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Announcing #PNCamp3 (22nd April- Hyderabad) – Feedback,Teardowns and more.

Building a startup is hard. And many times it’s lonely. The actual building of the product is the honeymoon period. Especially for tech startups. There is the high of creating something from scratch and seeing it take shape. But just like in a real marriage, then start the struggles 🙂

You have a product. You have some early adopters,maybe some friends and family. But how do you scale? How can you build a predictable revenue machine? Is your product right for the market? Should you track some metrics? What metrics should you track? How do you make people come to your website? How do you make them stay? How can you wow your customers in the first 5 minutes of them using your product?

Every early stage startup will have these and many more questions. And thats a good thing. This means that there are successful startups who have had these questions and have found answers. And thats where this #PNCamp gets in.

The idea of this #PNCamp is to get a bunch of successful startup founders and early stage startups together so that early stage startups can learn from the successful ones. But this aint your regular gyaan session where a founder gets on stage and shares his/her “journey”. No sir no. The format of this camp is to have a complete hands on approach in helping startups find answers to their questions. The PNCamp is structured for real action oriented learning. And the more you share the more you learn. You are getting only 10 visitors a week? What actual things you can do will be suggested. You are converting less than 1% of visits to leads? Actual changes to your lead form or web site will be suggested. These are actionable insights which you can apply immediately.

And you can question. In fact you should question the insights,after all, you own the product. And this will hopefully lead to a healthy debate.

Here are a list of things which we will do at the camp:

  1. Founder truth or dare: A successful founder will be put on stage and you can ask them anything. They will share their insights by putting it all out in the open. And in case they refuse to share, well, we will give a dare to them 🙂
  2. Teardowns: Startups can nominate themselves for a teardown from experts. The experts will analyze your product/website/sales process/marketing and give you blunt feedback on each of the processes. Don’t expect any sugar coating from the experts. They will tell it as they see it. It’s almost as if your startup is getting free consulting and mentorship from some of the best minds in the world :). This is the most important feature of the camp and this is where most of the learning happens. Our previous teardowns have been very successful and every startup which has gone through the process has improved.
  3. Pitch breakup: Here again, startups can nominate and share their pitch deck. Experts will analyze the pitch-deck and give suggestions on optimizing the pitch.

Startups may have a worry about opening up about their startup. Its a valid worry, but let me assure you, it’s an unfounded one. What goes on in the #PNCamp stays at the camp. Its just a community of startup peers sharing.

So are you ready? Just go and apply for the bootcamp  in Hyderabad on 22nd April 2017.

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What is a good sales target for a sales person in SaaS in India?

Unfortunately there is no fixed answer. Problem with SaaS is that there are too many moving variables. LTV,Churn,ARR,ARPU etc. So its really hard to come up with one fixed number. So based on our experience and our product the following is a number we have come up with to set targets for our sales organization.

0.8x(x is the sales person’s salary)

So, a sales person should pull in 0.8x worth of MRR every month. Or 9.6x worth of annual contract values every month. This is the number from which they start getting incentives.So for example a sales rep getting around 18 lakhs salary should pull in around Rs.1,20,000 MRR every month. If he pulls in 30,000 MRR(0.2X) he will be just covering his base salary. If he pulls in 75,000(0.5X) he will be covering the organization costs. And only if he pulls in anything above that will the company move towards profitability. And only when the company is profitable will the sales get an incentive.

Obviously there are a lot of assumptions made to arrive at this number. We are assuming the LTV to be around a year and churn is also very low. You can find a spreadsheet with some numbers here. You can modify the variables to fit for your organization.Just open SaaS Sales Targets and play around with the values to see the numbers. You can also download it and modify it as you see fit.

Since we started a sales organization a couple of years ago we have been experimenting with different variables and this is a good rule of thumb to follow for setting sales targets. Please comment on what your experience has been. Is our model too tough on sales guys or too easy. Hopefully we can all come out with a comprehensive model for sales in SaaS in India.

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A conference of the products, for the products and by the product leaders

Indian startup space is on a roll and while there is a lot of money being invested, we strongly believe that one needs a lot more talks on products – ranging from product management to marketing / growth hacking et al.

Product Nation has partnered with NextBigWhat for its upcoming conference, ProductGeeksConf.  At ProductGeeksConf, you will hear various product leaders share insights/experiences building some of the great products from India.

Some of the speakers include:

Punit Soni (Flipkart CPO), Deepak Abott (Marketing Tech specialist) and several others (more speakers will be announced by this week).

Topics include:

  1. Scaling up Product Management Function
  2.  How Social Media influences Product Management decisions
  3. The emergence of the growth hacker and how this new role and how growth teams
  4. Marketing tech hacks for app developers on budget.
  5. The Nuances of Customer Acquisition  : CAC,LTV,ARPU,MRR. WTF

As far as industry focus is concerned, the conference has something for everyone – be it consumer, enterprise or the app developers.

We are happy to announce that ProductNation community gets a special discount of 20% on the conference tickets (registration link / use the code PRODUCTNATION).

Date : June 19th
Venue: MLR Convention Center, Bangalore.
URL: http://www.nextbigwhat.com/unpluggd/productgeeksconf/

Note that the discount is valid only till June 8th.

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SaaS Metrics for India B2B

When we started selling our Cloud telephony platform, we had very little idea of what metrics to concentrate on. So we just built the product and winged it 🙂

Now after 4 years, we have a pretty good command of what metrics to concentrate on. What works, what doesn’t. Which channels are better and which sales techniques work. We learnt this the hard way and by reading blogs by David Skok, Jason Lemkin and Tom Tunguz. They did provide some benchmarks to go on. But nothing specific to the circumstances in India.

Looking around, we realize that we are in a very special situation. Since we concentrated only on India for our product, we have SaaS revenue from only Indian customers. This gives a nice opportunity to start creating some benchmarks.

Unfortunately there are not many hard numbers out there which can help new India B2B SaaS companies. So in the interest of transparency, we are sharing the SaaS metrics for our Cloudagent product. Some important points:

  • Cloudagent is a contact center product. It is a high touch point product with a big sales cycle.
  • All revenues and numbers are based only on Indian customers. We are in fact one of the very few companies out there serving only Indian customers :). May not hold true this year though.
  • We are doing this as an experiment. Looking at how it goes, we will open up more and more of our numbers, similar to what Buffer did. So be good to us 🙂
  • None of the metrics are set in stone. This is what works for our business and we are all learning. Please comment here our mail me at [email protected] or follow me @nutanc on twitter. Would love to hear your thoughts.
  • We will be updating this page on the 10th of every month. So please check back in to see how our business is doing 🙂

Building a SaaS machine is hard. But once it starts rolling, it is almost like clockwork. The numbers presented are what helped us to fine tune our process. Looking at isolation, each number may not make sense. But the way they all interact to run the SaaS machine is what is most important.

Kookoo

Since a lot of people were asking for the base spreadsheet used to calculate these metrics, I have created a template in Google docs. Feel free to download and use it as you see fit. You can just modify the “blue” numbers with your own numbers and see your metrics. Base Spreadsheet

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21st #PlaybookRT – 13 Sales Mantras for Product Selling in India – Part 1

Last weekend, we had a playbook roundtable on sales(mainly B2B) at the Ozonetel systems office in Hyderabad. Aneesh Reddy from Capillary led the RoundTable. The focus of the roundtable was on sales in product companies. This included early stage sales as well as issues faced during scaling sales. A lot of points were covered and the participants were involved in very lively discussions with almost everyone learning something new from the others experience. So without further ado, the following were the main learnings from the roundtable:

Ozonetel office
1. Sales solves everything. The panacea for all the problems of a startup is sales. Somtimes even a PPT is enough to do sales. This was explained by Aneesh how in their Capillary journey they showcased their to be built product on PPTs to prospective customers and made the sale.

2. Initial sales has to be done by founders. This was universally accepted by all the participants. So every founder has to become a sales person. There is no second way about it. Once you scale to a certain level, you can look at hiring dedicated sales head and building a sales organization.

3. Freemium model does not work too well in India. Get a customer to pay something(maybe even Rs.100). Make the customer also invested in the product. Only then will they give the time necessary for your product and evaluate it properly. Pilots work well, but try to make them paid pilots.

4. In India Push sales work, for outside markets, consultative sales works. In all cases, your sales person should be willing to listen to the customer and understand his pain points.

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Payment Collection

Payment collection is a big problem for SaaS products. Following up every month for the collections is a full time job. Some pointers to help in this are:

5. Quarterly, Yearly payments. See if you can push your customers to pay quarterly, yearly upfront. Give a discount two sweeten the deal. This is ok as you receive the money up front and you are reducing costs on processing collections.

6. Disconnect services. Most participants agreed that disconnection of service works as a deterrent to the customer. Give enough indications/alerts about the pending disconnection and follow up with a phone call for collecting your payment.

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Lead Sources

7. List rentals. Aneesh suggested that buying the list of conference participants gave a better RoI than sposoring some event. So identify some good conferences in your domain and buy the participant list from the conference organizers.

8. Attend exhibitions. Exhibitions in well known places like HiTex in Hyderabad gave a lot of leads to the NowFloats team.

9. Subscribe to local magazines. Local magazines are a good source of business listings as all good businesses advertise in local magazines. Build your list by mining this data.

10. Employ a good PR agency. Once you are at some level of scale, it makes sense to employ a PR agency. The PR agencies have good contacts in the media and they will get you good coverage. Though, they may not directly get you leads, they will help in brand recall, hiring and fund raising efforts.

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Inside sales:

11. Start with a 2-3 member inside sales team. Aneesh was of the strong opinion that inside sales is the way to go for B2B sales in India. Start small and monitor the team closely.

12. Invest and be patient. Sometimes, it takes around 3-4 months for an inside sales team to show some traction. be invested and be patient. Things will slowly pick up.

13. Team composition. One combination could be 1 data collector and 2 tele callers. Try different approaches and see what works best. To get started, you can out source the process, but that may turn out costly.

In the next part we will look at some metrics that will help us monitor sales.

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Indian Products- Creating a market

Building products when you know the need is hard. Building products which create a new market is harder.In the first case, you know a problem, you envisage a solution and you build a product which solves the problem. People start buying your product as they know they have a need for it.In the second case, you have to first convince the customers there is a need. You have to show them that things can be better. And only then will they start buying your product. It needs a lot of self belief to do this.Some examples which come to my mind are Harry Potter and Justin Beiber. Though J.K Rowling wrote Harry Potter, there is a big machinery which runs behind which has created the need for more Harry Potter books. It is now a billion dollar industry. Same is the case with Beiber.

Coming to the tech world, in this series I would like to explore products made in India which have created a new market.

I will start the series with a concept that is very Indian in nature, missed calls.

Couple of years back, missed call market did not exist in India. People did not know you could make money out of missed calls. People may have been using missed calls for random jobs, but there weren’t any companies which were using missed calls to their full potential. It was during this time that Zipdial came into focus. They made the missed call, a call to action event. The systematic way in which Zipdial has created value for the end consumers and provided engagement for brands through a missed call is commendable. It is not just about the tech. It is about understanding the ecosystem. And Zipdial has been able to do that. Other players have also now joined the fray and brands are now willing to pay serious money for missed call services. In its basest form, a missed call is a form of communication and companies are now being created for providing this communication channel.To do this, it takes a lot of effort and money. Companies providing missed call based services demonstrated the great power of their product through a lot of free campaigns. They created the need. Then they reached out to companies to get them to use their product by showcasing statistics of user engagement. Through their sheer will they created the market.Hope these companies continue with their innovation and conquer other countries as well and create new markets.In the next blog post, we will look at travel.