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7 Must-Have Features of the right Point of Sale (POS) software for your Retail business

Point of Sale software is being used in millions of retail and hospitality businesses who have thousands of different POS software to choose from. A right POS software will give the business a new level of control over operations; increasing efficiency, boosting profits, and will help it fine-tune its business model. The wrong system, however, can be a waste of money, time and a source of frustration.

The mistake retailers often make is to buy software that is not intended for their industry and this confusion mainly arises from the wide range of features available in thousands of software in the market. For example, a gift shop has much different needs than a car dealer and a liquor store doesn’t need the same software as a clothing store. So the same POS software will not be compatible to all of them. The differences in features and intended uses of a POS can have a huge impact on your business.

Organisations need to narrow their search to the specific industry and it will be well on its way to money well spent and a POS software system that makes your life easier and business more profitable.

Here are 7 common features to look into while buying a POS for any Small, Medium or Large Retail Business:

Features

  • Fast checkout: A retail POS software should be able to simplify the checkout process. This means that it should not take the sales team’s much manual effort to complete a transaction. If there is still a manual process that the team has to go through, then the POS software needs a replacement.
  • Inventory tracking: A  POS should make the inventory management process effortless. One should be able to monitor all the critical information about the store from individual transactions to purchases. This will make the ordering from vendors easy & the inventory manager would not waste time calculating the re-order level.
  • Customer Data: A good POS can help convert the data on customer’s profile into information. As a use case, it will let the purchase team know what products the customers buy more frequently and thus the team can place orders accordingly. The data can also help the customer relation team build an effective loyalty program, which can increase sales in the long term.
  • Automated Purchasing Program: A good POS allows the business to have a streamlined process of connecting with suppliers. For example, if the retail outlet is running low on a critical product, with the help an Automated Purchasing Program, the POS can easily get connected with the suppliers in no time and place the order for the required quantity required quantity
  • Capabilities for multiple location / Mobility: A good POS should also offer online access which helps you stay connected with the business from anywhere remotely.  It is a convenient feature for franchises and business having more than one location.
  • Payment Card Industry (PCI) Agreement: It is one of the most important features which can help the business build trust with its customers as it will protects customers’ credit card details. An organization may face legal issues if the POS does not have this feature.
  • Reporting tools: Every Retail POS should have a reporting feature which is user friendly. It should store information such as product styles or models, weekly sales, monthly sales, annual sales and hourly transactions.

These 7 features are essential for any POS software and ensuring the above feature will increase effectiveness and efficiency of any Retail or Super-Market.

Here are some softwares that you find useful:

 

To find POS with these features you can visit our the Point of Sale page on SotfwareSuggest.com

With Inputs from Sarthak Malani, at SoftwareSuggest.com 

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Presenting the iSPIRT Volunteer Model

Last few years have been very instrumental in making iSPIRT what it is today. A lot of thought had gone into creation of this movement.  We thought it is a good idea to retrace the movement to its origins and codify the model with which we operate on.  The whitepaper at the end of this blog post details the model.

This whitepaper describes the foundational principles, operating practices and culture of this network. This is the volunteer model that underpins the network and (through it) all actions of it. The whitepaper is for public consumption and will be available in public space for other organizations to emulate if they see the merit in these models.

There are two foundational principles. The first one is that this volunteer network is pulled by passion and pushed by program management. Both are essential for success. The passion signifies a strong sense of mission and cause. Program management converts that energy into feasible actions and tangible results. Sustainability of the network comes from its ability to get things done. The second principle puts the “challenges” at the center of network. We expect the volunteers to become part of the network not for glory, but for being part of addressing a shared challenge. The bond generated out of working on something bigger than oneself is what binds this network together.

Operating practices describe how to define a challenge, select volunteers, onboard them, and manage the project. They also describe the assessment of projects, the overall work program, volunteers and the network.

Finally, there is a strong culture within the network. While no document can completely capture any organizational culture, key behaviors that have shaped the network are described here.  The culture holds the volunteers together and creates a strong bond needed to deal with challenges.

Hope this paper will be useful for people creating similar structures across the various communities.

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Benefits of CRM Software – A 360° Evaluation

Do you own a business and face the problem of customer communication? Are you unaware of your customers’ needs? Are your customer’s unhappy with your services? Are you unable to analyze the progress of your business? Then, to all such problems there is one and only one solution – the CRM Software.

In any business two things are very critical: customers and employees. The growth of any business depends majorly on the relationship between the customers and the vendors. When both are satisfied then we have a “win-win” situation as happier customers are more loyal and spend often. To achieve this goal the business should meet its customers’ expectations and deliver them the best services in every odd. Hence, to address the problems of dealing with customers in day-to-day basis the concept of CRM was introduced which is gaining popularity from past few years.

Customer Relationship Management abbreviated as CRM is not just a software or an application of technology rather it’s a unique approach to deeply know the customers’ needs and nature in order to effectively and efficiently develop  a stronger relationship with them.

CRM: Business Point Of View

Benefits of CRM Software

  1. Right Selection

The CRM application is a supreme tool that helps to easily manage the business of any type – big or small, anywhere- home or office ,anytime- day or night and hence, it boosts the customer services. The increase in the sales efficiency can be seen after implementing the right CRM. Even, a CRM can enhance the productivity by 30%, if used correctly.  The selection of a right CRM for your business matters a lot to manage your business. Now-a-days, there are lots of CRM options available in the market.

Thus, as a businessman your first step is to figure out which option will help you build a strong relationship base with your customers and gain you profit.

Points to consider when evaluating a CRM are:
– Ease of implementation
– What features are available out of the box
– What level of customization is required to meet my business requirements
– Cost Professional Services
– Ease of integrating with other back office systems
– what level of integration is available “out of the box” to my telephony system.

  1. Your Progress

The report system empowers you to analyze the progress of your business as well as your team.

  1. Know your Financial Status

Certain CRM packages, offer its users to track their cost of sales and other operating costs to calculate the net profit. Such feature is implemented via finance software in the systems and plays a vital role in tracking the development of small business.

CRM: Sales Agent Point Of View

Advantages of CRM Software

There are many ways in which CRM helps you to nurture the customer relationships with the sales agents and some of them are discussed below:

  1. Organize your Business on tips

It is said that to achieve success easily you should have required resources. The same thing applies in the case of business too. The sale teams of any business – big or small can manage easily their business if they have the right tools to do the job.

The services offered by the CRM makes the task simple and effortless for the salesman or its team to efficiently organize their job of managing multiple clients or meeting big quotas.

Even you can track your own contacts, deals and leads using this technology and can share the info with your team members that helps to manage the customer’ needs even if their contact is not available on regular basis.

  1. Alert System

This functionality of a CRM software follow-up the salesperson with the data set for alert and helps you to do various important tasks on time like to timely meet the milestones, trigger a new activity, prepare presentations, go through a communication with a customer and many more.

Setting alerts makes you attentive, proactive and impresses your multiple customers with your punctual working style.

  1. Track the Important

CRM is a centralized system which helps you to manage your customer relationships by securely accessing as well as sharing your important information, correspondence, conversations, billing info or documents anywhere, anytime through your CRM based cloud benefits.

You can even have a look over the historical records of the customers which help you to deal with any specific customer more professionally.

  1. Get Social

Most enterprise CRM systems help the agents to be in touch with their customers via social media. Moreover, with CRM, agents can work together through chat or video conferences. CRM software offer agents a space to create and store templates for call scripts that have restricted accessibility to other employees.

Even, the service agents can go live with their customers through their website and mobile apps.

  1. Check where you stand

The reports attached with your CRM tool helps you to continuously measure your customer service performance as well as the customer activities so that you can easily figure out the needs of your clients and act accordingly to fulfill them.

CRM: Enhances Customer Services

Importance of CRM Software

After knowing deeply the benefits of CRM for different sectors let’s have a look on the ways in which CRM can help in improving Customer services.

  1. Social media

Generally, social media is used to mainly watch the activities of the customers which help to better learn about the customer choice. Encouraging the clients to link their lead generation and social media enables the clients conveniently log-in. For example, instead of submitting their name, phone, email address, etc. on a form on your web site, let the users just sign in with LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Facebook and others.

  1. Automated Customer Service

On adding a new customer to the CRM, automatically registering them in a Support System, sending them a “welcome to support” Email (with instructions on how to use it), adding them to the e-news mailing list, and notifying customer services to contact them after a specified period to see how they are getting on improves the customer services to a greater extent.

  1. Easy Adoption to system

To make the customers efficiently use the CRM system new gamification processes can be included in a customized CRM.

  1. Customer engagement

Customers always have a tendency to compare what they are getting is best or not it could be in terms of Price, Quality, Service and even the way there are being treated . So any function or process which can envisage the customers that they are getting the best deal or treatment from the market at optimal or lowest cost, and then nurturing that same relationship for highest profit or yield for as long as possible would make a difference to any Business.

  1. Customer Self-Service Approach

Usually, CRM systems offer portals that manage knowledge for the customer self-service. These portals allow the customers to access FAQ or troubleshooting articles without assistance of any agent.

On the other hand, some CRM solutions also offer a company to establish their own online communities for their customers which is an easy way to reach for queries and feedback.

Thus, Customer Relationship Management is an efficient way to get a clearer picture of your current business and helps you to plan your future strategies to satisfy your customers.

So, what are you waiting for? Start expanding your business today with the suitable CRM technology and share your experiences with us via comments.

Browse a list of CRM Software at SoftwareSuggest.com

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#TheWayForward for M&A in India

2013 was a hot year for Global Technology M&A:   204 announced Tech M&A deals took place at an overall valuation of ~$100B, of which 70% were pure software companies. Thanks to a strong stock market, 51 Tech IPOs took place in 2013.

The story for the India software product industry has been different. Despite huge innovation and rising entrepreneurship, most Indian product companies have lacked meaningful exits.

ThinkNext CorpDev PanelLast Friday, I hosted the M&A Panel at Microsoft Think Next in Bangalore, with a very interesting setup: 2 VCs, 2 entrepreneurs and 2 Corp Development folks from MNCs.   The theme of the discussion was “The way forward for M&A for the Software products out of India”.    Our star panel consisted of Ashish Gupta (Helion Ventures), Bharti Jacob (Seedfund), Ken Foo (Autodesk), Prashant Gupta (Microsoft), Sanjay Shah (Invensys Skelta) & Phani Sama (Redbus).   We had a marquee audience of VCs from IDG, Lightspeed, Qualcomm, Inventus etc. who contributed their insights and really made the discussion lively!

Here is a glimpse of the insights generated during the panel:

– “Discovery” continues to be problem #1 for India software product companies.  Most Indian startups don’t show up on the radar of the big US acquirers. Autodesk first discovered Qontext (their marquee acquisition in 2012) through analyst reports in the US, and didn’t know they were an India company until later in the process.
– Corp development folks are mostly agnostic to the location of the company.  As Ken Foo from Autodesk put it, “we don’t start our day thinking:   today I will acquire an Israeli company … or an Indian company”.  They are looking for a specific product or technology fit & location is secondary.
– One interesting insight was the Investment bankers didn’t really seem to play a role during the discovery process, and all of the participants (buy side, VCs and entrepreneurs) felt that startups shouldn’t expect a banker to help with strategic engagements.  iBanks do play an important role in helping negotiate the deal and running the process to a positive conclusion.
– Acqui-hires (acquisitions with the sole intent of acquiring engineering talent) are extremely hot right now, due to the shortage of big data, analytics & android/iOS engineers.  Obviously, VC investors are less excited about acquihires & view them as a “last option”.  As Ashish put it, a VC will entertain an acquihire deal only when he believes that scaling the company is no longer possible, and the company is in danger of running out of cash.  On the other hand, Corp development folks at the MNCs view acquihires as a ‘badge of pedigree’ for the founders!
– Entrepreneur readiness continues to be a challenge during the M&A process.   Indian entrepreneurs traditionally are techies and don’t spend time building a clear differentiation story or preparing themselves for organizational and financial diligence.  iSPIRT does offer an “M&A hotline” to entrepreneurs where we formally provide advice in the event of an inbound M&A interest.
– A new generation of MNCs: Traditionally, MNC companies have established captive R&D centers in India (eg: Intel, Cisco) and then looked at M&A to enter the India market or identify new technologies.   However, the panelists beleived that M&A activity in software products will be driven by a new generation of MNC companies, such as Facebook, Salesforce, Autodesk etc. who have limited or no presence in India, and are looking to use M&A as a means to acquire global talent and/or establish a presence in India
– Future M&A:  Based on the “Virtual Mandates” that iSPIRT has received, we believe that future technology M&A is likely to happen in the areas of Machine Learning & Analytics, SaaS disruptions like HR and Recruiting, Cloud Infrastructure & Mobility.   Companies that have aggregated large groups of customers & partners within India (small medium businesses, classifieds, consumers for finance etc.) are also interesting for acquirers.

I enjoyed the frank conversation & clear thinking from the panelists, and left with a  huge amount of learning and ideas that I will use to guide iSPIRT’s M&A connect program.

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Looking for full-time Program Manager for Software Adoption Initiative(SAI)

Program Manager for Software Adoption Initiative(SAI), is a full-time position (preferred location: Bangalore, India) with iSPIRT, would drive full-scale and focused implementation of the Action Plan 2014 that is drawn up by iSPIRT Founder’s Circle.

The focus of SAI for the year 2014-15 would be to work with software product companies across multiple domains, software product buyers in India and iSPIRT partners and help materialize a lot of engagement between the software buyers and sellers in India. The role involves interactions with key stakeholders (product company execs, marketing agencies, iSPIRT team members, iSPIRT partners), program/project management, document preparation (example creating software adoption guides for various industries), conducting events and managing outbound tele-engagement team.

We are looking for someone who holds an MBA, has flair for communication and interactions with senior executives and has a cross-functional experience with any product companies in Sales/BD program management roles.

The position is very entrepreneurial in nature, where the individual’s drive and passion determine the results while guidance and participation from the core SAI team members would always be available. As a program manager, one would gain great insight into what drives software adoption in India and what opportunities exists for software product companies.

Profiles could be sent to me at avinash(at)ispirt.in. We request Product Nation members to refer anyone who could be interested in the position. Suggestions welcome.

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Presenting the iSPIRT Governing Framework

It has been a great, great year here at iSPIRT, and though we have a long way yet to go, we are confident that we are well on our way to get to where we want to be.

After all, well begun is half done.

But then, there is also the question of structure, not unlike the problem entrepreneurs face they have to scale their business – when the organization becomes big and responsibilities fragment and become more focussed, what if the core values get diluted?

This is why principles are important, and since we started with an ideal we wanted to reach, we have distilled it into three governing principles , which are –

  1. Radical transparency
    This is crucial to continued operation of our ‘peer production’ (volunteer) model.
  2. Polycentric governance aka Panchayat system
    Which means that SPIRT is bigger than any one individual.
  3. Open-Access Public Goods
    We work for many and not for any one company, no matter how important it might be.

The Governing Council (GC) is responsible for upholding these governing principles and ensuring integrity across the board. The GC is about empowerment, not control. It helps clarify the causes and initiatives that we pursue. It is responsible to the SPI at large and not to donors. Our inspiration comes from the world of Wikipedia and Linux.  It’s a world where people are organized but there is no traditional organization; disputes are resolved and order prevails but there is no single person in control.

In the GC, we have a clear conception of the long-term outcomes that we seek. Today SPI is not even an identified industry. We seek to change this. As we argued in the 2012 iSPIRT Annual Letter, India’s future depends on a vibrant software product industry.

To accelerate the growth of SPI we seek a healthier power-law distribution of big and small firms. Our focus on market catalysts like M&A Connect, Global CIO Connect (InTech50) and Software Adoption Initiative are geared to help companies scale faster. In keeping with the global practice, we measure ecosystem’s success in terms of market capitalization, not revenues. We hope to overtake Israel in number and value of M&A deals in the coming years.

The Governing Council is going to champion three causes in this regard –

  1. Solve market coordination failures (e.g. through M&A Connect Program),
  2. Influencing policy,
  3. Synthesizing and evangelizing playbook for faster success.

We recognize that these aren’t everyday tasks. And iSPIRT is just getting started. With our almost audacious mission of transforming India at large through use of software products, we know this is a marathon, not a sprint.

This governing framework that we are sharing with you has evolved from numerous discussions and conversations with our Founder Circle members, Fellows, Mavens and Saarthis over the last many months.  By placing this in the public domain, we once again commit ourselves to building a durable Think Tank that’ll turn India into a Product Nation.

Bharat Goenka (Tally Solutions), Jay Pullur (Pramati Technologies), Naveen Tewari (InMobi), Sharad Sharma (BrandSigma), Vishnu Dusad (Nucleus Software), Governing Council, iSPIRT Foundation

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iSPIRT Seeks Technology Intern(s)

banner-who-we-areiSPIRT has over 40+ volunteers who belong to different organizations. The volunteers are working on many initiatives that are complex, need a lot of analysis/thinking, experimentation, and outcomes take time. Currently, iSPIRT internal communication and interaction has been happening via email, google docs, attachments, etc. The current set of tools have worked so far, but, we need a comprehensive toolset for iSPIRT to be able to manage its internal needs.

iSPIRT is looking for a platform that helps in 5 areas:

a)    Managing volunteers, expansion of volunteers, and creating sub-groups of the same.

b)   Managing information about product companies – mini CRM.

c)    Managing initiatives, projects, tasks, and discussions around them by a group of volunteers.

d)   Critical decision making, polls, and feedback online

e)    Information management – presentations, docs, info graphics, spreadsheets, etc.

Requirements

The intern or volunteer must come from a product/technology background and understand iSPIRT requirements, catalogue them, and identify a product that can be used for this purpose. If possible, facilitate the deployment of the solution among a test group initially and expand into all iSpirt participants. Ability to work independently is a must. Familiarity with open source tools is a plus.

Who should consider this internship

Volunteers who take on this gets an opportunity to work with the top executives of various companies, VCs, Angel investors, entrepreneurs, marketing specialists, sales specialists, and overall highly energetic engaging volunteers in India. Those who are in between jobs or those who are starting out their own startup, would be ideal to get their feet wet and build their network in the startup eco-system.

Location

Bangalore or Delhi

Duration

We are open to both full-time and part-time interns. The expected duration is 3 calendar months and the total effort may be around 25 hours.

How to Apply

Please send your detailed resume with cover letter explaining your motivation for undertaking this internship to avinash(at)ispirt.in by 28th April 2014.

After the Internship

At the completion of the internship, you’ll get a letter of work experience. You’ll also get a chance to network with industry leaders that are iSPIRT Founder Circle Donors, Fellows, Mavens and Saarthis.

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Unlocking the data within Indian Software Product Startups : An iSPIRT Survey [INFOGRAPHIC]

India has the potential to build a USD 100 Billion software product industry by 2025. India has a critical mass of software product companies that have entered their maturation stage. At this juncture, to sunstain momentum it’s very important for the entire ecosystem – product entrepreneurs,  angels,  VCs, government to  be aligned. And this alignment will come about when everybody is looking at the industry issues through the lens of credible industry data. Since this data isn’t available iSPIRT embarked on a systematic research effort in partnership with Prof. Sharique Hasan of Stanford University to address this problem.

The first Product Industry Monitor report is a result of this effort. Following are some key findings of this report.

Survey Infographic_7.0-01

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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.

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First 10 of the 50 Finalists: #InTech50 Most Innovative Products from India

InTech50, a joint initiative by iSPIRT and Terrene Global Leadership Network, that recognizes most promising software products by India’s entrepreneurs, is pleased to confirm the first set of 10 selected products from over 200 nominations.

InTech50 logoThe elected products that represent inspirational and pioneering concepts in software will be showcased at InTech50 , a two-day event to be held at Bangalore from April 9 -10, 2014, where global CIOs and transformation leaders will be present.

How we picked out the Top 10 showcase products:

It is quite an honor to be in the InTech50  considering there was an overwhelming response for product nominations.

An esteemed panel of Chief Information Officers (CIOs), venture capitalists, and product leaders from previous successes have evaluated the nominated products.

The products have been selected based on their capabilities and uniqueness, while having the potential to transform the world around us.

The first 10 finalists for InTech50 2014 Most Innovative Products (in alphabetical order) are:

  •  99tests is a Crowd sourced Testing Marketplace with over 6500 testers from over 20 countries. Software product owners can get their applications tested on different versions of web browsers and various mobile devices to find critical bugs.
  • Cerebra (patent pending), a product from Flutura Solutions is a Machine-to-Machine Big Data Analytics platform that has the capability to unlock signals embedded within cryptic machine logs.
  • CoCubes is India’s largest assessment and campus hiring platform. The company works with 450+ corporate for hiring that provide greater control and transparency, while assisting institutional clients measure and improve employability and helping students move ahead on their career path.
  • Datonis (TM) is a platform from Altizon which helps get any device connected to the internet, manage these connected devices and drive data related to their performance and usage to a cloud based data aggregation and analytical engine to glean operational and consumer insight.
  • Freshdesk is a leading SaaS based customer support software that has more than 16,000 Support Teams across the world using it to deliver exceptional customer service. Freshdesk allows businesses to support customers through email, Twitter, Facebook, chat, phone, forums and other channels.
  • Bizosys’ HSearch is an award winning Hadoop based search and analytics engine to handle several terabytes of data. HSearch has been deployed by clients in Telecom infrastructure, Pharmaceutical R&D, Energy management, online retail, financial analytics industries with the core search engine available as open source.
  • Uniken has developed a path breaking Secure Digital Platform, REL-IDTM – which delivers ubiquitous, rich multi-channel digital experience with military grade security to the customers, employees and partners of an enterprise. Through REL-ID, the end users enjoy a rich and secure digital experience across devices and platforms.
  • Whatfix is a solution for creating interactive support faqs, training and product tours. With Whatfix anyone can create such interactive guides with just a few clicks and integrate them with products, applications & websites.
  • WhistleTalk is a SaaS based referral hiring solution that allows companies to leverage the social network of all their current employees, reach out to their friends and hire them. This unique approach helps organisations to supercharge their referral hiring.
  • ZipDial is a pioneering Mobile Marketing & Analytics platform for emerging markets. Marketers and advertisers utilize ZipDial to transform their brand campaigns into highly interactive and viral user experiences, while building a loyal customer base.

Moving Ahead:  As the evaluation process is still underway, we will announce names of the subsequent finalists as we go along. So stay tuned and share your comments about these innovative companies.

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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.

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A “Virtual Mandate” from Silicon Valley companies for M&A

2013 was one of the most prolific years for M&A worldwide with 3169 acquisitions taking place across the globe. India had its own share of successes with RedBus, Little Eye Labs etc. going through acquisitions. However, in general, relatively few Indian startups figure on the list of acquisitions.

Last week, I hosted an iSPIRT M&A Roundtable in Palo Alto along with Jay Pullur. Attendees M&A - Connect1included corporate development, M&A and senior business unit folks from several key companies including Google, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, Groupon, Intuit, Box, VMware, Cadence, Docomo, LG, etc.

Manik Gupta (Global Product Manager – Google Maps) kicked off the Roundtable with a discussion around Google’s experiences with various acquisitions in the mapping space, both within the US and in Israel. We also had a good discussion on how to bring Indian startups into the mix.

The Roundtable was very well received by the Corporate Development attendees. Here are some takeaways for us in the Indian software product industry:

  • Indian product startups, unlike Israeli startups, are just not on the radar of US acquirers. This means that our efforts to improve ‘Discovery‘ are well timed and badly needed.
  • M&A connect2Acqui-hires are extremely hot right now. Almost every company is short of engineers. Mobile, Cloud, Big Data, Analytics etc. are all in big demand! However entrepreneur preparedness in Indian startups is low. Please use our hotline to get ready in you are approached.
  • Almost all acquisitions have a strong BU sponsor. Business engagements are a stepping stone to future M&A.
  • Acquirers are asking iSPIRT to expedite its ‘playbook‘ that articulates the process of doing an acquisition in India.

 

iSPIRT now has a good number of ‘Virtual Mandates” from the Silicon Valley companies. We are using these to make carefully targeted introductions to Business Exchange Associates.

Exciting times ahead… stay tuned!

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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.

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Stories of small business owners who are paying for software in India

I used to come across a lot of people in India saying SME’s adopting software will always be DIM (Do-it-for-me) but then I thought hard about existing software users in India. Why would they use software day-in & day-out when they are not tech-savvy.

That itch got me to work with my friend Tejaswi Raghurama to dig into stories of small business owners who are paying for software in India and are using it themselves.

Some of their stories are truly inspirational and shed light on how you, the average Indian, who runs a business (and I am one of the tribe, too!) must go ahead and take the plunge to try a software for yourself. You will be surprised at how little help you’ll need from others.

Software for India Part 1 from ProductNation on Vimeo.

Let me explain what I mean with an example. I am a non-tech guy (I can’t code!) in a technology company. Whenever I wanted to run experiments on our website, I was heavily dependent on these 2 people (Kailash & Shivku ) and I was sick of it! So, one fine day, I mustered up courage to try “Visual Website Optimizer ” to do some A/B testing. After spending the whole day interacting with their support team via email, I successfully pulled off a split testing on the website.

Till then, I felt like an over dependent bugger who couldn’t do anything to save his own life. There was a smile on my face walking home that evening. I felt free, I felt liberated and I today, a lot of technology & software drives my thinking and working style.

If I, a business owner who doesn’t have any knowledge of technology, am able to use it effectively to make independent business decisions, I have no doubt that every single business owner can. Make technology your best friend. It makes you independent, saves you time and helps you stay smart.

And guess what – team members, and employees should not be threatened by adoption of new technology – listen to what some of these folks had to say about using software to get work done everyday.

Share these stories with your friends and colleagues and get them to try a new software today, they won’t repent it, we promise!

Software for India Part 2 from ProductNation on Vimeo.

*A special thanks to Tejaswi for making the video, and @Practo + @Nowfloats who’s teams helped us talk to their customers.

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“Potential of Software Products from India” – Insights from an interview with Prof. Rishikesha T Krishnan, IIM Bangalore

In an interview with Govindraj Ethiraj on the changing paradigm of the Indian software industry, Professor Rishikesha T Krishnan, IIM, Bangalore, talks about how the software industry is getting transformed from a services oriented model to creating successful products. He cites FusionCharts as a great example of finding a niche market and moving to the cloud as an efficient mechanism to deliver and service customers.