Timing is Everything - whether for a batsman in the game of cricket, or a salesman in his efforts to boost sales. Sell Well - Grow Well takes you through 5 examples of well-timed sales pitches on a single solution, to set you thinking on creating your top 10 sales ideas where you believe smart timing can help boost business momentum.

Sell Well - Grow Well, a joint initiative between SBI Mutual Fund and Wealth Forum, is an effort aimed at encouraging and guiding distributors on a path towards right selling - which we firmly believe is the best way to grow well on a sustainable basis.

Few sales techniques are more effective than a perfectly timed sales pitch. You may have the best sales pitch in town, but if you don't master the art of timing, you will still have an uphill struggle. On the flip side, if you time your pitch correctly, you can get a lot of business, even with less impactful content.

Some products have a clear seasonal element to them, and most distributors use the seasonal factor to pitch them. Gold fund sales usually spike around Akshaya Trithi and around Diwali, those being auspicious periods to buy gold. Distributors who launch campaigns in advance of these festivals, usually see healthy sales numbers that make these campaigns well worth their while.

Here are 5 sales ideas around a single theme - children's savings plans - where timing is everything.

1. We usually look forward to receiving gifts on our birthday. But for many senior citizens, their birthday becomes an occasion to shower the younger ones in the family with gifts. Approach senior citizens in your client base a couple of weeks before their own birthday and talk to them about gifting an appropriate education savings plan to their grandchildren on their own birthday. You may be pleasantly surprised with the positive response you get with this well timed sales pitch.

2. A leading fund house created a marketing campaign last year around Children's Day (Nov 14th) to sell their Children Education Plan. Distributors can take a leaf out of this effort and diarize activities in the first 10 days of November each year, to promote appropriate children education savings plans.

3. A recent study indicated that Indian parents tend to grossly underestimate total cost of overseas education for their children. Send out a smartly worded mail with a link to this study to clients who are planning to send their children for overseas education, and set up a time to sit with them to review total costs of planned university courses. Once you have got updates on desired courses and colleges, be sure to get back to them after collecting all costs from university websites etc to help update their education savings plans. Quick and timely work will not only be seen by your clients as excellent service, but can also result in some handsome top-ups to existing savings plans.

4. Many stores run "back to school" promotional campaigns in the weeks before schools re-open for a new academic year, to cash in on the education related spending spree on books, stationery, school bags, shoes, lunch boxes and so on. In those 2 weeks, what is uppermost in the minds of parents is education related spending. Try and time a campaign around saving up for higher education around these weeks, when education is top-of-mind for your clients. You may be pleasantly surprised to see a lot more receptivity towards your proposals at this time, when they are anyway thinking about education.

5. A leading advisor from Western India, with a wide social network and a large retail client base, has adopted a practice of attending naming ceremonies of new born babies, not just to bless the young one, but to talk to the parents about starting a savings plan for the new-born. At this ceremony, the baby is often showered with monetary gifts - the advisor makes it a point to tell the parents that this money belongs to the child and should be invested in the young one's name. This enables a savings program to begin for the child instantly.

Whether it is well timed mails or perfectly times conversations, you can enhance sales momentum vastly by paying attention to timing. The 5 examples we discussed above should hopefully get you thinking about how you can use timing to great effect for every product and solution that you wish to sell to your clients and prospects.

Make a list of smartly timed sales pitches for every solution that you offer, put your best 10 ideas into a scheduler and work towards executing well timed sales campaigns around each of your top 10 ideas. Look back a year later and you should be pleasantly surprised with the increase in business volumes through these smartly timed sales pitches. After all, timing is indeed EVERYTHING.

All articles in the Sell Well - Grow Well section are created by Wealth Forum. These are not to be construed as opinions given by SBI Mutual Fund.

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