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Know your audience.

We, Indian entrepreneurs, can think big, can write code, can build a sustainable business, can raise money and we might as well make a successful exit but we still face challenges in making a 2 minutes presentation that would that would at least make the listeners curious about our startup.

I happen to attend an event recently wherein around 8 established and mostly funded startups presented to a billion $ US based company looking to partner/ acquire startups in India. Out of these, four startups kept on rambling about what they do, team, achievements, product details, technologies, etc. Two of them could not even explain their idea properly and the stakeholders were clueless even after 2 minutes talking by the founders. There was only one startup which did a decent job in explaining what they do and how they could help the targeting company. At every such event I have attended, the story is pretty much same – only 10%-20% of the entrepreneurs are able to make their case properly in a 2 minutes pitch. However crude that may sound, but we still haven’t learnt the art of selling.

The repercussions are actually much larger than we think. India’s VC/M&A ecosystem is still quite novice. We have handful of VC firms making a handful of deals every year. The number of successful exits through acquisition is much lesser and IPO happens once in a bluemoon. The onus is on every stakeholder of this ecosystem to help the ecosystem grow, both in size and maturity. So when some firangi folks from US come down to India hearing amazing stories about India, the first expression they get becomes really critical. Our product/ service may not be totally relevant to their business but our pitch should be kickass, so that when they go back, they should be thinking about how to leverage India more and invest more in India rather than having doubts about quality of startups and entrepreneurs here. In short, when we screw up the pitch, we screw up brand India.

And what’s more ironical is that, pitching should be one of the simpler tasks for an entrepreneur. The hard part is analysing the market opportunity, creating the product and making money, all of which we do pretty well. An entrepreneur should never underestimate the cruciality of a meeting, even if he is sure that nothing will come out of it. Some basic research and due diligence about the audience, putting oneself in their shoes, creating a customized presentation rather than an off-the-shelf investor deck, timing the deck and practicing it couple of times, etc. – these things should never be ignored. Basic Google search would give many good ppt templates that can be played with. Personally, I find the ones on 500startups website quite helpful. The story should be something like this:

–          Slide 1: What your company does. <Should be 1-2 lines – catchy and crispy clear>

–          Slide 2: How will partnering/ acquiring you help the company. <Very critical slide. Should be driven by various use-case scenarios and business impact creation>

–          Slide 3: Any case study (if available) about a similar partnership with another company

–          Slide 4/5: How have your operations grown since inceptions. Some data around founders, investors,  user-base, key clients, etc. and future roadmap <Ideally no technical stuff >

One can always keep more detailed slides about technology, architecture, etc. in the appendix and can share if the need be. An average of 30 seconds per slide would still consume around 2.5 minutes. So make sure you literally cram it by heart so that no time is wasted in reading through the slides while presenting. Even after this entire, an entrepreneur feels that he won’t be able to pull off the pitch, there is nothing wrong in handing the dais to a more capable candidate, even if he does not belong to VC/M&A ecosystem team.

There is a bigger picture here. All this is applicable is almost every walk of life. Be it job interview or a b-school interview or just a casual chat with some investor or probable client, we always tend to underestimate the importance of beforehand preparation and proactive viewpoint. Before stepping into any meeting, we should have a hypothesis and point of view based on it. Getting it wrong is better than not having it at all.

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What’s your Sales Story?

Whenever faced by dilemma over any issue pertaining to sales and marketing, I recall a famous quote by Ben Feldman, who is considered one of the best salespeople in world history.

Don’t sell life insurance. Sell what life insurance can do.

Just by following this one mantra, Ben was able to insurance policies more than worth USD 1.8 billion in his life!

It would be unfair if I don’t mention Steve jobs here. Have you ever seen him selling Apple products? No! He would always sell you the idea of ‘how apple products can change your lives’. Watch his keynotes at the launch of iPhone or iPod and you will understand what I am trying to say here. Sadly I don’t see the same approach being used by Indian startups and product companies. Many of us are still struck at ‘Buy our product, this is the best; this is different; this is cheaper; this is awesome…..’.

Human brain is inherently averse to sales. The moment we realize someone is try to sell something to us, we tend to lose interest in the pitch, become defensive and start finding reasons why we don’t need the particular product (or service). So rather than doing direct selling using plain facts and figures, if you narrate a story about your product and how it can help fulfill peoples’ dreams, chances are they’ll listen to you. Research has proven that majority of the decisions are driven by emotions and not reasons. We don’t realize that because our brain tries to find logical reasons to justify the already made decision.

So triggering those emotions should be a critical component of company’s overall Sales story. Ideally the sales story should be centered around the following,

  •          Making people more powerful/ efficient/ potent through your product
  •          Making people passionate about your company and yourself
  •         Ringing alarm bells in peoples’ minds of losing out on something if they don’t buy your product
  •         Generating mystique and awe among people for your company and yourself
  •         Being just enough rebellious and loud to make some noise and stand out
  •         Developing trust among people for your company and yourself (damn important)

 

Let me take an example. I went for a sales meeting for some stakeholders from a global networking giant. Here is what I presented the first time,

‘WE are Company X. WEhave been doing this for so many years. WE have worked with companies like … WE’ll help your business grow to next level (x%). WE’ll help to save y% costs. We’ll increase your efficiency by z%, so on and so forth’

I got a good response but not a mind blowing one. We were asked to present to some other stakeholders in the follow-up meeting. I decided to try out something different this time. Here is what I presented,

‘YOU are Company Y. YOU have been doing this for so many years. YOU are doing good with a% growth, b% cost savings, etc. YOU are projected to reach here. What if we help YOU reach there. YOUR competitors are already catching up. We can help YOU leapfrog. We have already helped many companies to do the same. YOUR company is very good, we can make YOUR it awesome’  

Boom!! Applauses all around!

Notice the ‘We’ centric approach compared to ‘You’ centric one. Research has proved that customer relations are more long-run and stronger in the latter approach. I have complemented ‘company’ with ‘yourself’ because your personal branding goes hand in hand with that of the company, as people don’t perceive you much different from your company. I can’t think of any aspect of life where you don’t have to sell anything. I believe aforementioned points are relevant in every sphere of life- job interviews, user acquisition, b-school interviews, advertising, online marketing, presentations, proposals, VC pitches, etc.

For the founders, it goes without saying that you should have questions related to positioning, value add to customers, target market segments, key differentiators, etc. clearly figured out before you start creating your sales story. Answers to these should be Crisp, Short, Tangible and Simple.

Happy Selling !!

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Entrepreneurship as an extra-curricular and hobby

Anatomy of an Idea

If today a survey in done in schools across India and students are asked some questions like,

  •         What are your favorite hobbies or pastime?
  •         What do you do after going back home from school?
  •         What do you do during holidays? 

You’ll get all sorts of answers but ‘Entrepreneurship’. Even worse, if the following question is also included,

Have you heard about the word “Entrepreneurship”?

I am guessing a depressingly low percentage would answer ‘yes’. That’s because the concept of ‘entrepreneurship being taught as a subject or an extra-curricular’ is non-existent in Indian schools. 

Schools play critical role in defining and determining a child’s way of thinking, perception about the world, mental and physical development and so forth. Schools shape children’s goals and aspirations. Children have an amazing ability to pick things up very quickly. The adoption of a concept is much easier in case of a child than an adult. We cannot expect India to produce a huge army of young home grown entrepreneurs when we don’t introduce this concept to them early on. It’s like expecting a country to have successful scientists or doctors without introducing science in schools. We benchmark Indian startup ecosystem against that of US based total annual VC funding, number of technology startups emanating, number of successful exits, etc., but forget that beneath all those facts and figures, there lays a very fundamental difference in the philosophy these two societies and, thus, their education systems have been built.  Success of America has a lot to do with their education system which promotes entrepreneurial and excogitative attitude. Indian education system, on the contrary, is more conservative and inclined towards rote learning. 

Trust me when I say that planting the idea of entrepreneurship in a child’s brain can do wonders!!

That’s because, it will ensure,

  •      Smarter kids (child’s development wont be restricted by bulky books)
  •      Better leadership qualities (entrepreneurship is all about leadership)
  •      Better problem solving and analytical thinking (child would explore innovative solutions as no   book would have written answers)
  •      Better sales/marketing skills (something which Indians are always criticized of!)
  •      Better programmers (I guess in many cases the next logical step after ideating something is learn programming)
  •      Increased employability of Indian engineers (Isn’t above mentioned skillset what every employer wants!)
  •      Better understanding and acceptance of entrepreneurship by parents and society at large, since schools would push the concept (again a major problem area, especially for young entrepreneurs)
  •      More experienced and more successful entrepreneurs (Serial entrepreneurs tend to succeed more than first timers)

In short, a win-win situation for entrepreneurs, employers and employees.            

Entrepreneurship may not be popular in Indian schools, but it is increasingly focused on by under graduate and graduate schools. Almost every good B-school has incubation cells and courses focused on entrepreneurship.  Also the companies hiring from B-Schools love to hire ex-entrepreneurs (not necessarily successful ones but also failed ones). That’s because in the fast changing times, it has become imperative for companies to innovate and evolve in order to stay relevant and flourish. In this context, entrepreneurs bring in a refreshing thinking and ‘challenging the status quo’ culture to the table. 

Today both schools and children are becoming more and more technology savvy. While Internet is within the reach of many, others are joining in. In that context, there is not much schools need to do, to ignite the spirit of entrepreneurship among students. All they need to do is realize its importance and try to build some very basic subject matter expertise of entrepreneurship in the form of a subject, extra-curricular, summer holiday project, workshops, etc.  Tying this to overall grade of the child would ensure parents’ buy in. The government and other stakeholders of startup ecosystem (investors, entrepreneurs, enablers, incubators, etc.) can also pitch in and organize competitions and events to promote the concept. Just as we have Science or Maths Olympiad, we can have similar Olympiad for business ideas as well. NEN is doing an amazing job in replicating this model in undergraduate schools across India. It is time that we move a step prior in the value chain and introduce entrepreneurship in secondary schools in some form. 

Think about this, the secondary education dropout ratio in schools in rural India is almost 50%. The major cause – as child reaches the employability age of 12-14 years, he is expected to add an extra shoulder to support household income. Mid-day meal, the driving factor behind sending child to school, becomes irrelevant. But if students are encouraged and supported (finance, mentorship, subject matter knowledge, etc.) to become entrepreneurs and thus, support his family by generating some monthly income, the school dropout rate can be brought down significantly. Needless to talk about the employment opportunities created! Here the definition of enterprise can be totally different – it may not be a technology focused one. A person procuring purified water from somewhere and selling it in villages is also an entrepreneur in one way.

P.S. : When thought about earnestly, this can be a billion $ idea !! J 

I sincerely hope in coming years we hear success stories like Yahoo acquiring Summly (a teen startup out of London) from India, in addition to a 12 years old cracking JEE or an Indian kid winning Spelling Bee.

This article first appeared on NextBigWhat