8 Powerful Things I learned about “Positioning your Startup” at the iSPIRT #PlaybookRT

As a founder or technologist mired in the day-to-day tasks of product building, it’s easy to get drawn into thinking of your product as a collection of features. But do customers also see our products as a stack of features? Or do they see products as a sum of the solutions that they offer? How do we best translate our offerings into a simple and sticky pitch that piques our customers’ curiosity and gets them to purchase/sign-up?

To find a thinking toolkit to these type of questions, I attended the iSPIRT Round Table on Startup Positioning at the WebEngage  office in Mumbai this Saturday along with the founders and product leaders of 14 other unique startups.

2014-12-06 16.57.35Over six intellectually stimulating hours, all of us had our product pitches brutally critiqued by everybody else under the guiding presence of Shankar Maruwada, an ex-P&G marketing wiz and the man who got millions of Indians to sign-up for the Aadhar card.

Here are the Top 8 things I took away from the #PlaybookRT.

  1. First, make sure you are positioning to the right customer—A startup can have multiple “customers”. The customer who will purchase and implement your product may not be the same as the one who will use it. Which one of them do you pitch to? Example—should RippleHire (an employee referral hiring tool that uses gamification) position itself to a company’s Chief Recruitment Officer who will deploy the product in his company, or to the company’s employees who will be the actual end users critical to the product’s actual usage?
  2. Then, know your customers well—What 3-4 specific things do you know about your customer, which you can use to create a pitch? This resonated very well with me. Having interviewed a bunch of Instamojo’s customers in the past few days and quizzed them about the outcomes they were trying to achieve by using Instamojo, I had learned that “non tech-savviness” was a common characteristic among most of them. This insight suggested to me that Instamojo’s positioning should embed the fact that it requires “Zero IT Knowledge”.
  3. Find out the customer benefits that your product delivers and communicate them—Beware of confusing features with customer benefits! Features define the tasks that a product completes. Benefits capture the outcomes that customers achieve as a result of using the features.
  4. If your product provides multiple benefits, prioritise them in decreasing order of importance and then communicate just the one or two most essential ones in your positioning. Communicating too many benefits at the same time could make for a confusing message and take the focus away from your product’s superpowers.
  5. Beware of the “Curse of Knowledge”—As product leaders, we are prone to become so close to the body of knowledge surrounding the product and internalise so many assumptions that we forget what it is like being the user. Positioning the product correctly requires us to place ourselves outside the realm of features, technologies, implementations and industry terminology and speak in the language of customer’s problems and our solutions to them. Example—product leaders of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software may forget that many in their target customer base may not even know what ERP stands for, though the same customers may still be facing the problems that ERP software aims to solve.
  6. Use the power of analogies—Often, a complex concept can be explained simply using the construct “We are the X of Y”. Example—“Foodpanda is the Uber of Food Delivery.” or “Wishberry is the Kickstarter of India”. While such a construct may not always fully convey the idea, it catches you the customer’s attention enough for you to then elaborate further on how your product’s benefits make the analogy valid.
  7. Use the power of stories—A powerful customer story can illustrate your product’s benefits and allow the target of your positioning to visualise herself in the story. Example— Apartmentadda helped an amnesiac senior citizen find his way home. His apartment complex’s security guard pinged all its residents on SMS about the lost gentleman using ApartmentAdda. Among those who received the SMS was the old man’s son, who promptly arranged for his pickup.”
  8. Use numbers for a strong impact—What numbers can you say about your product that will help your prospective customers visualise its impact on their lives? Numbers can be about the number of customers whose lives you have changed, the number of steps (hopefully very few) it takes to get started with your product, the number of transactions your product did in the last X hours, the number of hours of customer work your product will end up saving, etc.

Guest Post by Apoorv Pandit, Sr. Product Manager, Instamojo

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Nuts and Bolts of Marketing & selling SaaS products to US customers from India for First Timers

In innumerable brainstorming and “gyan” sessions with friends, mentors and experts, one of the most stressed focus area is getting product market fit as soon as possible and then follow it up with scaling sales.  I think most early to mid stage entrepreneurs are instinctively aware of this but struggling with “Hows”.  So when I saw this playbook promising precisely to explain how, I grabbed a spot. I wasn’t disappointed. Suresh Sambandam is very down to earth and spoke earnestly and in detail about different steps he took while selling the OrangeScape’s product KiSSFLOW. Attendees who themselves run early to mid-stage companies and Kishore Mandyam of Impel CRM chipped in with their stories and inputs. Here is the detailed enough capture of the same.

The relevancy of this session is greatest to Early and Mid-stage entrepreneurs going from $0-5K MRR to $50K MRR selling to US MSB. This session is NOT meant for discovery or product market fit but I have inserted the discussion at the end.

The blog is organised as below Product Market Fit / Pricing as step 0; Followed by Inbound Sales and Marketing and then finally Outbound Sales and discussion on tools.

2014-11-15 16.37.05Product Market Fit

The absolute first step (may be zeroth step) in Sales process is getting the product market fit. You know you have a Product Market Fit with a B2B Mid-Market SaaS product when unknown folks start buying (Inbound sales is picking up traction). Unfortunately in cases that were presented at the session, the discovery process of the product happened organically based on another product that they were building.

However the generic solution for early stage product discovery goes like this.

  • Create a landing page with a “notify when ready”.

  • Create a SEO/Adword campaign for getting early adopters. You need to be very clear about the product category and fine tune your Adwords to exactly match what product aspires to solve. There are usually two approaches to any product i.e Disruptive Innovator or Faster Better Cheaper. So Adwords need to be in line with these

  • Once people signup engage with them and partner with them to fine tune the product.

To put succinctly Bring-> Engage->Convert->Succeed; As you can clearly see from this model, “Marketing Comes Before Product” or as Suresh puts it bring the horse to the water.

Pricing and “Freemium v/s Free Trial”

So which model suits best for a SaaS product? Is there one preferable over another? Very subjective topic but the thumb rule seems to be for SMB / Mid-market SaaS Free Trial is a best method to go.

Models aside, what matters most to the conversion is the post-signup engagement and the price factor. Faster conversions are dependent on many factors but one of the key factors is pricing. If pricing is within the decision-making authority of the midlevel managers, it is easier to convert. The discretionary spending seems to be around about USD 5K. Keeping the price low per user and making minimum unit purchase of say 10 users per bundle works quite great.

Inbound Sales

WebSite – Suresh firmly believes that Website is a core asset for a B2B SaaS company and hence should not be outsourced. He advises to have a minimum team of Web Developer, Creative Designer and Automation Engineer.  This would help perpetual A/B testing in short cycles..

Couple of nifty tricks to make the whole experience frictionless is to have a one click signup. Visitor should be able to experience the main software within few seconds. The other participating companies in the round table have used various  techniques to authenticate emails like SMTP Ping, email pattern matching, etc.

It is also important to closely monitor the users interaction with the website, capture it and feed it back to the Engineers to close the gap and arguments between Sales/Marketing and Engineering. One of the recommended tools in this category is FullStory.

RajanSEO

Lot of interesting debates on this; discussion ranged from how get the right keywords for searches and what optimization works and how to track the metrics. Suresh again firmly believes in having a dedicated SEO guy and focus on defined key words. They manage about 28 keywords and track them very meticulously. Some thumb rules and objectives again are

  • Do it Slowly but Steady
  • Don’t alert Google
  • Build Backlinks (Naked and Anchor)
  • Improve Google Crawl Frequency

Adwords:

It is preferable to have one dedicated person with number crunching and finance background. This will help track the cost per signup for search ads

Content Generation:

While it is important to have this come from founders, it is very hard to find time for the founders. One technique employed by KiSSFLOW is to hire fresher from visual communication background who has a grammar nazi attitude and give a very specific target like 2 +2+2+1 per week (2 blogs published 2 interviews done, 2 assured interviews for next week and 1 research post). He also uses 10-80-10 formula for the content itself where beginning 10 and ending 10 percent are reviewed in detail by founders.  One of the other key points stressed was to have self ads in each of the content which leads to signup.

Outbound Sales

Contact DB

Obviously the most critical first step here is having a database of all the companies and the decision makers that you want to reach out. Linkedin Premium works best. This is how Suresh does it. He uses Linkedin DB to create a list of all target companies and then assigns the task of creating the contact details to an online consultant who was discovered on Elance. It usually works out to INR6-INR10 per contact. There are other dbs one can purchase directly from companies such as Data.com, Discover, rainking and slew of others.

Once contacts are obtained it is very important to use direct emails as opposed to using mailchimp, constantcontact, etc as most of them will not land in inbox. It also helps to be as personalized as possible.

Sales DNA

It is absolutely essential for the founder to set the tone of sales.  For US be ready to pull night shifts continuously.  Although it is the founders calling, it is good idea to assume the persona that appeals to US clients say Bob and position one as a sales manager. It is also important to make the sales hire to listen to the call handling to build on this.

Channels

Not all channels are suitable for SaaS and one needs to do some trial and error to figure out the best channels. The channels include Events, Road Shows, Reselling Partners and Referral/Affiliate partners, may work well but Orangescape has ignored them.

Metrics, Tracking, Tools

Meticulous tracking is critical and many tools are available to manage and measure the process. Some that are being used by the roundtable companies are listed below.

Metrics to track

Metrics to Track

Suresh SambandamTools

These are the various tools used by the KiSSFLOW team and other participant companies who attended the roundtable

tools

Conclusion

Very hard to summarize such a detailed session, but one parting thought stands out. Attention to details followed by automation and customization seems to be the way to go.

Product Management Roundtable For Startups by iSPIRT In Pune. #PlaybookRT

After all the missed opportunities of being at a PlaybookRT by iSPIRT, I finally made it to Pune last weekend for the roundtable on Product Management. Amit Somani and Rahul Kulkarni conducted the session. While I can’t do justice to all that was discussed at the session, I am translating my notes from the Roundtable into this blog post. After sharing some of our product dev insights in my last post Learnings From Building A Consumer Facing Web Product, this was a good opportunity to become a sponge and soak in all that I could manage. 

As a startup founder who hasn’t previously worked in a product company, starting a product business is tough. And being a CEO with no technology background, doesn’t help the mix either. The challenges for building an internet product for me may be more than the average amongst the ones attending this Roundtable, but product management is still a tough beast. Understanding consumer needs, building a product around it, figuring the right metrics for your business, measuring it and iterating is puzzling for anyone, specially given the fact that we are always chasing a moving target.

2014-11-08 14.15.57To give you a taste of how things play out in the real world:

When we started PriceBaba back in 2012, mobile apps were a good to have, desktop traffic was bulk of Internet usage and little did i know that India is on the verge of such massive investments in online shopping. Over 2 years later, the story is very different. Mobile is huge (both web and apps), online shopping is real and consumer Internet in India and the investment landscape which was looking slow between 2012-2014 has picked up crazy momentum.

For a startup that is bootstrapped, at an accelerator or even seed funded stage, getting the product market fit, raising funds to survive, hiring good techies and dealing with an uncertain market which is changing fast is a daunting task. If you add to that the learning curve involved to make things successful, you would know why I appreciate this Product Management PlaybookRT by iSPIRT so much.

The Product Management #PlaybookRT

Amit and Rahul kicked off the session by helping us define our product vision (and separating it from the company vision and mission). We were asked to make a 30 sec pitch by each of us on our product vision along with two things that we would never do. Both Amit and Rahul played devils advocate and helped us think through what we are doing. Learning: A quick dipstick to check if your product vision is well defined, ask employee no 20! If they can define it well in your (founders) absence, then you have set your product culture right.

Stack rank your requirements. What is the single most important thing you? Rahul suggested us that things can’t move forward till we stack rank our priorities. We must know what is the most important thing that we do. A somewhat heated discussion was on how important the user interface of a product is for being successful. Should we fret about having the best UX out there or build a product that is very compelling, offers a better price than competition and delivers what is promises reliably? To cut short on what could be a day long debate, here are two independent bits I picked up from our facilitators. i) If you are offering something that no one else can, your consumer will also use a command prompt to get it. ii) Your Apps UX is much more important than what it was a few years back and it is getting more and more important by the day. But that may not be the lone factor in getting a winner out there. That said, don’t purposely try to build a bad UX 😉

The user experience is not just defined by what the user does on your mobile or web interface. It is every touchpoint that the consumer has with your brand / service. It is the whole packaging of what a user goes through. For a e-commerce site it would go down to the professionalism and courtesy of their delivery boys. Similarly, when taking a view of product, the challenge isn’t always about getting that killer UX designer to work on your mobile app. It is really defining what your product does and how.

Each of us got enough time to define our key metrics and find ways of measuring them. With my experience I can surely tell you that it is indeed true that which ever metric you track on a day to day basis, improves quite magically 🙂

Tips on collecting feedback & effective product management: 

  • Take feedback from your extreme users. Either the ones who are very naive and would ask very basic questions. Or from the extreme users who would want every pro feature out there
  • Group users by commonality. Set goals for users who perform well. So track a users life journey within your app, figure key milestones and set them as goals. Optimize for these goals. So if you know that a user who completes Level 1 of your game, is most likely to play till Level 4, try to optimize such that you acquire users who will complete Level 1

Apart from the evergreen Google Analytics which is great for averages, tools like Mixpanel, Kissmetrics and Wizrocket are great for digging into specifics. You may want to give them a spin. You may also want to check Dave McClures talk on Startup Metrics for Pirates. 

playbookRT

Hiring. The Big Deal. 

So the tired entrepreneur in you is thinking already, when can I hire someone to take some of my money and all my product problems? Well, well not so soon! Product Managers come in various flavours and to begin with, YOU are the PM. Hiring a lead product manager is tough and transition is not easy. You need folks who are curious, bring product insight, are analytics, can be strategic and can work with really smart engineers. This is an individual that blends great communication skill and simplicity. So where do you find such a mahapurush?

Amit suggested a good strategy of hiring young grads and train them to become good PMs in a year. They will love the opportunity at the start of their career and won’t burn a big hole in your pocket. That said, a dedicated product lead will take over the duties from the founder(s). This would ideally happen at a later stage for most of us attending the Roundtable. The three flavors of Product Managers are:

i) A Project Manager who will get your task list executed

ii) A product manager who will get the job done but won’t give a new direction to the part they are leading – the CEO holds the strings. Also example of Windows OS where changing one aspect as per will of a Product Manager won’t fly, it would need the to go hand in hand with the whole OS

iii) The Business Owner – Give this product manager your metrics and let him/her chase it down for you with full ownership

^cheat sheet: Google for questions asked to Product Managers at Google / Amazon / FB 🙂 

2014-11-08 14.22.30Best Practices For Product Development: 

i) The Amazon Approach – Write a press release before starting the product development. Also read this by Ian McAllister of Amazon:

ii) Before you launch the product, predict the no of users your new product / feature would have for the next week & month. Define the usage metrics

iii) Have extreme clarity in goals, let people make mistakes but own the job

iv) Questions to ask yourself – Is this world class? Can an engineer look this up and build it in 2 days? Why are you uniquely positioned to do that?

Also appreciate if someone else has users and learn as to why they have users for what they have built. You can learn a lot from that. Eg: Google & Apple learnt about good features that would eventually go into their OS by looking at some trivial but popular apps on their App Stores.

Books recommended by Amit and Rahul: 

  • The innovator’s dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
  • Start with why by Simon Sinek (also the TED talk by Simon)
  • Profit from the Core: Growth Strategy in an Era of Turbulence by Chris Zook
  • Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Identify and Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Business by Andrew Grove

2014-11-08 16.26.16

How to Structure Sales and Marketing in a SaaS Business

PlaybookRTThe discussions continued post-lunch in the Playbook Roundtable led by Girish Mathrubootham, CEO and founder of Freshdesk, organized at the Freshdesk office in Chennai. During the extended session, Girish outlined the sales and marketing structure in a SaaS business. While this may be only taken as a pointer to setting up the sales and marketing teams, each business owner needs to focus on the appropriate strategy that brings him the maximum number of customers. As explained in the last report on this roundtable, firming up the business model after iterations and adaptations is very important before a SaaS business would scale. Remember the product is the key. And when the celebrated investor Andreessen Horowitz featured in his blog Mark Cranney’s “If SaaS Products Sell Themselves, Why Do We Need Sales?” it kicked a lot of debate on why Cranney is right. Some strategies outlined by Girish might be of great help in not only positioning your product but also making sure that customers continue to use it after they buy it. The Q&A format continues.

How do you structure the sales function?

The sales function has two components: inbound sales and outbound sales. For inbound sales, the ability to identify good people to fill the position is absolutely essential. If they have capabilities of researching on the customer and can write personalized mails, that works better than lifeless common mailers. Further, the response rates increase in case of personalized mails although it might not convert into sales immediately. The inbound sales guys should be able to identify themselves with the customers and a “We” pitch infuses confidence into the customer’s mind. In all, inbound sales people should be able to make the customer feel special about interacting with the product and the organization behind it.

Outbound sales is a pure arithmetic in one sense. Read Predictable Revenue by Arnold Ross. If you invest x amount of money, you harvest an amount y (usually as multiples of x) as revenue. To be able to achieve this, you need to have a structure sales organization inside the team. It could be divided into market research team (which identifies potential target sectors and customers), sales development team (which continuously interacts with the customers to understand their requirements and explains to them how your product can address their needs), and an account executive team (which specifically oversees one or more specific customer accounts). This should be supported by the pre-sales team.

People are key to all the roles mentioned. It’s important for the CEO or the senior management to identify who is good at what and then placing them at the position they can perform best. If someone is capable of creating a good rapport with the customer, move that person to pre-sales. Some people show an inclination to solve problems. Put them in the support team.

A small hint about shifts. Keep the people in the same routine, which means keep them in the same shift they come in. Some people like night shift and if they want the night shift, keep them there. Rotating shifts might need to unnecessary resetting of biological clocks of the shift people that might show up as poor performance. Be wary of this.

Should you hire a salesperson in the US?

This question continues to create varied views in the minds of SaaS entrepreneurs who find the US market attractive for their product. The right answer is it depends.

If you are able to close the deal through online and telephone interactions, it’s good and some big deals might also happen. But it’s not a scalable model. A salesperson in the proximity of the customer at times becomes necessary to go after big-ticket size deals and close them. Customers feel confident about having a support person near them. It also involves cultural and mind-set issues and the customers become comfortable with the organization present in the same country as them. It would be better if you would hire a person after you are sure that big ticket size deals would happen. The salesperson should be capable of going after big deals and closing them. One note of caution: Make sure your sales person is working full-time for you and not moonlighting. What is the final word? Again, it depends. The best option is to hire a full-time sales person in the US for closing big-ticket deals. Beware of the cost of the sales guy and the difficulty of getting sales out of them. There have been bad experiences for some. Maybe learning about that helps and also get tips on how to hire the sales guy in the US. There is no one strategy that works and it’s largely your own learning curve. But some pointers from people who already have a sales team or a sales organization in the US helps.

Identifying the right sales people

Sales people are either hunters or farmers. Hunter sales people hunt for new customers and go after new domains aggressively. Farmers have the ability to nurture the existing customers. It’s important to identify a person’s skill and decide where they fit in the sales organization. Read Jason Lemkin’s interview on SaaStr.com.

Retargeting customers can be done through Google mail. Don’t overdo mass mailers. You run the risk of Google labelling you a spammer. Write personalized mails.

Remember, a closure of sales that results in a recurring revenue (for example, through subscriptions) converts into a higher revenue over a period of time, without the need to add new customers for an increase in the revenue.

What is the role of marketing in a SaaS business?

The marketing team should generate qualified leads, which the sales function also should do. Both of this converts to good sales.

Once you identify your target, make sure you gather a valid e-mail address and a valid phone number. There are ways to do it. Learn them.

Social media helps a great deal in lead generation. Customer acquisition happens. If you are looking at competitor social media feeds, you at times spot an unhappy customer, who wants a specific feature or has a need, which your product fulfills. Instant connectivity on Twitter facilitates this connect. Trap them and convert them into your customer.

A step-wise filter for tracking leads works wonders. Right from a prospective customer approaching your product through your website, keep track of the customer to see what is he interested in the product. If he shows more than a mere curiosity interest, track him to see the various levels at which he interacts with the product. Sometimes, customer might return after sometime. Help the customer in whatever ways possible to convert him into a buyer of your product.

How free should be the free trial?

Various strategies work. The free-trial period varies between 6 and 11 days. Look for an optimum number. Any amount of free trials is not going to hurt your business. Think of a longer horizon of the free trial. Say 30 days. This is a feel-good or hygienic factor that keeps the goodwill of your business with the customer. Provide support during free trial and try to educate the customer in what he doesn’t know. You will earn respect and convert a doubter into a customer.

Be disciplined to knock off “parasitic” customers. Keep track of customers on free trial nearing their free trial period. If your plan is to close their account, send a polite mail announcing that their account will be inactive after x amount of days. Make it as if it’s your company’s policy to delete accounts that are dormant for a period of time. Sometimes surprises spring up. The customer might sign up. Periodically getting rid of customers who don’t bring any value to your business is a good idea.

The sales strategy and expanding into new geographies

If you want to expand into a new geography, do your homework thoroughly. Study the terrain in depth before setting your foot in. You must know where you are getting in and what segments you are targeting. Understanding the culture and business practices in that geography works immensely. For example, Australians want you to call them, whereas the English wouldn’t encourage that.

Acquiring a big customer at the beginning is thrilling. But weigh your options clearly before signing on the dotted line. If your sales and support would not be able to cater to the needs of the large enterprise customer, you are better off saying “no” rather than change your business model and focus your energies on one customer. You may not be able to scale instantly on demand. Never significantly or drastically alter your business model for one customer or for one big breakthrough. It would eventually hurt.

Seal the lower end. But the lower end is always going to be cannabalized. Beware of competition and remember you can’t be cheaper than free.

Onboarding the customer

Normally, there is a problem of customers falling off after, say, a couple of months. So it is better to have a customer onboarding team to track sign-up. Live tutorials can handhold the customer for the initial period of using the product. Videos are helpful for non-tech customers.

Don’t disturb the core tech team for small technical glitches. Customer Action Response Team (CART), which fixes small bugs, is a great strategy. Focus on fulfilling customer expectations. Remember, when you solve a customer problem, you earn a happy customer.

To take a cue from Jeff Bezos, hire people who are not able to say “no” in customer development and hire people who say “no” in business development. Empathy is a great trait. Empathize with the customer and their problems and see how best you can solve them.

It’s always best to “farm” the first top 100 customers or key customers who bring 80% of your business. Remember, 20% of the customers bring 80% of your revenue. Focus on them.

With everyone in the room taking away valuable lessons with them, the roundtable wound up on a happy note.

 

 

Global Lean Sales: The power for Demos

Playbook RoundtableOn Oct 18th iSPIRT organized a #PlaybookRT in Mumbai and the topic of discussion was Global Lean Sales. Pallav Nadhani founder of FusionCharts came down for the RT and shared a lot of useful information about how they do things at Fusion Charts. Most of the information from the RT has been covered in Rushab Mehta’s excellent blog post about the RT. I am just adding to that post…

Pallav showed us the demos that Fusion Charts built for their products and I wanted to share a few thoughts about what I learnt from that…

When selling online using a low touch sales model, the web site must replace the sales person at least in the initial phase of the sales cycle. And that is a very difficult job to pull of.

You need to anticipate every piece of information that the prospect may be interested in and make that easy to find. Your web site must then convince the prospect that your product is the right solution to the problem they are seeking to solve. Or convince the prospect that your product will enhance their business and give them a competitive edge.

But the web site must still be simple and clutter free. Putting pages of text explaining everything is of little help because the prospect will rarely spend so much time reading. So what do you do?

Almost everyone today will put up a product tour/demo to try and solve the problem. But a one size fits all demo has its limitation. Not everyone can see a general purpose demo and connect the features to their business requirements, without help from a sales person.  What can work much better are industry specific demos so prospects see how your product can be used in their industry (or a closely related industry).

Seeing the product in the context of one’s usage scenario can make it much easier to understand. Also instead of throwing all functionality at the prospect, only specific features can be showed in a usage specific demo.

FusionCharts does an amazing job of this. Their products enable data visualization and on their web site they have built a comprehensive section with dashboards to showcase the different capabilities of their products.  This includes a Gym Dashboard which demonstrates how membership based businesses can analyze their membership via cohort analysis and a really cool Music Player which showcases the performance of their product.

Looking at these dashboards it is clear that a lot of thinking and effort has gone in to them. It is surely not a trivial exercise and would require a dedicated person/team to pull off. But I think the effort would pay dividends in prospects understanding the product and encouraging low touch sales.

It has inspired us to try and do the same for our product SOHODOX.

Contributed by Shiraz Ahmed, Founder and CEO – ITAZ Technologies

Global Lean Sales – Selling your software online to global markets, without field-force #PlaybookRT

Last week I was going through the startup class videos and one particular statement by Sam Altman stuck with me. He said “All successful founders are fanatics”. And YCombinator has seen a whole bunch of them. The way he puts it is very awesome, let me reproduce the statement here:

“The word fanatical comes up again and again when you listen to successful founders talk about how they think about their product. Founders talk about being fanatical in how they care about the quality of the small details. Fanatical in getting the copy that they use to explain the product just right. and fanatical in the way that they think about customer support. In fact, one thing that correlates with success among the YC companies is the founders that hook up Pagerduty to their ticketing system, so that even if the user emails in the middle of the night when the founder’s asleep, they still get a response within an hour.Companies actually do this in the early days. Their founders feel physical pain when the product sucks and they want to wake up and fix it. They don’t ship crap, and if they do, they fix it very very quickly. And it definitely takes some level of fanaticism to build great products.”

Read the full talk here (later)

2014-10-18 15.23.57

This statement came alive for me yesterday when I met Pallav Nadhani, the founder of FusionCharts. As he walked us through how he built his company and sharing his experiences and wonderful insights in building his company, his fanaticism was apparent. I am sure everyone who was there, wanted some of it to rub on to them. Even though it was a “RoundTable”, I think Pallav had more experience than a lot of us and pretty much carried the group. He shared some very cool insights, with real life examples and actionable suggestions.

There were 11 of us, all selling business-to-business (B2B) products in the range of $1000 – $75,000, some online, some offline, most on a subscription model, some early stage, a few past the validation stage. Almost half of the founders depended on high touch sales and half had products that were Do-it-yourself. Here is a summary of the meetup:

Pallav’s Story

Pallav shared his story on how he started the company when he was 16, to get some pocket money. He made a charting widget for himself and then wrote an article about it, which became popular. Then one thing led to another and he now runs a company that publishes 90+ types of charts has 23,000 customers and 70 people. Some of the things that he focused from very early on was:

  1. Reduce all friction for the user who is evaluating the product.
  2. He promised his users that they would get their money back if they could not build the first chart in 15 minutes. That helped him simplify the on-boarding process and make it very easy for his users.
  3. He was a one person company for a long time and handled everything from developing the product, documenting it to doing customer support.

Documentation

Pallav’s father is an author of 15 books on accounting and that gave him a strong foundation to document his product very well. This was particularly important since his target audience was developers who needed good documentation to use the product.

  1. Pallav himself wrote 3000 to 4000 pages of documentation and still reviews every word that is added by his team.
  2. Documenting the product gave him key insights as a user and helped him refine and debug the product.
  3. Every time someone asks a question. His team is forced to answer using a public document. This made sure that the same question did not get asked again and also created a good knowledge base for his product.
  4. He learned from his father on how to structure documentation (with headings, sub-headings etc) so that the reader can quickly find out the relevant sections to read.

There is another interesting anecdote. jQuery was a late entrant to javascript libraries and according to its creator John Resig, it was because it was the first one that was properly documented.

Marketing and First Impressions

Pallav’s hypothesis is that all sales / conversions are driven by “Fear” or “Greed” and products must highlight these in their marketing copy, specially the headling. He even asked all of us the rephrase the core message of our product to appeal to one of these emotions. I had strong reservations on whether this was correct and if this lead too to much focus on top of the sales funnel (new visitors). Either way, the group seemed convinced. While I thought it went went with Pallav’s aggressive and “switched-on” approach, I have my doubts if it works for all kinds of products. Products have the personalities of their founders embedded in them, and I feel its best to stick with the approach that goes best with the philosophy of the product and the creator.

Pallav also referred Kevin Hale’s analogy of building a customer relationship like a marriage and how the first visit of a customer on the website is like dating. For more on this, I would recommend Kevin Hale’s enlightening talks on the matter (later!).

Some other interesting points that were discussed were:

  1. Classify your traffic into different personas. For Fusion Chart, it is the Developer, Product Manager and Designer.
  2. Deeply understand each persona. Appreciate that they are overloaded with information and identify openings in their daily routines where you can reach them.
  3. For security startups, a weekly roundup of major reported breaches worked well when sent at 8.30 in the morning.
  4. Online marketing has evolved from “carpet bombing” to “sniper”. Audience have to be segmented and messages have to be finely targeted.
  5. It is important to reach the users main Inbox and not the promotions box. So keep the mail personal and do not add an unsubscribe link.
  6. Pallav showed how he used WebEngage for conducting surveys on their visitors and how he tested his hypothesis. For example, his survey would ask if a visitor intends to pay for the product on offer or select an open source alternative. Based on the feedback, Pallav said he would change the marketing copy.
  7. He also used VWO for A/B testing and showed us an example on which one of “HTML5 Charting” or “Javascript Charting” resonated more for the user.
  8. Asking feedback from customers who had evaluated a product was also important. A simple email with the subject “5 minutes of your time for 5 questions” gives Pallav great customer insight.
  9. He said he tests all kinds of hypotheses and keeps experimenting on the message. Examples:
    1. Do users like a simple or complex layout
    2. How many fields should a form have
    3. What colour a button should have

The attendees at PlaybookRTContent Marketing

We spent a whole bunch of time discussing and sharing great insights on Content Marketing. Sahil Parikh of BrightPod.com shared his experiences in content marketing. He has built a product for the marketing community and started a blog with the purpose of reaching out to this community. It took him six months of building the blog before he saw some returns. He has hired two content writers and produces 3 to 4 blog posts a week. He shared that aggressive content marketing teams target producing one post a day. He also reached out to Indian authors on popular blogs like ZDNet and TheNextWeb and pitched the Indian product angle that got him attention. Sandeep Todi of Emportant.com shared that he bumped into a content writer for SiteHR, a popular HR portal and is how working with her to build content for his product.

Content marketing seemed like a favorite of strategy of a Lean Sales team but again it boils down to execution. It is very hard to product high quality content and as more and more people start getting good at it, the bar keeps on increasing.

Some content ideas / anecdotes shared were:

  1. Interview / Talk Show Series: Publish interviews with customers and thought leaders in the domain
  2. Use big brands in your blog posts. Examples from Fusion Charts:
    1. How Unilever / Walmart / P&G uses data visualization
  3. Act on industry events:
    1. Security Breaches
    2. Flipkart Billion Day flop
    3. Home Depot breach
  4. “News Jacking” – Connect popular news items to your product.
    1. GangamStyle in numbers
    2. Infographics on FIFA World Cup
    3. 10 infographics on Fitness Apps
  5. Put customer logos on your site, content unless the customer objects. Don’t mention it in your contract or it will trigger a red flag.
  6. Allow your site content to be reproduced.
  7. Curate, collate good content from other site and credit the original author.
  8. Get quotes from industry influencers, the will also ReTweet your content.
  9. Speed is of essence. Create great content quicly (yeah right!).
  10. Publish whitepapers. They are popular with higher management.

Sales Funnel

Pallav walked us through the various parts of the sales funnel.

[From his slides]

  1. Awareness (ads, blog, event, word-of-mouth…)
  2. Initial Visit
    1. Different channels / different ROI
    2. Best channels = low cost, high ROI
  3. Engagement
    1. Trial, case study, whitepaper, anything that could give you email AND other information
  4. Nurturing
    1. Mix of product, marketing and sales
    2. Sales job: get the customer on the call and do aggressive follow up
  5. Closing
    1. Handover from sales to client success.
    2. Repeat business through subscriptions, up-sells or cross-sells.

Pricing

There was a very heated discussion on pricing. Pallav was of the mainstream industry opinion that price is a reflection of value. The higher the price, the better the quality of customers and revenue. There was a discussion on discounts and how in high touch sales, discounts are a bane. Here Pallav shared that adding artificial constraints to negotiate. For example, you can extend the support by 3 months instead of giving a discount, or increase the number of servers etc.

Open Source

There was some resistance and suspicion from the group in discussing this and understandably so because of the nature of the software products business that depends on Intellectual Property Rights. We did touch upon this briefly and why based on our (ERPNext) experience we see open source as a great way to not only reach out a new generation of users but also believe in an alternative way of doing business.

2014-10-18 15.24.15Conclusion

It was great to learn from Pallav, and we thank him for sharing so many suggestions and learnings. Also a big thanks to him for openly sharing specific insights and walking us through an A/B test or testing an hypothesis. This is also a great initiative by Avinash Raghava and iSPIRT, the think-tank/lobby group for Software Products to bring together entrepreneurs so that they can share tips and build networks. It would have been a bit better if there was more unstructured time so that there would be better interaction between the group, to build deeper relationships between the founders. Also a big thank you to FreeCharge.in for hosting the event and providing lunch.

Finally what really matters is execution. For me the biggest takeaway was that the product is a reflection of the creator / founder and it was important that the founders are obsessed with each detail of the product and its quality and also work with the energy that is required to do so much work. For that it is important that they see success early on as Pallav did and the once they are on to something they make sure that they do not lose it.

Specifically, for me it reminded me that its time to go back to fixing the documentation!

Innovate on the Product, Not on the Business Model

Entrepreneurs from Bangalore had no problem driving into Chennai amid a tense political situation in Tamil Nadu. There was an air of expectation and enthusiasm on the part of more than 15 entrepreneurs who had come in from Bangalore and Mumbai, apart from Chennai itself, to listen to Girish Mathrubootham, Freshdesk CEO and founder, for the Playbook Roundtable on Scaling a SaaS business. Colourful wall graffiti greeted visitors at the Freshdesk’s vibrant office, which itself exuded energy.

A condensed version of the discussion is given in form of a Q&A.

Girish from Freshdesk

What should I focus on in a SaaS business?

The No. 1 success for your business is your product and it is key to your sustenance in business. You should know what matters to your business. Innovate on the product but don’t change your business model. Look at businesses that are in the same domain as you are or businesses that sell to the same kind of customers like yours. Adopt their business model. Copying business models is not a sin. Tweaking the business model may not be good in the long run. 37Signals started charging credit card subscription only when the merchant bank refused them monthly subscriptions as the bank felt the business is new and could fold up in any time. Such business model changes happen by compulsion and not by design.

How should I go about marketing the SaaS business?

Forget affiliate marketing. It works only for impulse buys and in an e-commerce environment. Success, if any, is not scalable. Only Constant Contact has achieved success with affiliate marketing.

Guest blogs with linkbacks to your product site is a good idea.

Positioning and lead generation are key to marketing. Trigger e-mails is just a drip marketing tool and not scalable. Killing welcome e-mails increases response rates. Getting your e-mail to land in the target’s inbox is crucial and it shouldn’t get into Promotion box in Gmail.

Text-only e-mail with no images and links works best. Attention-grabbing subject line and shortening the length to four to five lines assure greater response rates. Remember, mails are read on mobiles. So keep it short.

Instead of a uniform pitch to customers, talk to them to understand their problems. Then your demo should provide a solution to their problems. Customers at times get confused if you run through your presentation and may not connect with how the product or the features will solve their problems. Be specific.

Make your demo educational for the customer. Say something new and which the customer doesn’t know. It will earn you respect and might convert to sales.

Freemium has two groups. In one, after a trial period, you charge for the product right from the beginning. In the other, there are a free version and a paid version of the product. Nail down which works best for your business. Any number of free trials is not going to hurt your business. Leaving money on the table is a good idea. Because the customer might buy after a long time. Patience is a good trait.

Track the customer from their first visit to your website and determine the pattern of how customers find you. This is called visitor fingerprinting. Then you know where to focus upon.

Trade shows. Do they help? For small companies, they may bring some branding and don’t expect too much ROI from events. What works best is a personalized presentation to your target customer. Do your homework and create customized presentations. This might convert to sales.

Attendees at FreshdeskGenerally, personalize across presales, sales, and marketing. The response rates are 25%.

[Read Marc Benioff’s Behind the Cloud.]

[Watch Gail Goodman of Customer Contact’s video “How to negotiate a long slow SaaS ramp of death”]

Webinars? Webinars are good. All the more good if there is an expert on the topic speaking and it offers something new. Make the webinar having some educational value for the audience.

PR – Be in the news constantly. Hire a good PR agency and avoid scamsters promising hell a lot of things (say, one-page content on you in a magazine that has access to thousands of targets in a domain). They wouldn’t be suitable for your business. Churn out good stories often. Reach the people who don’t need you now. Seed them for the future.

Segregate your marketing function into a campaign team and a content marketing/product marketing team.

Notes from the iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable – Nuances of Customer Acquisition #PlaybookRT

Saturday, June 16 was the day, the iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable finally arrived in Mumbai. The topic for the Roundtable was Nuances of Customer Acquisition. 

The Roundtable was hosted at the office of WebEngage by their CEO Avlesh Singh and saw participation from CEOs of around 14 startups from in and around Mumbai.

10488869_10153099109185639_609878204_nThe event went on for around 6 hours but given the variety of issues discussed each issue could be touched upon briefly. Since this was the initial event of this kind in Mumbai, a lot of participants were meeting each other for the first time. Some time therefore had to be spent in understanding each other’s businesses, back-stories and some of the special challenges they faced.

In terms of business stage, this was a very diverse group ranging from companies signing up their initial customers to those on their way to scaling up from a well established customer base. The challenges each one faced and techniques they employed were understandably different.

Some of the hot issues that got debated were effective usage of content marketing and social media for customer acquisition, working with resellers and using out of the box ideas to increase brand awareness.

Content Marketing and Social Media

There seemed to be almost unanimous feedback that there is great potential in these techniques and there will be a lot of experimentation and learning required to figure out what would work best in an Indian scenario and for that particular product category. One size definitely does not fit all, however that should not discourage you from trying. Challenges in creating content for an international audience were also discussed. A participant pointed out that one Indian company was finding it more effective to get content written by its US based team.

Different Mantras For Different Markets

There was a discussion about different customer behaviours in different Indian cities. For one company inviting potential customers to educational seminars worked well in Bangalore but did not have the same results in Mumbai. Also they saw good demand from Kolkata. The CEO of another SaaS based startup reported excellent pick up from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. He mentioned that if he was to begin now, he would probably focus more on those cities than the major Indian metros.

Resellers and Customization Requests

In the B2B market, even when selling SaaS products, face-to-face meetings are still important when selling in India. Resellers can really help here by providing the requisite feet on the street and leveraging their existing client relationships. However it takes a lot of time and effort to find and educate resellers.

Requests from customers for product customization are pretty common in India. This may not always be a good thing for product companies. So companies are learning to tactfully deal with such requests without jeopardizing the deal itself. This is especially important when dealing with requests from customers contacted through resellers. One of the successful tacts in dealing with customisation requests was to quote a high price which either results in good revenue or ends up in dropping the request. Either way, customisation should always be merged into the product roadmap to avoid maintenance nightmares.

10473799_10153099108785639_379159022_nSales Bible

One of the cardinal principles in sales is to create a sales bible. Ensure that every person talks and positions the product the same way and you follow a well thought out strategy in terms of furthering the customer decision making process to your advantage. In the growth phase if this is not done, you end up having inconsistencies in your sales process which significantly reduces the chances of successful acquisition. Some high level aspects of creating your sales bible:

  • Identify what kind of collateral you need
  • Qualifying the customer
  • Sharing price at the right stage
  • Determining timeline and budget
  • Figure out whether they are buying based on need or want
  • Identify early on whether they are long tail prospects and how much human touch should be built into your sales cycle. Spend your time on long tail vs short tail judiciously based on the ticket size.
  • Have aggressive goals and set weekly sales targets for your team
  • Adhere to your sales bible and redraft it from time to time based on learnings so your process becomes better over time.

Ticket Size

Ticket size is extremely important part of customer acquisition. Your product may sell well to a Fortune 1000 company and you may make 1 sale a year. You can also position the same “product” but in a new avatar for a smaller ticket size and sell 100s every year. So traction in customer acquisition can have a major boost or roadblock depending upon how you decide your ideal target customer profile. One such customer decided to keep their ticket price to US$ 3k so as to avoid getting into budgetary approvals by the buyer organisation and got significant traction in spontaneous purchase decisions. Another participant had the reverse problem as they sell analytics tools and did not want to target SMEs who have relatively smaller spends on social media.

Other ideas

It is important to try different marketing ideas as it is difficult to judge what will click. One excellent example of an out of the box idea for brand awareness was www.chotuchaiwala.com. The company behind this saw great results from the campaign.

One of the most important lessons early on is identifying the right customer. In case of one company they started selling to graphic designers but after finding that they were not tech savvy, they shifted focus to ad agencies and found their product market fit. It also makes sense to piggy back on sales channels which are selling a complimentary product and who may be able to sell your product easily to the same target group.

Using APIs to extend your ecosystem is another effective strategy. Done well, you can then latch on to the traction in other products that you can integrate with, and therefore expand your leads inorganically.

10486350_10153099108485639_2090687747_nFree vs Paid

It is generally believed that SaaS companies offering a free plan for their products do not see many free to paid conversions. However some companies reported that the free plan allowed them to increase their brand awareness. For example if the free plan user’s web site featured the product brand, independent visitors to the web site get exposed to the brand and generate leads for selling the paid version. In effect, the free plan rarely works to convert to paid plans but serves well when used as an advertising medium. Some others used an incentive during the free trial period to sign up early and bypass the long evaluation cycle.

To sum it up, this was a very good and important beginning. And everyone is looking forward to more in-depth sessions in the coming months!

Guest Post by Shiraz Ahmed, Founder & CEO – ITAZ Technologies

 

Product Management mantras from the 26th Playbook Roundtable

The 26th playbook roundtable was held last week (8th March 2014) at Delhi NCR and brought together over 15 startup and product practitioners to discuss and gain insights on some of the challenging aspects of growth and monetization in product companies. This roundtable was hosted at Eko India Financial Services office in Gurgaon, and was led by Amit Ranjan, Cofounder of Slideshare, and Amit Somani, CPO of MakeMyTrip. In a span of over 5 hours, a diverse set of topics were discussed. Prominent takeaways from the roundtable were insights on approaches to pricing, virality, growth decisions, pivoting, user experience etc. The following paragraphs detail the key learning from each of these above aspects.

Pivoting in a Business

Creating a successful company is essentially a search for the repeatable and scalable business model. To succeed in this search, companies should frequently make and test predictions about what will work in their business models. Businesses, no matter, which stage they are in are always pivoting. As a business, while you do focus on your revenues, but you also need to constantly keep thinking what will drive the revenue in 3 years from now and ensure that you slowly move in that direction. Of the so many internet companies, perhaps only a handful will survive 10 years. Amit Somani mentioned how MakeMyTrip is constantly looking at the next big thing. It started from a flight booking venture for NRIs to become the largest flight booking portal for the Indian market and is already evolving to cater to hotels and holiday packages. The next challenge for the company is mobile and ensuring that the company is successful in an increasingly mobile world.

IMG_2851Amit Ranjan talked about how often ventures have to 3-4 side projects or “distractions” that help you understand what will work in a fast changing industry and ensure you evolve to address these changes.

Moving from early adopters to 10x Growth

One of the best ways to achieve 10x growth after successfully validating your product and without spending too much or no money is virality. By definition, virality is designing and engineering your product such that it markets itself. A viral product derives much of its growth from its current users recruiting new users. A user could recruit another through a simple invitation (“Check out this product, it’s cool/useful/entertaining!”), or directly through using the product (“I want to send you money on PayPal!”). Virality is not an accident. It is engineered. Virality is more about width and depth. Amit Ranjan shared interesting insights on how the homepage of Slideshare during the initial days was designed for virality (with several banners and stickers to attract audience) during the initial days and when the portal was able to achieve significant growth, the homepage was redesigned for user experience.

Prioritizing Customer Inputs in a B2B Product

If you manage a product or service in the business-to-business (B2B) market, customer requests for features will be a regular part of your work. Requests come in through the sales team, service reps, and senior management, as well as directly from customers themselves. This makes it difficult for companies to decide which feature to include in the product or not. A good thumb of rule to decide whether to include the feature or not is that if 3 customers want it or a pushy a customer wants it and you can sell it to 2 more customers, then you should go ahead and include that feature. A key issue is to how do you know multiple customers have the same request? A common way is to utilize software which allows customers to post ideas, suggestions and requests. There are idea management providers that are good for this. Or you can user customer feedback sites. These asynchronous, always-on, open-to-all sites are well-suited for capturing suggestions.

IMG_2852In addition, you may need to check other areas. Your email often contains customer suggestions. Or you have a service ticket database you can check. Relevant knowledge will be in people’s heads, those who directly work with customers.

Also, it is very important to validate this feature. This can be done by rolling out first to your employees and then to few customers. This will help validate your thoughts.

Documentation and User Training

Generating user training manuals and videos can be a tedious job, especially for ERP kind of solutions, especially when the product is frequently undergoing changes. Also, the general trend seems to be that users have stopped reading trend. Even if people did decide to read the instructions, showing too many at once increases users cognitive load. Because users cannot read the hint overlay and use the app at the same time, they are forced to memorize the instructions and then apply them. Thus, it is more effective to focus on a single interaction rather than attempting to explain every possible area of the user interface.

Rather than generating documents and videos which will very soon become redundant, a better approach will be to have built in CTAs in the product to help/guide the users. This includes things such as built in FAQs (built using services such as Zendesk), using coachmarks etc. Presenting hints one-by-one, at the right moment, makes it a lot easier for users to understand and learn instructions. This interaction pattern has the added benefit of teaching the user at which point in the workflow these interactions or functions become applicable.

Making Sense of Data

As a product usage grows, enormous amount of data gets collected and sometimes making sense of the data becomes a challenge for Product Managers. It is no wonder that big players such as LinkedIn, Facebook etc. have large teams comprising of data scientists. Data crunching from this team of scientists even help the companies to validate the probability that a particular feature will be liked by their audience.

Product Managers are knee deep in the product and data can help take an unbiased look at the product, often yielding amazing insights and learnings. Data Analytics are important for one major reason: What you don’t measure, you can’t improve. Without knowing what the state of the system is, it is very hard, if not impossible, to do much to change or affect the system. You can, of course, make changes  blind, but without analytics you will never know whether the system was changed or whether nothing happened. It allows you to see what is currently happening, make a change and see what effect the change has.

IMG_2849A good way to make sense of data is to have an hypothesis and then look for local maximas. Apart from that, product managers can apply operations such as segmentation, funnels and cohorts to make more sense of data. Over time, as the system changes and improves, the KPIs (and consequently the metrics) will change, which in turn leads changes in what needs to be measured. It is likely that new flows and metrics will be discovered that prove crucial to the system so whatever the analytics used, they will need to be continuously adapted to meet this change and keep you on top of what’s happening in your product.

Encouraging Users to Sign Up

For a consumer product, completely logged in experience versus a logout experience is a choice between distribution and engagement. Slideshare and Youtube offer a complete logout experience as users do not need to login to access the portal. Linkedin devised an interesting way to incentivize users to sign up. They show a glimpse of profile to users who then need to sign up to view the full profile. It is also imperative that the process to get users through the front door of an application and engaging with content needs to be as simple and seamless as possible if an organization wants to win and keep mindshare.

Increasingly a lot of companies are using gamification, but it is more geared towards engagement rather than acquisition.

Key Takeaways from the 25th #PlaybookRT at Bangalore – Sales for Startups

The 25th playbook roundtable held last week (01 March 2014) brought together about 14 startup practitioners to discuss and gain insights on some of the challenging aspects of Sales in product companies. This roundtable was hosted at Accel Partners office in Bangalore, and was led by Aneesh Reddy, from Capillary Technologies. In a span of about 5 hours, a diverse set of topics were discussed. Prominent takeaways from the roundtable were insights on approaches to pricing, decision making during sales cycles, dealing with resellers and partners, setting up a sales team for the first time, how to plan for your Sales team when you are scaling up and dealing with Sales in new geographies. The following paragraphs detail the key learning from each of these above aspects.

When to setup your first sales team?

Entrepreneurs should be selling themselves till they achieve repeatable revenue streams, irrespective of the sector and nature of the offering. One should start looking at a dedicated sales team only when the founding team cannot anymore respond to leads / queries in a time bound manner.

If the founding team does not have deep skills in selling, it may be useful to involve a consultant to setup the team and the processes and learn on the way. Firms such as Gosonix have helped setup the sales processes for startups as they began to address increasing customer interest.

There are also organizations that provide inside sales services to startups. A few startups such as Freshdesk have benefited by use of such extended inside sales teams.

Inside Sales Operations and Management

Based on the target geography that you are working on, one should use the qualification criteria to build a sales pipeline. Macro parameters such as number of employees or revenue of the enterprise in the segment and country that you are targeting to sell provide good starting points to develop the qualification criterion.

Inside sales activities have yielded good results in English speaking countries such as US and Europe, however, has been very difficult and non-efficient in UAE, South Asia and non English speaking parts of Africa.

Accent training is a must if you are reaching out to customers outside India. Training partners are available to help you with accent training needs of your sales team.

For markets such as South Asia, cold calling does not work – since language barriers and culture is not very assimilative. Field business development operations are cheaper than inside sales operations if the target market of focus is on South Asian countries.

Sales Best Practices

A 30 second script consisting of factoids describing who you are, what you do, which customers have you dealt with, how has it helped them is a must for any startup Sales – irrespective of whether you set shop just today, or if you are scaling your startup.
Have a clear separation of duties amongst your lead generators and deal closers. Usual practice is to hire a deal closing guy for about 5 lead generators.

Ensure efficiency in your Sales operation by tracking the conversion of calls to meetings to actual leads and finally to conversions or drop-outs. Expect about 1 lead to come for qualification from about 10 calls on an average.

Once you have a lead, qualify the lead using the B.A.N.T or the more comprehensive S.C.O.T.S.M.A.N technique to ensure you spend the optimal time on that lead.

Differentiate and track marketing generated leads and inside sales generated leads. Provide visibility to the Field Sales personnel on the source of the lead to ensure they have the right context to qualify and initiate a discussion with the prospect.

Indian customers – especially in the SMB segment take a lot of time to decide to buy. Keep them engaged continuously with good marketing content after initial contact. They will get in touch with you and buy when they decide to go ahead.

Pricing

Pricing is the trickiest aspect in Selling. For offerings where the value added by your offering / solution can be calculated directly or indirectly, pricing conversations is a lot easier – since you have data to back your discussion. However, in other cases, one has to use all available information and work on a range to begin with.

For startups that are in their early stages, back calculate based on your expenses to decide on pricing. Another approach for SaaS based early stage startups is to price based on the CAC (Customer Acquisition Costs). General agreement is that a CAC of about 5-6 months is ideal, and a CAC of upto 1 year is tolerable for early stage startups.

A barebones calculation of pricing should be based on the product of revenues, gross margin you want to derive and customer lifespan for your offering. David Skok has good articles on these topics.

Complement your Sales efforts by your Marketing efforts

Use marketing as complementary aspect to sales – apart from leveraging it for various aspects of building your brand and communication etc. Nurture your customers by segmenting them based on the previous interaction by your company and send relevant content that could be of use to them.

For startups targeting global customers, ensure that you generate adequate content by means of customer acquisition stories, case studies, announcement of new customer wins, participation in events etc. This will help build the initial set of opportunities from the marketing side.

Use the rental lists of magazines that are widely read in the field of your offerings to increase mindshare. Blog or write regularly on Industry trends in some of these magazines to offer a good discount. Engaging with a PR agency based on the geography in the early stages of market entry also can pay off.

Discovery Hack Playbook Series – Effectuation – Experiential Workshop

In Early Stage Startups – What to do next ?

Early stage startups and first time entrepreneurs face many challenges that are unprecedented in nature.
– How to know which discussion (customer, vendors, mentors) inputs to keep and which to ignore ?
– How to make confident decisions when very little information seem to be available and the stakes are high ?
– How to navigate your way through when so many options seem to be available ?

Many successful entrepreneurs have navigated this challenges with ease. These entrepreneurs believe that “The part of future I can control I do not need to predict it”

Decades of study of successful entrepreneurs has led to the finding the entrepreneurs think effectually and not causally. The studies have to led to identification of 5 key principles of Effectuation which when applied help entrepreneurs improve the odds of success.

Prof Saras Saraswathi from Darden University who has founded these principles through rigorous research will be conducting a experiential learning workshop on Feb 5 to select Indian product entrepreneurs.

This workshop is an extension and continuation from PNCamp discovery track playbook discussion. To maximize the effectiveness of the experiential workshop will have only 10-15 participants.

The event will be held from 10.00 to 3.00 pm on Feb 5 at iCreate office in Koramangala. Please do confirm if you are able to attend this by filling the form.

Enterprise Sales, Product Market Fit and Partnerships: Learning from the 23rd iSPIRT Round Table

Vivek from iCreate facilitated yet another juicy round table with lessons learnt ‘from the trenches’. While this article provides a distilled summary, it cannot do justice to in-person learning.  I strongly encourage you to attend the next iSPIRT round table.

Vivek started off by saying that there is no silver bullet.  Every product exists in its specific market conditions. Different things work for different products in different domains.  Nevertheless, there are certain fundamental themes that are commonly applicable.

The fundamental problem typically during the early days of a startup is lack of clarity of what are we solving and for whom (in other words – “Product-Market fit”).  Articulating this clearly is the first thing a startup needs to get right. 

2013-11-23 16.59.13

Spend some time answering the two questions below and ensure that all of your team is on the same page. Otherwise, it will be like the classic story of six blind men describing an elephant in completely different ways.

WHO AM I?

I am better than ____ (existing way of solving the problem)

For ________ (what problem)

Because _____ (differentiation)

As a result of ____ (your secret sauce)

Answer this for your product.  This manifests in your strategy, marketing communications etc.

WHY BUY ME?

Create a sentence with 10-15 words.  I am better than X because of Y and solving the problem of Z. 

Articulate this clearly and crisply. Otherwise, you are confused and it is also confusing to your customers.

Without clarity, you knock on a lot of doors and have lots of meetings, but with no results.  This can be very frustrating.

Domain Knowledge

It is very important that you have a very good understanding of the domain in which you are playing.  Depth of problem understanding is a must.

Do you know who the buyer really is? It is not enough to say company C is the customer. Who exactly in the company is your customer? Why should the user spend time to understand your product? Why should the user talk to you? What is his/her role? What are their motivations and fears?  What is their procurement process? Are you sure you qualify to pass those gates?

You need to have differentiation in your product with respect to your competition. It can be things like premium domain knowledge, completeness of the solution, cheaper pricing etc.  You should be clear about your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) and articulate it to your team and prospective customers.  The differentiation should be outcome-based and not based on things like technology stack.

People pay a premium for completeness. Plus it is easier to understand. And we can show the value to the user. E.g. architecturally, well designed modules are all fine, but from the customer point of view, he needs to see a complete use case coverage.

There is a popular Hindi saying “Jo dikha hain, wo bikta hain” (meaning “only what can be seen can be sold”).  It is tougher to convince with words.  Ensure you can clearly demonstrate the value of your product in action.

Pay close attention to your problem space and understand the dynamics. For example, in banking domain, the customers are married to existing platforms such as SAP, Oracle etc. So when you make technology choices, ensure that they work with the incumbent platforms.

Product Market Fit

Product market fit is critical.  Have a plan to get to product market fit as fast as possible.  Danger is you might run out of money, so get to product market fit fast.  iCreate was providing services and used these revenues to fund their product development. This way they had a longer runway to get to product market fit.

If you need to educate the value of your product, then there is a segmentation mismatch. Better to find a market place where they see the value clearly and it is more about demonstrating your value. If you have to explain why they should use your product, then product market fit is not there.

In your universe of market place, there will be big clients, small clients and medium clients with different attributes. Do not try to solve the problem for everyone. Pick your initial target segment as narrow as possible and play there. Pick a demographic where the user sees the value immediately and get them to start adopting. You can later expand to other segments when you see success. 

Qualify your market segment and leads. If they don’t have the problem, don’t spend time with them. You will see a glimmer of hope everywhere, but you are not going anywhere.   This will give you a false sense of accomplishment and is a dangerous situation to be in.

Having a vertical offering works better than a horizontal offering (i.e. applicable to everyone in the world).  Having a generic mother of all products means multiple stakeholders need to be convinced and the message also gets diluted.  It is better to choose a specific problem and completely solve it.  You can sell faster and also sell for more and get customers faster.  For example, iCreate had a generic solution which took 9-12 months to close the deal. With a single point solution, the time reduced to 3-4 months.

As a startup, you want to do several different things, but you don’t have resources.  You need to make the hard call and pick the 1 or 2 things you want to pursue.  Platform to solve N problems takes 2 or 3 times more time than solving 1 problem.  An amorphous offering is more dangerous and takes more time.

Another example that was shared was of a language translation product. They struggled to find market fit for their generic language translation services.  Then they verticalized it to retail segment where their product translated customer messages to native language and vice versa.  They were able to then go and penetrate this market segment.

As a startup, it is challenging to verticalize a horizontal offering due to resource constraints and the temptation to have a large market size, but this needs to be done.

Finding the first customer willing to use the product is a big challenge.  Be prepared for a long grind, and it can be a very frustrating experience.  Sometimes it can take a long time to get the product market fit (several months).  However, you should keep an eye on whether you are making progress or the product is not viable as a business.  You need to introspect if you are getting product-mismatch feedback.  Set clear goals and metrics. Don’t go by sentiments.  You have to be dispassionate.  Come up with some objective metric such as “The way for me to validate X is Y”.

If founders can’t sell, nobody else can sell. Look at the offering instead of finding a sales guy.

Every company needs one or two key inflection events change the trajectory completely. You also need some luck to get your first break.  Try to get top marquee client vs. a small client.  Marquee client also helps in marketing and validation and others will have lesser resistance to trying your product.

Product Merit is a must. In addition, try to show up where your customers hang out e.g. have stalls in conferences.

The next big challenge is getting the first paid customer. Then, you need to get your first referencable customer. 

You need to inculcate champions among your existing customers.  They will also tell their peers. This is critical during early days. Investors and prospective customers want to talk to existing customers.

2013-11-23 15.23.21

Creating a Sales Team

Look for partners or non-founding sales ONLY after getting product market fit and messaging right.  Till then, the founders should be the sales team. In iCreate, pre-investor stage sales team was zero.

Initial sales guys that you hire should be comfortable with the ambiguity of startups. 

Hire folks who can put ‘skin in the game’, aligning with wealth creation (e.g. ESOP) or a percentage of revenue.  Incentives also work – for example, “If you get $X revenue in Y months, you will get a car”.  Make the incentives outcome based and not effort based

In India, typically R&D budget is much more than the sales budget, but as you get traction investment in sales should increase.  One rule of thumb is to have 60:40 (engineering to sales) during growth stage. In US, mature companies have R&D costs around 15% of revenue and 50% of revenue is invested in Sales.

If the sales team is sub-optimal, firing early is better. You might make mistakes, but it is liberating when you fire a misfit as you can focus on important things better.  

Without raising money, growth can be slower.  If you raise money, growth is much faster.  Raising money for growing is a very good idea.

Partnerships (Distribution and SI)

First, have a story to sell. You put in initial effort to get initial customers in your target geographies. Then attract partners using these success stories.

We discussed two kinds of partnerships.

  1. Distributor – who just resells your product.
  2. System Integrator (SI) – who resells your product along with implementation or other services.

In every market, nuances are different e.g. private vs. public banks, different geographies etc. You need to figure out which kind of partnership is suitable to your product.

In mature markets like US or Hong Kong, you can sell direct and may not partners.  US is a great place to do business, as you get quick and clear feedback – positive or negative.  If they see value, they will buy. However, the sales cost in US is expensive.

In emerging markets, people want in person meetings and they do not say yes or no immediately. This can lead to mixed signals and longer sales cycle.

In geographies like Africa you might have to work with local partners. Your direct sales may not work. In general, East Africa and West Africa need distribution partner to set up meetings. Then your sales guy has to do the work.  Look at sector focused players e.g. computer warehouse in Nigeria, Simba in Kenya.  

Middle East and Africa are brand conscious – they don’t want to go with small startups.

In mature organizations, SI plays a major role and has a lot of influence on decisions.  Evangelize both with SI and clients. Once SI sees a win for your product, they will want to replicate that in similar contexts.

2013-11-23 15.26.17Be generous with commissions to your partners.  Once they see the money, they’ll show more seriousness.  See if your partner can make commitments to gauge their seriousness.  The commitment is not necessarily in money terms only. For example, ask if the partner is willing to send their employee for training on your product to your location.

It was observed that strategic discussions with SIs not as fruitful as tactical ones.  If there is an immediate opportunity, SI and you can have a meaningful tactical discussion.  Strategic level discussions might give you a good feeling, but not much might come out of it.

Channel partners need to see a clear way of how and how much money they can make. Find a channel partner who already has a user base of stakeholders of your interest.  To find out, look at other players in your space and which partners they are using.

Remember that your product is just an additional product for your channel partner.

Partners want to look at value addition, not just cost or feature arbitrage.  Partners compare your deal with existing big names to see if they get to benefit more by pitching your product.  

Partners need to be given all intelligence on a platter. They don’t want to spend on learning or figuring out. They don’t want you to experiment at their cost.

Some participants were worried that brands from India might have to first fight the battle of perception of being an India based company. But feedback was that it might be an issue in the beginning, but once you get traction and the product has merit, this problem is not insurmountable.

Government tenders is a complicated process.  You need to be proactive about positioning your product even before tender process. 

2013-11-23 15.23.50

Product Positioning

There are different stakeholders in a B2B context – could be the CEO, IT Manager, or VP of a business unit.  All of them are looking at different parts of the problem (one might be looking at cost savings, one might be looking at value delivered by the product and another might be looking at maintenance costs).   Create your message for each stakeholder.

For your product positioning, consider the following:

  1. For the points of your differentiation, reinforce in your messaging.
  2. For points of parity with competition, highlight them.
  3. And for points of despair, mitigate or downplay them.

From your client’s point of view (particularly in large enterprise context) “he will never get fired for hiring a well-known brand. It will be risky for him to try a startup’s product”. Reduce the risk for your client and also demonstrate differentiated value of your product.

Proof of Concept

Instead of free proof-of-concept (POC), ask for conditional order.  This shows commitment and also the buying process will start early. In B2B context, the process can be quite long.  If the POC is not successful, the order can be cancelled.  If you can get a paid POC, that is the best.   Free POC can be a waste of time if the person driving the pilot does not have buying authority.

Advisors

It is good to have an advisory committee of domain experts. This is good for validation. You can never be an expert in every area, so have advisers.  Typically, you meet them once a month or once a quarter.

There are three common models for compensating advisers:

  1. Free.  They like your passion and are willing to give you advice from their experience.  But this can be good only for some time. Otherwise, you will start feel guilty about taking their time for free.
  2. Stock options.  This is better as they will benefit when you benefit.
  3. Payment for their time. This is the standard consulting by the hour model.

Conclusion

While there is no silver bullet that works in every scenario, there are certain fundamental aspects that are common. 

Unfortunately, a lot of learning is experiential.  And it will take time. You’ll do wrong things but when you navigate, you can course correct earlier by having the knowledge from those who have tread this path before you.

Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Tweetable tweets

The first problem a startup must solve is product-market fit.  Everything else comes later. Tweet this.

It is very important that you have a very good understanding of the domain in which you are playing. Tweet this.

People pay a premium for completeness. Better to solve one problem completely than N problems partially.Tweet this.

Jo dikha hain, wo bikta hain (“only what can be seen can be sold”).  Tweet this.

If you need to educate the value of your product, then there is a segmentation mismatch. Better to find a market place where they see the value clearly. Tweet this.

If founders can’t sell, nobody else can sell. Look at the offering instead of finding a sales guy. Tweet this.

Tactical discussions with System Integrators are more fruitful than strategic ones. Tweet this.

Design and its New Role in Innovation – A Round Table led by Eskild Hansen (Nov 26th, New Delhi)

DesignRoundTable with Eskild Hansen in New Delhi

Eskild Hansen will lead a discussion with prominent design thinker in the NCR on ‘Design and its New Role in Innovation.’

Eskild Hansen is one of the most talented Danish Designers on the Scandinavian landscape. Just turned 40, he has already been in leaderships positions at Cisco and Coloplast among others after having worked with other leading global design firms. At CISCO Eskild was responsible for establishing their first European Design Centre in Copenhagen and during this period helped bring a breathe of fresh air to the previously ‘boring and bulky’ Wireless Routers. He even won a Red dot in 2011 for one of his designs. You can read more about his work at www.eskildhasen.com.

Eskild is also a part of the Danish government strategic think tank that is developing and strategizing the ‘Danish Design Society.’ Invest in Denmark, a part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is bringing him to India on their 2nd Design Tour between 25th and 30th of November, 2013 and are offering the members of iSpirit and opportunity to engage with Eskild on common areas of interest. A new development has been the opening of a Danish Innovation Centre in New Delhi and Bangalore (www.icdk.um.dk).

Eskild is also very excited and eager to work with Indian companies for his private design consulting company.

Everything is an experiment

A few days back, SameerAvinash and I chatted about my learnings from doing the Product Nation Playbook Roundtables as part of iSPIRT. If you’re curious what they are, here’s how iSPIRT describes this program.

We convert conversations into playbooks for product entrepreneurs. Product companies need a different mindset than IT services businesses. They need to anticipate customer needs rather than just react to them. They need to brand themselves in very different ways and create IP that will disrupt the marketplace. They need deep technologists rather than fungible engineers. And so on. pn.ispirt.in will be the platform for enabling crucial conversations around these issues amongst practitioners. It will use an evidence based methodology to shine light on successful playbooks.

From iSpirt website.

I believe building products is a continuous and highly impactful experiment that one can do. More so in today’s digital day and age. Here’s a short video put together by Sameer that captures my thoughts.

Sridhar Ranganathan(CrediBase) sharing his views on “Building a Product is Experiment” from ProductNation on Vimeo.

The key aspect of every experiment is that there’s definitely an OUTCOME! Whether that is good or bad, is something left to the hypothesis one frames, before the experiment.

Meanwhile, a bunch of folks who’re very interested in seeing the product ecosystem evolve in India, have come together to create #PNCamp, a 2-Day Boot Camp for product entrepreneurs. You can learn more about it here, and if you’re a product entrepreneur, I’ll strongly recommend getting an invite for this – you’ll learn a bunch from it. Even this is an experiment, to learn from how to evolve the ecosystem. Do you agree with me? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

22nd #PlaybookRT – Solving a customer’s problem in a way your competitor is not doing, is the most memorable thing for your customer or partner.

The Pune Round Table on Lean Sales (26 Oct 2013) could not have had product leaders with personalities as different as Kailash Katkar @QuickHeal and Pallav Nadhani @FusionCharts. In this difference lay the magic. The magic at this Round Table was in full force. Thank you Kailash for hosting us all.

Round Tables are not about story telling. It’s about getting to know specific challenges of the group and correlating that with real experiences of other folks, especially the leaders who have experienced similar problems first hand. However, this Round Table would not be complete without some inspiration from the growth trajectory of Quickheal and Fusioncharts.

Entrepreneurial Discoveries:

Kailash Katkar, QuickHeal:

Kailash started off as a calculator repair engineer, and later was the only one in Pune who could fix broken ledger posting machines. The seeds of Quickheal were sown when they gave away virus prevention software for free. For him, the approach of always being close to the customer’s problem led to one solution (product) after another. Kailash was never a sales guy and when traditional channels refused to carry his ‘Indian’ product, he offered it to computer repair shops and the rest of his distribution story is history.

He realized that even an STD call to Pune was a large enough friction for channel partners to call them at Pune. Meeting with customers and partners helped establish local sales offices, a centralized helpdesk call center, even local feet on the street for support and much more.

Lesson#1: he always pushed his product as a service (we will clean it for you) and demonstrated value, rather than trying to push a box.

Lesson #2: always remained close to the customer, designed service organization around what customers wanted. Today, commands a price edge over security products from MNCs, and now selling in 50 countries.

Lesson #3: solving a customer’s problem in a way your competitor is not doing, is the most memorable thing for your customer or partner

Pallav Nadhani, Fusion Charts:

Pallav’s journey as told was equally mesmerizing. You had to see how starkly different his approach was from that of Kailash. He went for low touch sales, mass marketing, and the direct online route. This worked because his target was an educated customer and they used content marketing to the hilt.

Fusioncharts moved from a developer focus to a corporate IT department focus. This is the typical customer discovery process that any young startup goes through. Theirs is a classic tale of using LinkedIn, online forums, data visualization experts etc to talk about them and promote the brand.

So fierecely were they branding driven that they even changed the name of the product when doing a new major version. The Obama administration and many such examples did not just help them, they used it to their advantage, and relentlessly.

Fusioncharts started giving away source code to build trust, and even contributed to open source. Yet they never played the ‘cheaper product’ game and even commanded price premiums. Of course, to do this you have to position the value of things like source code, support etc and do the ugly duckling design. More importantly, you need to keep experimenting with price to find the sweet spot.

Kailash & PallavLesson #1: Pricing is a competitive weapon. Higher price is not a disadvantage and don’t let sales people tell you that. (Compare with QuickHeal, today sells some versions at a higher price than MNC products).

Lesson #2: Consciously went after higher value customers (corporate IT) who could be relied upon for assured recurring revenue.

Lesson #3: If you price well you can share decent margins and build a good product. Use different prices for different markets if the situation demands, and always try to sell a customer the highest possible version they may need. There’s always scope to reduce the price paid by offering lesser.

Common threads:

Sell to retail or Enterprise:

  • Start selling to retail customers, gain credibility and then move to Enterprise.
  • Enterprise customers would have less churn and provide opportunities to cross-sell other products as well as to other teams in the same enterprise.
  • Many retail customers / channels eventually move to enterprise so you can sow the seeds for larger deals even when you work the retail market.
  • Create several SKUs, the idea being to let the customer find the price level / functionality level that works for them (I’m not paying extra for something I don’t need).
  • Create sales teams for each type of customer (Fusioncharts – for selling to Enterprise, selling to Developer. Similarly at Quickheal, separate teams sell to Enterprise, Retail and Online). This helps the team align to the sales process for that market and talk the language effectively. Quickheal has separate teams for renewals.
  • Created a sales bible (Fusioncharts) which was the rule book for all sales folks. This helped in establishing a credible sales process and limiting discounts to the extent allowed by company policy.

IMG_2589

Branding and PR:

  • Always do your own PR. Keep it so simple that the common person (your mother?) can understand.
  • Your PR should either inspire people or make them angry (agitatated?). It’s no use otherwise.
  • Build relationships with the press, constantly pitch to them and help them with information in general. Ask them what they’re working on and if you can help. They’ll be happy to get any help and will remember when you need them.

 

Sales and Marketing:

  • Use automation tool for customer communication (Infusionsoft / Marketo / Salesforce)
  • Smaller channel partners are preferred (Quickheal) as they have personal relationships and quick on payments. Large partners usually try to dictate terms and tardy on payments. Fusioncharts has used a similar strategy of tying up with smaller channel partners in overseas countries.
  • Maintaining relationships with channel partners is extremely important as they carry a high emotional quotient. Wish them on the festivals which are important in their country. Talk to them, meet them.
  • If necessary, tweak your product or do something special for that market. This generates huge buy-in from the channel partner as they see your commitment.

IMG_2590

Among other things, the specific issues got discussed around:

  • Closure strategies
  • Market awareness
  • New geographies
  • Building / ramping sales team
  • India as a market
  • Funnel management
  • DIY or DIFM
  • Customer Engagement
  • Influencer marketing
  • Building your Service Organisation
  • Leveraging customers
  • Positioning

 

Each of the above is probably a session in itself and the experience sharing was the easiest way to get insights into how these are situations and not problems.

Both Fusioncharts and Quickheal are hugely successful in their own areas, even though each have completely different markets and selling strategies. The amazing part was when :

–       Pallav remarked that he’s learnt a lot from Kailash’s method of being in touch with customers every single day and being out there in front of them.

–       Kailash appreciated the way Fusioncharts has leveraged content marketing and driving a successful marketing team through his vision

The other folks around this round table were Avinash Sethi (Sapience), Ulhas Ambergaonkar (Mauris), Vishwas Mahajan (TiE Pune), Anup Taparia (TouchMagix), Satish Kamat (JBT), Sandeep Todi {me} (Emportant HR) Varoon Rajani (Blazeclan), Dilip Ittyera (Aikon Labs), Sagar Apte (CarIQ), Aditya Bhelande (Yukta), Sagar Bedmutha (Optinno), Girish (Shunya), Arnab Chaurhuri (Xcess), Avinash Raghava (iSPIRT Product Nation), Sarang Lakare (IntouchApp), Ranjeet Nair (Germin8), Pallav (Fusioncharts), Kailash Katkar (Quickheal)