calls ‘sales hygiene’. By ‘internal facing’, he refers to the leveraging of the ecosystem within the company where there should be proper accountability and a good relationship with the employees.

When Somani associates his physical fitness, patience, and mental endurance to his success in the sales profession and says these qualities helped him to be a successful businessman. He says his planning and execution of business programs have a lot to do with playing badminton and cricket, the games which he plays with fervor.

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