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When we learned to crack US sales from India

October 24, 2015. A Saturday after Dussehra, and 59th roundtable of awesomeness in lively office of Zapty.

Not only Sanjay (founder of Zapty) was great, offices of Zapty welcomed us with a lot of natural light. Then, introductions happened and people started to get comfortable around each other.

It was Samir, founder of Shop Socially, who flew from Pune a day before, was going to share the things that worked (and didn’t work) for him at ShopSocially when they built a team to sell to US companies from India.

PS: He also has sales people in US, but we will get into that as well.

We were scheduled to start at 11:00 AM, but kinda waited till 11:15 to start. I call this Bangalore Standard Time (not really late, but a little late)

Then I clarified certain things about Round Table and set the context to make sure everyone understands it’s more like a discussion than a lecture session. Also, it was clarified that its a safe place to share and nothing that is sensitive will leave the walls of that room. That made everyone attending it comfortable and also people were ready with their discussion hats on.

Then Samir shared some great processes which he has developed over 20+ years of experience.

Ohh man, if I could only describe it in words, you should have been there to feel the transparency we saw in an Entrepreneur. The goal of each function inside organization was clear, more like crystal clear. Tons and tons of questions were asked and we all shared some great insights.

Well, here is my attempt to put some of the learnings we had in words:

    • Marketing is Lead Generation: From beginning, Samir made it clear. In his business, marketing is Lead Gen. Branding is a byproduct of marketing, but marketing is for one thing and one thing only, Lead Generation. So, all efforts are measured on this parameter.
    • A simple Motto – Get conversations going: Samir pointed this out multiple times during discussion, getting conversation going is the single most important step in a sales cycle. Do whatever it takes to get conversation going, if your prospective customer is not responding to product/service/problem A, show them B, then C. Do anything to get conversation going.
    • 5 min callback to warm leads: So, this is a 2 part lesson. Number one “define” as clearly as you can, what is a “warm” lead. And then making sure 5 minute callback to warm lead. Now, both of these tasks are important, and success of your “sales” department depends on this. You can define “warm” leads too loosely and your sales team would end up wasting a lot of their time. Or you could end up defining your “warm” lead to tightly, and end up leaving a lot of money on the table. So, constant feedback is super necessary and should be part of the process.
    • For a product, IT HAS TO LOOK STUNNING..PERIOD: I don’t think this needs any explanation, but when he said this, he was really clear on one thing. No compromise on this, its HAS to look stunning.
    • Where to start? Email List: We spent quite some time on how to do this in a scalable way and what are great do’s and don’t around it.  
    • Quora and LinkedIn Pulse are great places to start for B2B sales. If you can get one of your articles on LinkedIn Pulse, that can do some wonders in early stages.
    • For inside sales – warm leads only: Samir was very clear on another thing, how anyone in the team spends their time. And inside sales team should be spending their time on “warm” leads only.
    • Text only emails are best: You can surely try more formats, but whole group agreed on this, as pretty much everyone had experience with sending a lot of emails.
    • For calling, make a script: If you get a chance to get on a call with customer, don’t go without a script. It’s like going to war without a plan..don’t do it. Make a script and rehearse it.
    • Optimize lower end of funnel first: Samir made this super clear that it’s super expensive to lose sales at lower end of the funnel, so if you are optimizing start from bottom of the funnel.
    • Case studies, no…Stunning Case Studies, YES: We according to Samir, anything that you put in front of potential customer (PPT’s, Case studies etc.) has to look great, nothing less than “stunning”.
    • Retargeting – FOR EVERYONE: It doesn’t matter what kind of product you are selling, retargeting ads are for everyone..
    • Video testimonials: If you can get video testimonials, they are the best. You can even put them on landing pages..they are expensive, but might be worth it

Tools / Service companies that we discussed:

  • BuiltWith
  • Datanyze
  • DataCall (a company in Bangalore)
  • Benchmark
  • Yesware
  • Pipedrive
  • Localphone
  • Ringo
  • Express Writers – Bangalore
  • Discover.org
  • AgileCRM

Now, it’s quite possible that you want to know more about the process we learned in the RT, but may be that’s the reason you should attend next Round Table in your city..

PS: Here is another post about Samir’s round table in Pune..

Guest Post Contributed by Natwar, Around.Io

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SaaS India struggles with Inbound Lead Response

As Indian SAAS companies are aspiring to make a global footprint, the sales growth can make or break their goals. Companies who respond fastest as compared to competitors always have first mover advantage to close sales. According to the Harvard Business Review, companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly 7 times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision makers as firms that try to contact prospects even an hour later.

We surveyed 90 funded SAAS companies; the observations were quite shocking as far as their inbound lead response is concerned. Only 26% companies (24 out of 90) companies cared to respond to inbound leads. Given the kind of investment companies make in their digital marketing, money goes down the drain if the inbound leads are not tapped efficiently. Even if the leads are contacted, the time to respond makes all the difference.

Inbound Digital Marketing – A must for Generating Leads!

Organizations rely significantly on inbound digital marketing for their businesses. B2B companies invest from $25 to $500 for generating an inbound lead while B2C companies invest from $5 to $25 for the same. The money spent goes down the drain if inbound leads are not responded in an efficient way. The important questions for you to answer are – How many of your inbound leads are never contacted as they get lost during data transfer to sales team? How many inbound leads are loosely passed on to Sales reps to contact with incomplete or wrong information? How many of them are contacted when the prospect have lost interest in you or chosen a competitor?

The answers to these questions will define the ROI of your inbound marketing efforts. However, the good news is that if you are effective in inbound lead response management you are on the top of your business as chances are pegged on higher side in converting inbound sales leads rather than outbound leads for which investments are even on a much higher side.

Time is all what makes a difference!

We (Texo Team) conducted a research on funded B2B SAAS companies in India to analyse the inbound sales readiness. 90 SAAS companies were identified as funded. Web forms on the websites of the identified companies were filled and the responses were logged. We made an analysis on the data and have come out with an interesting insight on the current state of inbound sales processes in these companies or any other B2B company which may be used as a reference point for improvement through process, people and/ or technology.

We found that 8 companies choose to directly call the prospects and 4 companies choose to directly send personalized emails without sending an auto response. 4 companies sent personalized emails along with an auto response. Overall, only 26% companies (24 out of 90) responded to inbound leads out of which 67% (16) adopted calls as the mode of contact and 33% (8) used email as the mode of communication.

Only 4 out of 90 companies responded in less than 10 minutes. And only 7 companies responded in an hour. Click here to download TEXO SAAS Inbound Lead Response Report- 2015 for free and get deeper insights of the research report including the best SAAS companies in India who scored high in lead response research.

Way to Efficiently Manage your Inbound Leads

Inbound Leads are the prospects who have shown any kind of interest in your products/services by making a contact at any of the buyer stage. Marketers and sales reps have to align their engagement strategies with respect to the buyer stage. But what can they do about the 70% of the buyer’s journey that they’re missing out on? They are not able to correctly judge the prospect’s buying stage when they make a contact and hence not able to employ an effective engagement strategy.

And how can a tool like Sales Engagement Hub integrated with Marketing Automation Tools help marketers and sales reps keep pace with their buyers? The level of interest may vary depending on the buying stage the prospect is in, and hence different prospects need to be addressed differently. Factors to be considered for engaging with inbound leads are Response Time, Mode of Communication, Information to be shared, and Frequency of follow-ups and so on. A prospect in the consideration stage would prefer information about products, solutions, services, and case studies, and would need longer follow ups over email (preferably) or call. However, a prospect in the decision stage would be more interested in having information on solutions and pricing, and would need consistent follow-ups (shorter) over call (preferably) or email. Sales Engagement Hub integrated with marketing automation tools help the sales reps and marketers in effectively engaging with prospects.

 

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The final agenda for #Pngrowth is here

In the fourth #PNGrowth hangout last week, the usual suspects got together but this time with something a lot more concrete to hand out. With #PNgrowth generating the buzz that it has, we have been inundated with questions about what exactly the three days of the residential workshop will entail. As we have been vocal about, the residential workshop will kickstart the yearlong program that is #PNGrowth. To give everyone deeper insights into the agenda, we brought Sharique Hasan, Rem Koning, Sharad Sharma and Pallav Nadhani together to speak about the program we have put together for the three days.

You can watch the whole hangout here, which will give you a deeper insight into what we are thinking about and hoping to achieve, but this blog will give you a rather simple breakdown of the agenda itself.

With the major objective for #PNgrowth being category leadership, we have calibrated the three days to be workshops; there will be no gyaan sessions and every entrepreneur will be thinking and working through problems they face.

Day 1 – Rethink

The first day will be spent on entrepreneurs getting their bearings right and reflecting on where they stand with respect to where they want to be. The day will focus on getting the best tools and frameworks they need in place, to think about where their company is heading, and to understand their company represents versus what the category leader in their segment will look like.

Day 2 – Redesign

The second day will focus only on one thing – getting a gameplan in place with the aim of getting to category leadership in their spaces. This day will contain what the entrepreneurs will need to carry back most. The day will cover all the important things entrepreneurs need to concentrate on – culture, team, product/business, authentic leadership and so on. With sessions designed for entrepreneurs to work this out, this is going to be an absolute cracker of a day.

Day 3 – Implementation

On day three, the gameplan will be put to the test. The question of how to implement the plan, what challenges will rise, and in what sequence to implement the learnings will be discussed. The important metrics to focus on will be finalised and most importantly, where to start, how to start and how much time and energy to focus on and where will all be cleared up.

After the workshop, when all the entrepreneurs have gone back to work on what they learnt, comes the most important part. Now when they start, they’ll come up against the real world, and will need help adjusting their plans with things that will come up. This is when the real value of  will come in. With a direct line to mentors who have done this before, they will know who to call and when to call for help. This kind of opportunity is unprecedented in the Indian ecosystem and was formulated with the goal of an Indian product nation in mind – a community of product people who have a network to help each other and grow together.

For people who still haven’t applied, we have ONE last batch to select. You should apply.

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Five reasons to attend #PNgrowth

Ever since we opened registrations for #PNgrowth, we wanted to do a list of this sort, to make it easier for those who wish to  attend to have a look and decide whether this program is helpful for them. But somehow we never got around to it until now.

#PNgrowth is now red hot, and we have three applicants for every place on the program. We still want to tell everyone about it because only a small fraction of the applicants will qualify for this program.

So here you go, five reasons you should be at #PNgrowth –

1. Handcrafted for the Indian Startup eco-system by iSPIRT and B-school professors from Stanford and Duke.

For the first time in the Indian ecosystem, evangelists and academia come together to design a program that will give maximum returns to the participants. With iSPIRT’s experience conducting Bootcamps and Roundtables across the country, and the experience of faculty from the Stanford and Duke school of businesses, the program has basically been handcrafted for Indian startups. You’ll know when you’re there.

2. Three day residential kick off event

Infosys Mysore has been kind enough to volunteer the space and infrastructure necessary for a program of this scale. The three day residential kickoff camp will take place at one of Indian tech hubs. This is followed by a year-long engagement with each Startup to help them achieve their goals.

3. Focus on category leadership

#PNgrowth is designed for the company which has already done the hard yards and  has potential to ascend from profitability to category leadership. The program will help organisations get past this transition without losing sight of the goal, which is to become category leaders in their space.

4. The best mentors in the country

#PNgrowth has the advantage of being able to bring into the program some of the best mentors in the country. With iSPIRT’s(Mavens) network of India’s most successful entrepreneurs who have been there, done that, some of these mentors at #PNgrowth is like a who’s who of the Indian startup scene. 

5. Months of follow-up through remote hangouts and peer-based learning

And lastly, the program is a long term investment. The aim, which is category leadership, will be achieved through several months of follow-on remote coaching, mentorship and peer-based learning. You will have direct contact with mentors and will be able to ask them questions as and when they arise for you. This isn’t just rare for the ecosystem. It’s unprecedented.

Now that we’ve said our bit, do come over, look at our entire program, and decide. We would love to see you in Mysore! apply now, before you miss the Mysore bus.

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Announcing the first 25 successful companies attending #PNgrowth

Right. So the first batch of #PNgrowth companies is here. It has been a slog for us going through all the applications we received, and we have made sure that we are extremely fair in the way we are allocating places for our already over-subscribed program.

If you don’t know what this is about, you go here, and if you want to apply, here, better late than never.
                                25-founders-collage-1
We are going to announce the companies finalised as we go along, so they can start preparing for what will possible be a non-stop knowledge ride.
So here we go, the first 25 companies for the inaugural #PNgrowth program
    1. Ahimanikya Satapathy of Docengage,  Healthcare CRM
    2. Akshat Choudary of Blogvault, WordPress backup service
    3. Anand Krushnan of Exclusife, offers app
    4. Ankit Oberoi of Adpushup, online ad optimizer
    5. Arastu Zakia of Collegebol, education/students forum
    6. Ashwin Ramaswamy of ContractIQ,B2B Outsourcing Marketplace
    7. Dhruv Gupta of Valuehire.com, recruitment software
    8. Elvis D’Souza of Sensara, TV search app
    9. Jaineel Agarwal of Planet Superheroes, Superhero merchandise store
    10. Jofin Joseph of Hello Vibe, contact management app
    11. Koushik Shee of Effia Soft , cloud ERP
    12. Krish Subramanian of Chargebee , billing software
    13. Kumar Abhishek of ToneTag, payment app
    14. Laxman Papineni of AppVirality, growth toolkit
    15. Mrigank Tripathi of Qustn, training and assessment company
    16. Nityananda Rao of Actouch Technologies Pvt Ltd, accounting software
    17. Pritesh Vora of Uninstall.io, app analytics provider
    18. Priyanka Agarwal of Wishberry, crowdfunding platform
    19. Rahul Bhalla of Zenatix, energy hardware company
    20. Rohit Bagaria of Budli.in, used gadgets marketplace
    21. Sanjay Sahani of Optimizory, management tool
    22. Shameel Abdulla of Jiffstore, grocery supermarket
    23. Sonal Goyal of NubeTechnologies,data analytics company
    24. Srikanth Adiga of Open Specimen, biobanking informatics
    25. Vijay Mane of Albumizer , album designer
Congratulations to the startups who made it. They will receive further information in their mailboxes.
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SEBI & iSPIRT Discuss Modernized Online Platform with Tech Startups and Securities Market Intermediaries.

On 15th October, Mr. U.K. Sinha, honorable chairman of SEBI, had a more than 4 hour meeting with iSPIRT. The goal was to lay the ground-work for a new approach to Paperless and Presence-less Distribution Model enabling a 10X growth in the number of people buying Mutual Funds.

The iSPIRT team was chaired by Nandan Nilekani and included key members of its Open API Expert Team – Sanjay Jain, Pramod Varma and Sharad Sharma. Several Tech Startups like Scripbox, FundsIndia, Perfios, Eko, PolicyBazaar, BankBazaar, Flipkart and Eko participated in this interactive session. Many Securities Market Intermediaries comprising of representatives from HDFC Mutual Fund, Birla Sunlife MF, Quantum MF, CAMS and KARVY also attended the meeting. Nakul Saxena, Fellow Policy Initatives, coordinated the meeting on the iSPIRT side. From SEBI’s side Mr. Amarjeet Singh, Mr. Sujit Prasad, Mr. Ravi Kumar, Mr. Rajesh Gujjar and Mr. Vimal Bhatter also participated.

The discussion focused on three tracks:
1. Regulatory track for simplifying the various processes for Investor participation. There was intense discussion around simplifying or re-engineering the Onboarding process of Retail Investors. It noted several ideas to remove IPVs/wet signatures, speeding up the KYC processes via KRAs’ (KYC Registration Agencies).
2. Technology track focused on providing a paperless and presence-less Online Technology Infrastructure. This was about leveraging the “India Stack” for lowering the onboarding costs almost 100X.
3. Market track focused on enabling streamlining the Distribution Model for increasing the Retail Mutual Fund Investor base. Several ideas around how to increase Investor trust, lower cost of customer acquisition and provide for an Online Only Distribution model were discussed.

Conclusion
It was a very productive working session. There were many learnings for all participating including Tech Startups and Securities Intermediaries. Pilots will now be undertaken starting mid-November.

Its now becoming even more apparent that INDIA will leap-frog the WEST in its Digital Platforms particularly in the Banking and Finance sector. Brace yourself, as we might be entering an ERA of hyper-growth fuelled by JAM (Jandhan, Aaadhar and Mobile) that is powered by the “India Stack”. iSPIRT will talk more about this impending change in the coming months.

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A Recipe for Selling a Product Globally from India

iSPIRT regularly organises Playbook roundtables to help startups succeed by learning from successful entrepreneurs. One of such roundtable was conducted at GS Lab in Pune on 10th Oct 2015.

This PlaybookRT was focused on Product startups (B2B) who are keen to sell to the global market. The PlaybookRT was facilitated by Samir Palnitkar, President of ShopSocially.com. Samir hosted a highly interactive Playbook Roundtable for Product Startups and shared his journey of building ShopSocially globally.

Being a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of industry experience, Samir’s passion is startups and new ideas. He is a founder of four successful startups which include I2P acquired by Lattice), Obongo (acquired by America Online), Ingot Systems (acquired by Synopsys) and AirTight Networks (category leader in secure, cloud WiFi). He is also an active early stage investor and advisor. His expertise includes social media, strategy, productization/execution, and business process setup.

Samir has authored two highly acclaimed books and he also holds 5 US patents.

In this highly intensive session, attended by over 12 Pune-based startups, Samir shared his insights on the strategies, techniques, team and the infrastructure required to sell a product effectively from India.

I was one of the attendees who were immensely benefited from this workshop. Here is a brief summary of the topics that we discussed.

Most of the early stage startups face following challenges:

  • How do we find customers?
  • How do we reach them?
  • Should I build a team abroad?
  • How much money do I need to a sales team abroad?

Samir not only shared how he solved this challenges but he also provided some actionable steps that can help to build a sustainable sales process.

Sales Process

Most organisations look at marketing and sales as two different departments, and most often there is little or no communication between these two. Samir strongly suggested to integrate these functions closely with each other for optimum results.

Since startups have tight budget, they tend to rely more on inbound marketing to generate the leads. Samir suggested to have a right mix of inbound & outbound marketing.

This is how it works at ShopSocially – Marketing team generates the leads through various channels, these leads and then filtered and after qualification, passed on the experienced Sales Executives who conduct a demo and close the deal. Finally, Customer Success team nurtures the clients and ensures minimum churn. Sales-Process

List Building

Samir shared some innovative ways to build the list of potential prospects. First step of building a list is to create buyer personas. We must know who is our target customer, which industry he belongs to?, what’s his title?, what’s his geographical location? how much is the revenue?, etc.

Once we identify the attributes of our potential customer, we can start hunting for the contacts. Sites like BuiltWith, Hoovers and Data.com can help you find the right fit based on the criteria you mention. Even if you get the website of the company, you can find out the contact details of your potential prospect. If you are short on time, you can outsource this activity and get someone to do it for you.

Key here is to find ways to consistently build the list and nurture it.   

Email Marketing Flow

Now, once we have our list in place, we need to contact them. It may sound like an easy thing to do but most companies get it wrong and end up spamming the email list.

Here are some of the tips –

  • Use text instead of large images in the email as most email clients block images.
  • Keep it short and to the point. Best to have maximum of 5 sentences.
  • Use only one link
  • Message should appear as a personal note rather than a marketing text
  • Send the email from an individual account instead of a generic email ID.

There are few bulk email software’s that can help you send automated emails at a predefined internal. For example, you can send 2nd mail automatically after 15 days and so on. With these tools, you can create an automated email marketing flow and send emails based on user behaviour.

Cold Calling Flow

So we have built the list and sent the emails. Now what? Should we start calling all of them now? Definitely not!

Cold calling random contacts does not help anymore. Once we send the first mail, we need to monitor the email opens, clicks and most importantly replies. If any of this action occurs, sales team should immediately call the contact.

This way the response rate will be much higher as client will be aware of the product and its offering.

Important things to keep in mind while making calls:

  • Create a short and precise calling script
  • Practice the script multiple times by doing mock calls
  • Track the response in a good CRM software

Setup A Meeting

Samir advised not to try selling your product during the first call itself. During this call, we should qualify the lead and setup a meeting to showcase the product. Depending on the product, it could be an online demo or an in-person meeting. This will be handled by a more experienced executive as discussed above.

Simplest way to setup a meeting is to use Google Calendar. You can quickly get the lead to accept the meeting after that call. Details of the meeting can be updated later.

Follow up & Closer

Once the meeting is over or demo is done, next step is to follow up. Based on the feedback you get from the meeting, you can setup a predefined follow up schedule.

Follow ups should be polite, non-intrusive and should not be spammy. You can share marketing collaterals like case studies, testimonials or webinar recording to make the decision making process simple.

Samir advised to create high quality marketing collaterals that have visual representation of your product. Once the prospect is in final stage of the funnel, you should aim for 10 to 30% closer rate. Focus should be on improving this close ratio.

Building A Right Team

To execute your plans, you need a good team. Based on the number of leads you can generate every month, reverse calculation can be done to estimate the number of resources you will need.

Samir suggested to use Linkedin and Employee Referrals to hire new employees. He strongly suggested to have mock sales calls with the candidate, no matter how experienced he is.

Its also important to design a good incentive plan to keep the sales executives motivated. Salary structure should have a fixed component and a variable commissioned component.

Tools & Infrastructure

In order to run the entire sales process smoothly, we must invest in a good infrastructure. Based on his years of experience, Samir recommended following tools:

  • Novanet for VOIP calling
  • Grandstream GXP-1400 – 2 line IP phones
  • Vonia headsets
  • Separate 2 Mbps Leased line for voice (for about 18 reps)
  • Separate Broadband Internet of 50 Mbps speed for data
  • Microtik Router to do traffic routing
  • Pardot software for email marketing
  • Suger CRM for lead tracking
  • ClearSlide for sharing presentations online

It was indeed a great learning experience for all the entrepreneurs who attended this PlaybookRT.

Guest Post by Harshal Katre founder at ProfitBooks – cloud accounting app designed for non-accountants. He loves everything about running a startup and often writes about it on the ProfitBooks blog.  

 

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Product Market Fit – Pre Event playbook by @Avlesh @WebEngage & Arvind Kumar, @attunetech

The morning of the SaaSx2 event saw a great pre-event playbook at the Attune Tech’s Office.

Playbook by Avlesh

Avlesh from WebEngage, Arvind from Attune Tech. and Suresh from KiSSFLOW came together to host the session and anchor the round table.

With a casual round of introductions, Suresh kickstarted the entire roundtable discussion with a question:

Who is your ideal user?

Identifying the ideal user for your product is the key to your entire product. Is it a product for developers? Is it for CEOs? Is it for mobile users? Is it for users of spreadsheets?

Once you identify your user, identify the ‘buying title’ and the ‘influencing title’. The ‘buying title’ would be the shot-caller whereas the ‘influencing title’ would play a major role in influencing the shot-caller to buy your product.

Sometimes, if your on-boarding process is straightforward, you can sidestep your segment. Figure out what’s happening, is your product gaining traction, etc., And then iterate your product.

Aligning Metrics – The key

This is when Avlesh (Webengage) (he was lost in the land of Chennai, damn the cabbie) joined the discussion. He stated a very crucial point, that sometimes entrepreneurs forget during their journey of building their product.

“Try aligning your product to your users’ metrics” was a great insight from him.

If you’re launching a second product, run it by your current customers.

Try answering these questions:

What’s that one thing that your user can relate to? What does he/she get out of this? What are you improving for them?

These are very practical and a data-driven points to consider before taking that step forward towards your market fit.

Instant Gratification -Connecting the dots

Arvind, connected these points to the psychological concept of ‘Instant Gratification’.  What pain point are you trying to address? What’s that ‘wow’ moment they get when they start using your product? Something as simple as what they do everyday and how you can help them do it differently. If users get an immediate result from your product, they would be hooked to it.

Stickiness. The sole determiner.

Suresh mentioned a very simple but powerful point to elucidate product market fit.

“People who like your product will help you in scaling your product. But people who love your product will be your early adopters. Will be your referrers. Will be your evangelists. And they will help you achieve your product’s market fit!”

He also spoke about how product fit is not necessarily a price fit but much more than that. If users love your product, they really wouldn’t mind shelling out some extra money to buy it.

If you had noticed, all these points have something to do with user engagement.

Users see. Users love. Users buy. Users stick on.

Product Market Fit: The process

Product Market Fit isn’t a destination you aim to reach, but it’s a continuous journey.

Here are a few pointers to follow before you set out to find your fit.

  • Understand your market.
  • Estimate the market size.
  • Don’t go after a broad range of things. You can’t be everything for everybody.
  • Identify your segment. Your niche. That sweet-spot!
  • Then, iterate your product. Strip/add features to suit the market.

Mohit from Jombay, who had some thoughtful points to add on to the entire discussion, mentioned about how it’s important to know what to focus on! Positioning your product is a prerequisite in obtaining a market fit.

Are we there yet?

When do you know your product has obtained a market fit? To understand the answer, ask this question. Are more strangers paying for your product? (not just your mom’s friends or cousin’s colleagues). Are you solving your users’ problem?

Sean Ellis answers this beautifully, in his blog.

“I’ve tried to make the concept less abstract by offering a specific metric for determining product/market fit. I ask existing users of a product how they would feel if they could no longer use the product. In my experience, achieving product/market fit requires at least 40% of users saying they would be “very disappointed” without your product. Admittedly this threshold is a bit arbitrary, but I defined it after comparing results across nearly 100 startups. Those that struggle for traction are always under 40%, while most that gain strong traction exceed 40%.”

Takeaways

Some quick points to sum up my takeaways from the session:

  • Product market Fit isn’t a destination, it’s a journey.
  • Understand your market.
  • Know your customers.
  • It’s not about the product. It’s about how you position it.
  • Keep your product sticky.
  • Align your products to your users’ metrics.

Avlesh’s sense of humor, Arvind’s sarcasm and Suresh’s guffaws helped maintain a lively atmosphere for the discussion 🙂 It was a great session overall with some brilliant takeaways from all of them.

Guest Post contributed by Anusha Murthy, ChargeBee

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SaaS is the new black – and it has found a place in Chennai

At SaaSx 2015, Girish Mathrubhootham, CEO of cloud-based customer support software Freshdesk and popularly known as the Rajnikanth (think an acting, singing James Bond) of India’s Software as a Service (SaaS) scene, did the unthinkable. He revealed the entire spreadsheet of internal data-based metrics that he presented to his investors in 2011. All the media people were asked to put away their weapons and, at first, I was a little disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to share any of those numbers. Soon, however, I realized that they weren’t even important.

After Girish’s investors took a look at his numbers – and, honestly, at the time, they were not all that impressive – they decided to email his clients with a feedback survey. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with 96 percent of Freshdesk’s customers expressing approval of the product. “We didn’t even expect that,” explains Girish. “The only other feedback we got was customers expressing their desire to see us expand our product into different areas.”

The fact that customers wanted to see Freshdesk expand was important for both the company and its investors. As its progress revealed, the most dynamic feature of a SaaS product is its ability to acquire and reacquire the same customers by offering insightful new features. And, while the transient nature of software products means that differentiation can be difficult to maintain, Girish went on to explain that capturing the market was all about moving in at the right time. “Of course, best practices are easily copied and hard to retain – that’s why I’m only revealing our numbers from 2011-2012,” he joked.

SaaSx 2015, held in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, the self-proclaimed SaaS capital of India, was full of similar insights. People visited from all over the country, the furthest having traveled over 800 miles from Ahmedabad. Those in India’s startup capital, Bangalore – this includes yours truly – traveled over 6 hours and 300 miles on a bus through the winding Western Ghats to reach its neighboring state of Tamil Nadu. Despite an early start, energy was high on the road to the conference – the 34 entrepreneurs on the Microsoft Ventures-organized bus managed to conduct an ice-breaking session without falling over during the turbulent bus ride.

“My biggest virtue as an entrepreneur was patience. And, my biggest mistake… it was probably patience,” quipped one young CEO.

Read more about the SaaS Leap of Faith, SaaS circles are all about community, a blog post contributed by Meghna Rao from TechInAsia

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Funding Game – The rules and the hacks via @skirani & @BKartRed

The weather in Chennai was finally getting kinder & more pleasant in tune with the time of the year, much like the funding climate which has been less testing on the entrepreneur in general. Depending on whether you ask a consumer product entrepreneur or a B2B SaaS product entrepreneur, the level of optimism could vary, but it’s optimism all around.

As a pre-event runup to SaaSx2, we met at Freshdesk’s office in Chennai, for the Roundtable on “What it takes to fund a SaaS company?”.

Shekhar Kirani from Accel and Karthik Reddy from Blume, joined by Girish Mathrubootham from Freshdesk, anchored the conversations.

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Shekhar and Karthik started the round table, with some pretty interesting nuances about what numbers ought to add up, for their investment to make the returns they promised to their limited partners. The conversation touched upon what it takes to get funded at the early stages (upto Series A) and what it takes to be on that path, beyond Series A. Girish chipped in with personal examples of how Freshdesk got funded and his first-hand insight into looking at early stage startups that get funded (or not)!

Here are some bite-sized insights from the conversation that lasted for 3 hours:

On the options for the entrepreneur

  1. Indian B2B entrepreneurs have bootstrapped their startups remarkably well that it’s not an exception. If you are a B2B entrepreneur bootstrap or do more with less. Wait for the right strategic opportunity to scale. With numbers backing you up, raise for growth.

2015-10-07 11.12.22On what drives investors’ decisions

  1. Don’t get discouraged with ‘No’ from a partner of a VC firm. They have their biases and baggages. It’s the partner who has a view and not the firm. Find your champion.
  2. Most investors don’t like it if the outcome has a cap to it — there’s a maximum that you can do in the market and that sets a pretty hard ceiling to crack. In such cases, you’ve to out-execute everyone else and that’s a hard ploy and makes less exciting for the investor. Example: Would you start another CRM company now and if so why would you do what the rest of the 1600 have not done. Even if you execute well, what market share can you capture?
  3. VC firms pitch to Limited Partners (wealthy individuals, family offices, pension funds etc.) more than startups do to investors. They’ve the same issue of having to convince an LP that a certain startup that’s pre-revenue will get an exit worth $100M in 7 years. To do that in India, when there was no such exit till recently, made it even less credible.
  4. Most funds last for 10 years. 3 years to invest and 7 years to grow and nurture those investments towards exit events.
  5. Among the top quartile or decile of startups in a portfolio, one company returns the entire fund. Top 5 companies return 90% of the capital.
  6. Each startup has to be a prospect for a $500M exit, for the fund to meet its “Return on Capital Employed” goals.

On what investors look for in a startup?

  1. In a SaaS startup, front loaded costs are high. So your first two rounds are not about revenue or profitability but more about Product-Market fit and elimination of business model risks.
  2. Integrity, smartness and hard working ethics of the team are important but not sufficient. There has to be a potential for $500M exit for that startup for investors’ math to work. Anything less is already a sub-par outcome.
  3. It’s the job of the entrepreneur to make the VC look and realize how big the market is. They see a 1000 pitches a month and carry stereotypes. Help them make the context switch.
  4. Integrity cannot be stressed enough — Questions about India’s professional ethics do come up.). Indian LPs too find it hard to fathom that it’s possible to legally generate a 25x outcome from a startup, given where they come from and what they’ve seen.

2015-10-07 11.12.37On how to negotiate investment terms

  1. Clauses are there to protect the downsides for an investor. If you understand why they are there it’s easy to have a conversation around them.
  2. Most dissonance that an entrepreneur feels is because s/he does not understand the responsibilities the investor has to his/her fund and their LPs.
  3. Clauses such as liquidation preferences are there to protect the downside of the investments. So long as you cover the down-sides as an entrepreneur, your negotiation leverage for not carrying over these clauses to subsequent rounds is high — Don’t get it yet? Ask entrepreneurs who’ve raised several rounds, on how to negotiate.
  4. Drag along clause is there so that an investor can get the fund its returns as the fund comes to the end of life. If that goal conflicts with your startup’s, look for funds that are early in their life, to take money from and thereby give yourself a better runway.
  5. Everything is negotiable if your numbers are good. All downside protections kick in only during the bad times. So the best way to stay on top of the negotiations is to execute well.

Contributed by Ashwin Ramasamy, ContractIQ

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The #PNgrowth #OneThing Series – Mohit Gundecha, CEO of Jombay

When we as a ecosystem try to help our entrepreneurs, we make the mistake of always focussing on the mistakes others have made, and trying to steer away from those. This is evident even from the stuff we write on blogs and platforms with the specific purpose of helping others.

Maybe it’s time we step away from that.

In this new blog Series from #PNgrowth, we are going the other way. We are going to publish a series of posts on what we call the #OneThing. Our best product people will be asked a simple question – what is the one thing that worked best for you when you were trying to scale your company? These answers will be insightful partly as success stories and partly as guides for other startups looking to scale. In the second blog of the series, we talk to Mohit Gundecha, CEO of Pune based Jombay, the hiring portal that uses psychometry science and analytics to find the perfect fit for a job profile.

Mohit Gundecha, CEO of Jombay

Jombay is one of the cooler startups in recent years. With psychometry and associated analytics growing more powerful and insightful in the last few years, there is tremendous interest in these areas. Jombay has ridden high on this with a super-cool tool that is already working for organisations like Citibank, Nestle and Reliance Capital.

When I talked to Mohit, he was in the middle of several other calls, but graciously talked to me, taking his time to explain what he thought was the one thing that worked for them. This turned out to be quite similar to Subrat’s answer in Part 1 of this series. 

The difference, though, was in the phrasing, and in effect, critical.

Mohit’s answer wasn’t content marketing or something as specific as a particular blog. It was ‘thought leadership’.

If we go to Mohit’s LinkedIn profile, we have a series of posts that span an arc around his company and his interests – mainly around HR and employee culture and hiring and retaining employees and so on. Sharing his thoughts about relevant topics and what he is most passionate about has assured him a devoted following, some of them pretty important influencers themselves. People from his now 30-people strong team write too, and this deliberate attempt has paid off handsomely. Mohit’s articles have been picked up by newspapers and magazines, assuring constant media attention and several interviews, all of which has helped the company gain customers by way of recognition and of course, to attract major talent.

“It is LinkedIn which has been the most important channel for us,” says Mohit. This is understandable in hindsight, as Jombay is first and foremost a hiring portal, but for Mohit and his team to get this insight and execute on it is truly admirable.

There are several kinds of content/inbound marketing, and identifying which kind and what channel works best for your organisation is as important as creating great content.

About #PNgrowth

PNgrowth is a year long mentorship program with some of India’s top product people and founders, with learning sessions and curriculum prepared in collaboration with the universities of Stanford, Harvard and Duke. Content marketing will be one of the major areas being covered, as will all the other points our #PNgrowth series will highlight. 

Nominate your Startup here (Apply before 15th November)

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The importance of having a defined mission for your start-up

If you are a small team, starting out to solve a problem, having a mission is hardly a concern. What must concern you at that stage is getting to the product market fit and customer validation.

But even after building a successful product and scaling the business to a sizeable extent, many startups hardly articulate a compelling mission for themselves. With early signs of success, founders directly jump onto growing the team, building feature-sets and scale the organisation. Not very far in the journey, many startups end up facing employee attrition, lack of passion in teams and alignment issues in their organisation.

Founders of growth stage startups often mention retaining talent and alignment as a big area of concern; and end up applying many tactics to resolve talent-related problems. However, the cause of these issues is much more fundamental and intrinsic to the organisation.

Before your push the scale button and look outside to attract other people to your startup, the impact of your mission can’t be overstated. It is very important for the founding team to sit together and extract and articulate the mission for their business. A meaningful mission that matters to the world would instantly change how you look at yourselves and the business. The same regular job would inspire a lot more passion and a sense of pride in doing it. A well-articulated mission makes it easier for prospective team members, customers and investors to relate to your business, decisions and get similarly inspired.

Every problem worth solving is hiding within it a deeper challenge and glorious mission, which needs to be extracted with patience. For instance, the mission for a food delivery startup could be “Savings humans worldwide from the discontent out of hunger”.

Beyond inspiration, a mission opens up the avenues of long-term thinking and frames the canvas of opportunities, ideas and themes of innovations for the business to pursue.

Guest Post by Lalit Mangal, Co-Founder & CPO, CommonFloor

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Are you in India/SaaS, and not at #SaaSx2? You missed transparent mind-blowing insights

SaaSx event is a meetup organized by a bunch of SaaS entrepreneurs for all SaaS entrepreneurs in India. SaaSx Chennai event enables SaaS start-up founders to learn and share tribal knowledge from SaaS (software-as-a-service) start-ups in various stages of the evolutionary ladder.  Every participant registered for the event and was vetted for fitness with theme of the event. (Do events really have qualifying criteria for participants beyond collecting money?)

A good number of us going from Bangalore to Chennai climbed SaaSy bus early in the morning. For everyone who climbed the bus, our learning started in SaSSy bus from Bangalore to Chennai. Entrepreneurs got comfortable with each other quickly and most seem to be in the mind-set described by Yamini “Running a company becomes a lonely job after a point. Super excited to meet other co-founders”.

After crossing to Tamil Nadu, we had breakfast and climbed back to bus. This followed with ice-breaker session where everyone self-introduced themselves and shared 2 things that worked for them and 2 things that did not work for them. Sharing brought the journey to end in Chennai. Some attended private roundtables, followed by lunch, SaaSX2 event started. FireSide Chat was kick-started with Aneesh Reddy of Capillary Technologies on ““The Nuances of Enterprise SaaS” by Ahi and Asha Satapathy.

  • Lonely initial start-up days when it was not cool to work on start-ups. That was okay and they got time to work focused.
  • Shared their approach to balance developing a product and customization needs of customers, how they make decision whether to do customization or not and when to actually execute customization.
  • Shared the challenge to collect money from customers after delivering service and the approach they took to streamline the same. For delays with large enterprise customers, one needs to evaluate whether it makes sense to follow with customer for smaller payments.
  • Shared being lucky not to take hard calls of firing people in India. He thinks firing makes it very difficult to hire senior people at some point of time.

Asha made Aneesh to share personal life tips by asking his advice to young entrepreneur’s to find life partner, which Aneesh coolly as “If you are entrepreneur or plan to be one, marry daughter of business man. She would be able to relate to you as she is already used to relate to her father”. The Next FireSide Chat was started by Sumanth Raghavendra with the man who has mapped SaaS growth from seed funding to Series B and beyond. Yes, Girish Mathrubootham. Earlier he welcomed us sharing his inspiration from thalaivar (leader) Rajinikanth, Tamil film actor. For me, Girish story is very similar to Rajinikanth movies, film world made real in software world.

Girish set context of his learnings and insights might contradict with Aneesh by sharing the difference between order ticket sizes in their individual business. Some of insights shared were

  • Focus should not be just about features in product, but any user must get value in 20 minutes without help from anyone.
  • B2B SaaS is never a winner takes it all market. There will always be a set of 2 to 3 credible players.
  • Decision to spend $40K money earned through Microsoft Hackathon to explore different marketing channels and evaluate their effectiveness. Required courage to spend on marketing against conventional wisdom of boot-strapped start-up booking the money for other purposes.
  • When customer land on the website, product experience starts right at that moment. The customer needs to like what he sees and when he signs, he needs to get value out of the website. If customer ends up saying atleast a vow, there is more probability that the customer might spend time in the next 30 days evaluating your products.

In between sessions, I loved the concepts of #onething at conference where entrepreneurs are asked to share one thing as response to a quick round of questions. Here are few fresh in my mind.

      • #onething “Simplify and communicate “helped team to scale was awesome #communication among team members. The context was the presence of start-up team across multiple geographies.
      • #onething “Should we change focus from Minimal-Viable-Product (MVP) to Billable-Viable-Product(BVP) ?” No money flowing is opinion but cash on table is fact. The Value of BVP: After 30 days of trial, will we get revenue on day 31?
      • Today internet earnings are migrating from advertising to commerce. With more commerce happening, product information is core to the future of brands and market.
      • Choice of Cloud in 2008 enabled us to establish India ecosystem for health management /diagnostics technology products and created a whole new SMB market of SaaS offerings.

Dorai moderated Unconference session. The session started with narrowing down to 3 topics based on audience preference of topics. It just happened that first topic “Inside Sales for SaaS products” took most of the time. It was nice to see exchange of folks with challenges asking questions and folks who cracked challenges sharing their insights. It was nice to see Suresh and Girish stepping up to share their inputs for most of the questions. May be this is exactly how real knowledge sharing should happen.

iSPIRT continues its focus to encourage learning and sharing among entrepreneurs as support for their journeys and here is second event in 2015 to demonstrate their commitment. Here are my thoughts after the event

  • Each questions of entrepreneur’s comes from real world challenges. The answers are not in text book and the answers have to come from real world experiences and are not available in textbooks or class rooms.
  • Learning from SaaS start-ups is tight connected with the context where SaaS start-up operates. Without context of the start-up, insights are of little or no help to entrepreneurs, as learning of SaaS start-up in first context contradicts with the learning of SaaS start-up in second context.
  • No one tried to create good impression. All were open to share their mistakes and what they learnt in the rough way. Indirectly saying that “Failure is first step towards success”.

Here are #bigMistake heard from Bangalore entrepreneurs in #SaaSyBus

  • Sold to friends & thought we were good, product ended up weak. Should’ve sold to toughest customers 1st to make prod strong
  • Hired for start-up experience and skills. Should have hired for attitude and culture fit.
  • Build the product along with sales. First few paying large customer got pissed off and jumped away.
  • Following templates for success does not work. Need to find your own path and your own means to succeed.
  • Took a lot of money from investors and became complacent. Will bootstrap next time.
  • Build a product for a market that was 2small. Now moved to a bigger market and trying hard.
  • Corporate experiences and start-up life are poled apart. Do not worry about other, competitors.
  • Being too passionate when things get hot. Need to step back and take a hard dispassionate look and face reality.
  • Trying to hardsell. Now we just do demos, show the value, if they see the value they will buy.
  • Selling operational cost efficiencies in a fast market does not work.
  • Customer say wants, not need. Product roadmap cannot be based on customer inputs, must come from deep within.
  • Delaying product launch to polish it. Need to launch fast and get market feedback and face reality.

Guest Post by G. Srinivasan

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The difference between iSPIRT’s Playbook RTs and what we have planned for the #PNgrowth Camp

We are now only about 90 days away from what will be a first of many sorts in the Indian ecosystem. The #PNgrowth camp at the Infosys campus in Mysore will be the first long-term program ever initiated for product startups in India. That much has been established. But at the Google hangout we were in yesterday, where we talked about what to expect at #PNgrowth and the process by which we were screening applicants, there arose a question that needed to be answered.

Some of our applicants are asking themselves about the need for a program like this when they have already been getting a lot of insights from our hugely successful Playbook RTs and other events.

I just wanted to make clear the difference between them, as they are both completely different beasts.

First, on content

The Playbook RTs are solutions for the problems that startups face in the here and now. Startups have an extraordinary amount of daily challenges and decisions to be made. Playbook RTs are designed to help founders and employees navigate them. On the other hand, the #Pngrowth camp is a long term mentorship/peer learning program that is focussed and has only one one aim – category leadership. The Playbook RTs are pointed, razor-sharp workshops, the #PNgrowth camp is a university course. The former will award you a diploma and send you off, the latter will give you an education for life.

Second, on numbers

Around 860+ people have, until now, been part of the Playbook RTs. The #PNgrowth camp will have only 200, and that’s it for the whole year. The #PNgrowth camp is selective, and open to product startups at a particular stage of their life cycle – when they need to scale. This selectiveness also means that we have to disappoint several startups who will want to join the program but aren’t in the perfect stage to. We intend to be very choosy here; this is a premier program whose graduates will come out with skills that can never be learnt elsewhere, and therefore it has to be this way.

Third, on the question of overlap

The Playbooks are tactical meetings almost, with different approaches aimed at something immediately tangible. #PNgrowth will design the architecture for the path ahead for startups looking to scale. Playbook RTs are peer-fuelled. #PNgrowth has a important component of academia involvement that will make sure that it succeeds as a long term program for improvement and action. Though the two can be complementary, they are definitely not substitutes. They are very different from each other, and aim to do two completely different things for the ecosystem.

I hope that makes clear the distinction between both of them.


Lastly, I’d like to stress once again the fact that #PNgrowth is going to be incredibly selective and there will be no last minute places. Each applicant goes through a screening process, and there will be no exceptions to that rule. Which means that if you are even slightly interested, please do apply immediately.