Obama's Diwali Message to People of Indian Origin
Sales Lessons from Obama's Public Diplomacy With Indians By Vishal Asthana and Nick Vaidya. Diwali is the most auspicious festival celebrated by Indians worldwide and holds tremendous emotional value to the community. Obama had a message for the Indian community this time (available on YouTube). He could simply have said something like “‘Happy Diwali to all my Indian friends’” and be done with it. But no, he chose to go beyond. He made his message meaningful. He nicely managed to correlate religious significance of the auspicious festival to what it means or should mean for people who celebrate it today - time to do yearly reflection/ time to count blessings/ time to cultivate an attitude of empathy towards the less privileged/ time to pray for peaceful existence of all human beings. He relayed this feeling as if he was part of the community and not as the President of the most powerful nation of the world! Did he manage to establish an emotional chord with the viewer belonging to the Indian community? Undoubtedly, yes! The message exhibited a very vital sales and marketing lesson though. Surprised? So were we. Let’s dig further to find out more: 1. Are you on your prospect/client’s team? Obama’s message made the Indian community feel that he’s on their side. He’s one amongst them. Think about it. The same thing applies to prospects. Do your prospects feel comfortable that you are on their team and working in their best interests or do they feel you are just another sales person indirectly questioning the prospect’s lack of business sense for not using your product until now? What feeling do you relay? If your sale volume has not been up to the mark, it’s time to look at whether you have been applying this principle while taking a lead further. 2. Are you ‘genuinely’ interested? Obama’s message had a sense of genuineness in it. He seemed to have done his research about the significance highlighted by various Indian religious scriptures and then used it to craft fully in his message by tying it to modern day significance. Once again, the same thing applies to prospects. Look around you and observe how the “top sales person” handles leads. You’ll find that this person “genuinely” goes out of the way for his clients – both current and prospects. He/she would spend a lot of time understanding the requirements and designing a solution around it. Aggressive pricing would be the only concern and the intent would be to strive for a 100% match with the client’s requirements. Your actions have to be “genuine” else the prospect/client will sooner or later determine that you are someone making big promises just to clinch the deal and probably going to deliver below par afterwards. Obama’s message got us thinking further about things that he didn’t say but were implied. Here they are: 1. Do you ‘consistently’ do what you say? This portion is not evident from Obama’s message but goes without saying. All year long, he can give these type of messages tailor-made for festivals of various communities and strike an emotional chord but if his actions towards these communities are consistently adverse, it wouldn’t take long for people of these communities to realize that in reality the gestures meant nothing. Same thing applies to prospects who turn into clients. Impressing your prospect and working with them to work towards a solution that closely matches their needs is one thing, once the deal is done and they have become clients, delivering consistently is the key. 2. Is there a ‘strategic’ benefit? Did Obama derive any strategic benefit from this simple message? Of course, yes. He knows Indians form a decent chunk of immigrants in the U.S.A. As long as he keeps doing these types of gestures and not follow them up with any adverse policies for the Indian community, his votes from the community are assured. Same thing applies to sales. When your client’s contract comes up for renewal, if you’ve consistently delivered what you promised, the client will not hesitate in giving the business to you again. This would apply even if a price component was higher than normal market rate. Furthermore, clients developed and retained using the mechanisms described in this write-up almost always provide “word-of-mouth” publicity and that too free of cost. Since we liked what Obama said and felt that it was meaningful and genuine, we know we would be referring his video to our other friends in the Indian community by telling them something like ‘Did you see Obama’s Diwali greeting video on YouTube’. Didn’t we just mention free of cost “word-of –mouth” publicity? :-)

Obama's Diwali Message to People of Indian Origin