why would someone buy my service/product

While you trace the path of Sales and Marketing, for the first few months/years you are busy with things like Branding, creating a strategic network, start calling people to explain your offerings, feel good once they give you time blah, blah but then suddenly a time comes when something hits you and you start feeling "Why would someone buy this service from me" and even if somebody does "Why would the next person buy that". This happens for good because now you are not just thinking of Transactional S&M :) but you are putting your creativity to analyze what makes a customer buy a service and how can I be that seller.

Different things can influence this , you could be the first one to sense the unmet needs of the market and create an offering around it, you may be the only one in that space ( very unlikely but can happen) , you could have the best cost of offering or simply you may have a selling team which can influence any buyer.

The crux is to understand what ticks the customer and is my offering good enough to keep a lot of customer ticking for a long period if not better get back to the drawing board to re plan

Operation Excellence @ Mystery Shopper

Learned about this amazing concept of FACQS , the key for evaluating operational processes for a Retailer. Friendliness (Crew), Accuracy of Service ( Crew), Cleanliness ( Store), Quality of Items ( Items) and Speed of Service (Crew) is what FACQS is all about and the best way to measure them is by using services of a Mystery Shopper. A mystery shopper is just like any other ordinary shopper but with a subtle difference as he/she is armed with a set of training and guidelines to observe and monitor the processes in the store.

Oh did I mention that I am a registered Mystery Shopper now :)

Networking - The 'Brahmastra' of a Marketing Guy

Though with the advent of new technologies and tools 'Marketing' today has become lot more structured and process oriented but still one thing which gives the Marketing Guy a strong competitive edge over his peers is his ability to create Networks and leverage them according to their characteristics

In my 2-3 yrs as a Marketing person, I have come across several types of networks such as Bozo Network, Power Network, Information Network and the most talked ones like Social Network.

The most important 'know how' for creating/managing a network is (a) Ability to position yourself as a saint ( who has no intent whatsoever of leveraging that network and just wants to be a part of it :) ) (b) Communication, both from quality of content and regularity (c) Leverage Knowledge ( When, How and What)

The best part is when you can act as a "Strategic Node" who has access to mutually exclusive networks and provide 'Match making' services , it seriously is FUN :)