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

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

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

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

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

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

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Payment Collection

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

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

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

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Lead Sources

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

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

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

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

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Inside sales:

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

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

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

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

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20th #PlayBookRT at Chennai: Sales war stories from 2 SaaS start-ups

An interesting discussion on the theme of ‘Sales’ happened last weekend at Chennai (Orangescape office) as part of the iSpirt round table. Shashank N D from Practo and Girish Rowjee from Greytip gave engaging presentations on their journey and the ~20 participants responded enthusiastically with several interruptions (read questions :)). [Note: A similar discussion in Bengaluru was covered earlier here]

Sales Stage - PractoShashank wooed the audience by starting off with his story on the origins of Practo – when his dad had to undergo a knee operation and wanted to get 2nd opinion from another doctor abroad, he couldn’t send out the medical records electronically. Thus began a singular journey of using emerging technologies such as cloud and mobile to enhance patient experience.

Here are some key ‘Sales’ takeaways from his presentation:

  • Golden Rule: Never build something without making a sale. Practo always got a buy-in from existing or potential customers before actually building new features. This was true even in their early stages.

 

Selling and Coding should be the only activities.

    • Practo benefitted heavily from referrals. They did Zero cold calling and focused on delighting existing customers. The doctors who became customers of Practo were so happy with the product that they were happy to evangelize it amongst their peers
    • It is important that the founders bring on the early adopters. At Practo, the founders got the first 50 customers and in the process achieved Product/Market fit (took about an year). While this number may vary for each company, it is important to note that dedicated sales or marketing should be brought on only after this stage.
    • Shashank also talked about evolution of the sales team over the years. While founders are the best sales persons in the initial stage, it is important to bring P-salesmen (P for Passionate) at the next stage followed by R-salesmen (R for regular) for mass adoption.
    • While product-market fit was the focus during the first phase of going from 0 to 50 customers, the next phase focussed on sales culture. Bringing on P-salespeople, providing free trials for instant gratification of customers, value based selling etc were the highlights
    • Zero discount policy: Practo followed a strict no-discount policy. This actually helped them reduce bargaining behaviour and enabled them to be seen as high-value. But in the ensuing discussion on this topic, most agreed that this is based on the type of product, target market etc. Selling to large customers may not be possible without discounts.
    • ‘Instant Gratification’ was a key customer psychology aspect that Practo focussed on during its sales cycle. Practo provides a feature where the doctor will be able to send an SMS alert to the patient within 30 seconds. This feature became a star-attraction of the product and improved sales
    • Practo was one of the first companies in India to sell a SaaS product offline. Some blogs even mentioned that this was start-up graveyard but it eventually did work for Practo.
    • As a matter of principle, Practo did not focus on doctors/hospitals that did not have computer infrastructure. This gave focus to their sales process. Also, they did not target general physicians and focused on specialists such as dentists, dermatologists etc. Thus targeting really helped them
    • To set up appointments, Practo initially had their own salespeople calling as well as had an inside sales team (with many women!). But what eventually worked for them was to create territories and assigning salespeople to specific territories. Salesmen were then made responsible market intelligence, cold calling etc. Usually the salesperson has to wait at the hospital to meet the doctor in person (like a medical rep) for the first time. But subsequent meetings were all setup through follow-up calls and prior appointments.
    • Medical reps couldn’t deliver as salespeople. They did not have the mind-set to challenge the doctors. At Practo, the smarter and tech-savvy sales guys were more successful as they were about to demonstrate the value of the product/technology to the doctors.
    • After various experiments, Practo had a clear separation of hunting salesmen and farming salesmen. Also most sales guys sell one product.
    • It is important to incentivize salespeople to get maximum yields from them. They have now established something called ‘flyers club’ where top 3 performers can go to a destination of their choice on an annual basis
    • All new salespeople undergo a 1 week training program and are instilled the Practo way of sales. But they have observed that it takes nearly 3 months for them to reach an efficient state.
    • There was an interesting discussion on a question on reselling partners. Majority of the participants concluded that resellers cannot solve your sales problems. What they can do is to magnify your sales success story. Resellers also bring in warm leads and act as influencers.

Shashank from PractoInterestingly and rather ironically, the session concluded with a note that start-ups should not target other start-ups as customers except as early adopters or reference case studies!!

Product Management related takeaways from Practo:

  • Practo spent inordinate number of hours with doctors. The idea was to understand user behaviour, just seeing them go about doing their work, how they interact with the software etc.
  • Practo had an interesting philosophy for feature prioritization – their order of importance was product vision, customers, employees and finally investors! Thus even when customers gave multiple feature requests, only those that aligned with the vision got implemented
  • Practo has lot of focus on analysing product usage, customer data etc. They built in-house tools (eg: epicentre) to monitor usage. Even during early stages when they had just 3 developers, one of them was purely focused on tools. Shashank calls it their ‘secret sauce’ for success.
  • They had a 30% conversion rate for face-to-face trial to paying customer.

IMG_2567The presentation on Practo was followed by a short session on Girish’s entrepreneurial journey with a few nuggets on sales related topics. Unlike Practo, Greytip did not have field salesmen and they went the online sales route for their payroll management software. It took them 2 years to realize that this model will not work well in India – not because of any issues on their side – but the market just did not buy without salesmen. Girish added that many of the emails that they send out are never read by the payroll in-charge. In fact, Greytip realized that CEOs may be more interested in such payroll software but the payroll head did not have the vision or mind-set to think of such possibilities. Thus began a journey of attempting to educate the target segment and build credibility in the process. Greytip also built relationships with payroll processors. Since the competition in payroll processing was cut-throat, their pricing was in fact determined by the market.

IMG_2568The following links were highly recommended during the discussion:

 

Guest Post Contributed by Karthik V, a software product enthusiast with degrees from IIT & IIM

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19th #PlaybookRT – Insights on the Indian Product Ecosystem

This #PlaybookRT was led by Shivku, techie and founder of Exotel. The theme ‘The Ship of Theseus’ was inspired by the movie released in 2012 and also by a team in TCS that used to call itself the Ship of TCS. The focus of this Round Table was to evaluate if product developers have enough insight about the Indian Consumer to make a product company. Most technology companies have an exposure to the Bay area product culture, but do they know enough to build products for our own local market needs. There were a lot of insights that were drawn on the product eco-system in India and the following is a summary of the discussion.

Exotel office

What is the ideal organization structure for a product company in India?

It’s the culture that defines an organization structure. It’s common to find the founder’s background driving the product decisions, for example, a founder with a sales background will ensure the product management strategy is more sales focused.

Shivku had led the discussion with Exotel’s organization structure explaining how his organization structure allowed him to scale his product. Exotel’s teams are divided into Operations, Marketing & Sales, Product Management and Core Technology. Interestingly the support team has been integrated into the Product team in Exotel. This unique structure was done so as to ensure that the product team is closer to the customer.  Customer complaints are usually an indication of bad code and the team that pushed this out this bad code is also responsible to fix it. Even though each team’s responsibilities and targets are clearly demarcated in Exotel, there is a technology person in each of these teams, making them self-sufficient.

Exotel started off with the intention of being a SaaS company, it almost fell into the trap of being a services company post launch. Some of the insights drawn from these discussions were:

1)     Democratically building a product feature set in the early stages is important. But once you cross a tipping point in terms of customers its best to pick and choose features that will drive the product’s engagement in your core audience. If you do not this, you may end up building a services company instead of a product company.

2)     Listening to your sales team is very important. It is upon meeting a lot of customers that the sales team can synthesize patterns (of customer needs). Identifying this common pain point between customers ensures that you are satisfying a broad market need and not a specific problem within a company.

3)     We can’t satisfy every customer with one product and your product will need to scale in the direction you see the best product-market fit. Ensure sales teams have a clear audience to market the product to. If the sales guy comes back saying that there is no product-market fit, then it is very likely that he is selling to the wrong audience.

KPI’s

In terms of KPI’s, B2C companies tend to focus more on the virality and retention  and B2B companies focus on monetization and sales. From the discussions it also became clear that you cannot improve on things that you cannot measure. The focus on which KPI’s to use to measure success keep changing depending on which stage your company is in, for example, in an e-commerce company, it is very likely that initially the focus would be on customer acquisition, it could later change to sales, then margins and probably retention.

Translating the top level metrics which the CEO/Board measures to smaller metrics which your sales/technology team can measure is very important. This helps you correlate any discrepancies and problems that may arise. It also gives you a fair understanding of the success/failure of a new initiative.

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Bharath, from Pugmarks.me, illustrated the above problems with an example. His product management philosophy currently is to create high engagement in a smaller audience. By identifying the customers pain points on why user’s drop-off very early, he was able to divert his team’s resources in fixing this problem, thus ensuring retention. He highlighted a problem with low latency which hindered the user experience leading to poor retention. The team has now spent a considerable amount of resources in fixing this problem, to ensure the product’s KPI’s were met. However, the focus could later change to improving engagement and/or CTR’s.

When do you know and how do you know if you have a product market fit?

Rinka Singh, highlighted his pain points while talking to his first set of potential customers. Although he had met many companies that he initially considered to have a problem-solution fit, these customers never converted into paying customers. It was through perseverance and exploring a little bit further down the value chain that it became apparent to him that he had been attacking the wrong market altogether. Upon increasing the awareness within this initially ignored consumer group, he had faced a tremendous increase in customer response.

Rashmi Ranjan, founder of Shoppers on, highlighted his experience when he launched his product. The product had served a very important need in the market that. It pulled customers in, without the need for a push. He had over 20-25 signups without even going out which indicated a great market fit.

In conclusion, when your customers start to get pulled by your product’s features then it is very likely that you have a successful product market fit.

What is the product manager’s responsibility?

A product manager’s job according to Marty Cagan is to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible. Very often the only person who has a complete view of the product (tech, business and sales) is the product manager. A product manager’s responsibility is to find solutions the market needs the most. He very often envisions the path of the product and depending on the company’s resources his responsibilities could also differ.

rt at exotelFrom the discussions, it became apparent that as an entrepreneur you very often end up constantly building and it becomes very difficult to focus on the micro details due to the backlog of features. A product is built in conjunction and not in isolation from the market. Hence, it is very easy to forget the customers who you are building this product for. In the build, measure and learn cycle, we very often forget to measure and learn. It is important to not let this happen, and the recommendation proposed was to change this role to be of a product market manager instead of a product manager as it is very easy to commit the mistake of constantly building without feedback.

Do I know if a product that was built abroad will be successful in India?

Products that are successful abroad and in India seem to have a strong cultural thread which makes it successful. For example, Facebook ties in common user behaviours of sharing and socializing. However, it’s the ecosystem that drives a products success. You need to constantly evaluate and iterate. In India, it is unlikely that a consumer product can succeed without venture funding. This is probably why we see more SaaS business models or a lot of B2B products in the Indian eco-system.

The conclusions drawn were that you need to have a network that allows a product to grow into the scale it needs to succeed. These networks maybe very well developed in markets like US, but India is catching up. It was also pointed out that there is no dearth of venture capital in India. The supply often exceeds the demand. We need to utilize these channels appropriately and grow the product efficiently. People also need to be more vocal about products they like as more often than not, it’s the early adopters who drive the product to success.

Are we bent towards making services in India?

The product round table concluded by evaluating the Indian product companies psyche. The question was whether companies like Infosys and Jugaad were the reasons why Indians leaned towards a services model. Services by nature start and end with a contract. The problem definition is usually laid out by another company and there is very little room for novel products to come out in this problem space. Product companies are driven by a vision, and it is often executed by combining fields such as design, humanities and engineering. It is important that Indian’s focus more on building our strengths in design and humanities. This disconnect was attributed to the poor education system.

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Conclusion

We have the knowledge and network to build great products in India. Although there maybe large inefficiencies in distribution, Indians have had a fair amount of success stories with regards to products. Flipkart and JustDial are great examples of this and we need to work towards improving the network for product entrepreneurs to succeed. From the Launchpad, promotion, content curation, funding, and giving back to the community, there is a lot that can be done to make the eco-system in India more robust to serve its customers.

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iSPIRT Sales RoundTable: Acquiring initial customers, Early product management, Indian SME Selling

Yet another extremely educational round table from iSPIRT – 8 out of 12 participants gave it a rating of 10/10!  Girish from GreyTip and Shashank from Practo led the round table and Aneesh and Yashwanth contributed with their experience at Capillary.  This article captures some of the key learning from the round table.

The focus of this round table was on acquiring the initial set of customers, particularly in the context of SME segment in India. However, several takeaways are applicable in a general context too. Other topics included early product management, hiring and motivating the sales team and channel partners, and product pricing.

Acquiring your first customers

One of the most common and biggest pain points for a startup is getting the initial customers. Enterprises don’t want to talk to start-ups as they are looking for a mature, tried and tested product. Channel partners also do not want to talk to start-ups unless they have proven sales record and reference customers.  It’s a catch 22 situation.  Add to that the long sales cycle of 2 to 6 months and it can be a very frustrating experience.

Shashank shared the learning from Practo’s journey of acquiring the initial customers:

  1. For the first 50 customers, the CEO did the sales and got them to sign up.  
  2. The focus on the first 50 customers was on product market fit (more from product management perspective than customer acquisition).
  3. Early on, they were not focused on pricing, but on getting people to use it.
  4. They went behind early adopters who were open to technology and did not try to engage with the late majority or the laggards. For example, if they found a doctor using an old feature phone, they would not consider him as an early adopter.  Lead qualification is very important.  Focus on quality leads rather than trivial leads.
  5. In the earlier days, they segmented the market and targeted only dentists in Bangalore and only later expanded to other geographies and kinds of doctors.
  6. They spent almost the first year and half to figure out what the customer wanted.
  7. Some of the unique things they did included not giving any incentive to existing customers to refer other customers. They wanted the customer to find so much value in their offering that they would refer on their own.  They had a zero referral fee policy as they wanted genuine references.

According to Shashank, four key things that they did right were:

  1. Spending hours with the USERS to understand their needs.  They measured each and every action the user is doing and used it to qualify the lead.   They had in-built tools in their product to measure usage.
  2. They build for needs that can SCALE to several other users.
  3. Focusing on PAID needs.
  4. USAGE was their best friend. 

Girish from Greytip talked about his journey from being on-premise only software to providing a cloud based solution too. They launched their SAAS version in 2007 when it was still nascent.  To experiment, they built a small product on SAAS.  They used the beachhead strategy i.e. get a first achievement that leads way to future successes.  The beachhead strategy goes by the name of MVP (minimum viable product) these days.

 

During the beachhead stage, they validated aspects such as customer need, data center hosting, cloud strategy, multi-tenancy etc.  Once they saw traction, they realized there is a much bigger market and they started adding more features to the product and scaling sales.  And they experimented with different things such as free trials, doing the sale completely online etc. They also tried SEO and SCM.

For their product, they saw that free trial did not work.  Nor did they see a sale being done completely online.  Girish’s hypothesis is that for their kind of product (payroll), people want someone to speak to and hold responsible for delivery and timeliness. On the other hand, some companies have got all their sales in the Indian B2B context fully online.  That is why it is crucial to validate the assumptions in the problem space and target market. 

The key takeaway is to experiment different things to figure out what will work for a given product in a given market context.  SEO, SCM, Adwords got them leads, but fulfillment was never 100% online. It required a human to close the deal. 

 

Do a bunch of experiments and have clear metrics on what you want to measure to decide the effectiveness of the experiment.

Getting the first customer takes the longest time.  Getting the second customer takes much lesser time. Getting the 10th customer is much faster and getting the 100th customer more so.  Customer acquisition time drops exponentially.

Metrics is always useful to convince value to customer.  Have an ROI calculator.  Quantify the perceived loss of not using your product.

To get initial customers, do whatever it takes.  Keep chasing the right guys. Use personal references and networking to get meetings. Once you get the meeting, then it is up to the product fit and normal sales cycle.

One company got their first customer after 10 months. And then it took them 14 more months to get to 10 customers.

Get 5 or 6 testimonials and users who love your product and only then go aggressive on sales. Build the product along with 5-6 target customers. First, figure out if there is a need for the product. Follow the lean startup model that is quite popular in startup literature. It really works!

In these times, the product has to give Instant Gratification when the customer tries the product for the first time. For example, with Practo, a doctor can send SMS to a patient within 30 seconds of starting trial.  Also, using the product for the first time should be very easy.

Getting references from existing customers is the best method for a startup to acquire more customers.  Along with references, cold calling is also needed to get more leads.

For startups founded by young entrepreneurs, age can be a concern in some domains, as some people give more credibility to age. For these kinds of startups, spending efforts to acquire additional credibility helps.   For example, you can enlist the services of an industry veteran.  Or use an existing customer base as a reference.  Customers listen to someone from their community.   For example, Scheme Central went through the secretary of the jewelry association and was able to get a huge community of jewelers sign up for their promotional event.

Create case studies. And put in metrics and data points in the case study that communicates the value very clearly.

A new product needs investment in marketing for awareness creation. Webinars help in thought leadership and credibility.  You should share best practices and industry trends in webinars.   In the last 10% time you can talk about your product.  However, the results may not be immediate.  Use technologies like webex, gotomeeting, gotowebinar.

Tradeshow presence helps in getting rid of the startup tag and establishes credibility. Use tradeshows also to educate about new things, establish thought leadership and engaging the community.  Tradeshows are also places where you can get time from people, who are otherwise too busy in their work to take time out for you.  Try to connect with and setup meetings with interested parties before the event, so you can get more mileage out of the event.

Hiring and Motivating Salespeople

Startups need passionate team members for sales.  In the early stages, professional sales people are not needed, but passion is more important. 

Sales culture and values are very important.  Different companies have different values, but it is important to articulate your culture and values so the new employees can identify and relate to the culture. For example, one aspect of the values could be that “We will not give any discounts”.   This can help in reducing the sales cycle since there is no negotiation phase. 

Build internal tools for sales tracking, conversions and product usage.  It might be worthwhile to have a dedicated engineer to build and maintain sales tools.

It is not very difficult to hire foot soldier sales in India for SME sales.  Some companies have hired sales people with 2 years’ experience for 25K INR per month. Naukri is a good place to hire junior sales people.

For a startup, it might be better to hire a little experienced folks instead of freshers.  In addition to training costs, freshers also have the urge to look out for a change after an year or two.  Attrition is higher among lesser experienced employees.

The key things to look while hiring a sales person are:

  1. Communication skills
  2. Sales ability. In the interview, ask him to sell his current product to you.
  3. Relevance. Right background.
  4. Attitude.

As you scale, investing in the right recruiter is very important as it is very important to hire good candidates.

Act quickly on mistakes.  If you find someone who is not right, let go immediately. Typically, 1 out of 2 sales is good fit.

Have a transparent incentive system.  And make it non-linear so the salesperson is incentivized to achieve more.  For example, if the salesperson gets 1 to 3 deals, the incentive is Rs X per deal. For the 4th through 7th deals, the incentive is 2X and for the 10+ deals, it is 3X.

While it is important to track results, for salespeople tracking effort is also important. It helps in improving morale. For example, effort metrics are things such as number of meetings per week, 4 demos a day etc. 

Early Product Management

The product requirements should be driven by the needs of the customer. Aneesh also mentioned that they built the product after talking to retailers (their target customer segment).  The first five customers gave them the requirements and then they build the product. 

Till you get 100 or so customers (the number might be different for your product), keep making modifications so you have a good minimum viable product (MVP).

Free trials are a great way to get customers.  The trial period can be 15 days, 1 month or 3 months or whatever is appropriate in your context.  This depends on how soon the customer can see the value of the product.  If the value is immediate, then a 15 day trial should be good enough.

If a customer asks for feature X that is not currently available, ask them to pay for it, or tell them to buy the existing product and give them a commitment on when the new feature will be ready.  In India, people don’t want to say no directly and hence may come up with different missing features to indirectly say no.  Ask other customers if they want the same feature X. If 20% customers need it, then build it. 

Build metrics in your product so you can measure which features are being used by customers.  This can also help in manage the funnel.  For example, you can take these actions based on usage during the trial period.

  1. Who is using it?  Convert these people to paying customers.
  2. Who is not using it? Extend trial.
  3. Who is not using at all? Train them.

SME mindset

Pay particular attention to the most common mindset in your target segment.   For example, some SMEs have budget constraints. So being flexible in your pricing might be needed. In large enterprises, things run on budgets, so we need to be sensitive to that too. In India, price negotiation and discounts are normal expectations. You will have to decide how you want to handle this.

If the product delivers value, people will pay for it.  It is not true that the SME segment in India does not want to spend money.

In the Indian B2B SME context, the customer wants to buy from a person. In the B2B SME context, another important factor is local language communication. Not everyone is English savvy or comfortable doing business in English. So they hired local language speaking sales people.

“Me too” syndrome is prevalent in SME segment in India. They are well connected with each other.  You can leverage the “me too” syndrome by using names of your customers competition who is using your product.

SME sales can take a few weeks to a few months, depending on the kind of product and the kind of market.  If there are multiple decision makers, sales complexity increases and it can take a minimum of 3 months.

In India, customers don’t say no directly.  They might give a variety of reasons to not make the commitment and you might mistake that for genuine interest in the product. Get them to say “Yes” or “No”.  Any concrete answer is a good answer.

Channel Partners

Get at least 10 customers yourself so you have established product-market fit.  And then go talk to channel partners.  Channels will not solve the sales problem for you. You solve it first and that will get the channel excited. They can help you replicate, but not create the sales model.

Channels want to make money. They don’t want to invest in your product.  They want to take up already proven products.  You might want to put your sales guy in the channel partner’s office and make sure channel partner is making money.  Channels will take time and effort.

SAAS products are not exciting for channels as the ticket size is small and they don’t have much scope for making money from implementation and upgrade services.  In SAAS, you need to give higher commissions.  You can use channels to increase awareness.  For SAAS, marketing is more important than channel partners.

For straight forward low touch products, you deal with distributors and resellers (e.g. anti-virus software). Channel partners are typically used for high touch, high involvement kind of solutions where the partner brings in some perceived value addition.  

Thoughts on Pricing

Here are some rules of thumb to arrive at product pricing:

  1. What is the customer currently paying to solve the problem? For example, is it a person whose salary is the cost? Or it is on-premise software that you are replacing with a SAAS solution? Your product pricing has to be less than what the customer is currently paying.
  2. Your cost of customer acquisition should be less than the annual revenue from the customer.  Otherwise, it might not be a sustainable business. Cost of customer acquisition is roughly equal to total salary of sales people + some % markup for additional costs associated with an employee divided by the total number of customers acquired.  The formula might vary based on your cost model (e.g. advertisements), but you need to figure out a simple handy customer acquisition cost calculator even if it is not accurate.
  3. Life time value of the customer should be at least 3 time annual revenue from the customer (=1/churn).

Some Tips and Reference Material mentioned in the round table 

  1. 6 Cs of SAAS metrics and other resources, available at www.bvp.com.
  2. A book titled “Solution Selling”.
  3. Some of the participants found yesware.com  a very good tool for salespeople.  It tells interesting things about whether a prospect opened a mail, forwarded it etc.
  4. Slides used by Shashank at the round table are here.
  5.  A very good blog for startup sales is http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/06/13/why-your-startup-needs-a-sales-methodology/ (PUCCKA model).

Tweetable Tweets

Getting the first customer takes the longest time. Customer acquisition time drops exponentially. Tweet this.

To get initial customers, do whatever it takes.  Keep chasing the right guys. Tweet this.

Experiment with different models in your specific context to figure out what will work. Tweet this.

The customer needs to have instant gratification when he tries the product for the first time.Tweet this.

Getting references from existing customers is the best method for a startup to acquire more customers. Tweet this.

Have a nonlinear and transparent incentive plan to motivate salespeople to achieve more. Tweet this.

Build metrics in your product so you can measure which features are being used by customers.Tweet this.

In India, customers don’t say no directly. Get them to say YES or NO. Tweet this.

Get at least 10 customers yourself. And then go talk to channel partners.Tweet this.  

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Insights from the Sales Playbook RoundTable Led by Ambarish, Knowlarity in Gurgaon

The second Sales Playbook RoundTable in Delhi-NCR was held at EKO office in Gurgaon, led by Ambarish Gupta– CEO/Founder, Knowlarity Communications. About 10 companies attended the meet such as EKO, Easework, Busy, Yippster, Conixevus and few more. The format was quite engaging and action oriented as participants were asked to come with their own set of sales challenges for the RT. The session started with a brief introduction and the specific challenges participants were facing.  There was a good degree of overlap among sales challenges of different organizations. The common theme emerging out of the challenges can be divided into three categories – Profit margin, Velocity of Sales & Scaling up. I’m listing down few of the actionable learning discussed

Improving Profit margin:- 

There was unanimous agreement over the core purpose of business among participants i.e to make profit which is a very elementary mathematical equation i.e difference between revenue from a unit customer & cost of serving a unit customer. Even if somebody is making revenue, he may choose to leave a particular customer if cost of serving customer is more than revenue. Exceptions are always there if the unprofitable customer is a source of bringing other profitable customers. Organizations should have real time view of profitability of different customer segments and may focus on segments with maximum profitability. While formulating any pricing strategy, the above mentioned formula should be kept in mind.

  1. The most important point in improving profitability is to understand the sustainable value coming out from the different customer segments & know associated risks. For example- startups as a major customer base are not good for companies because most of them die in a year so average cost of acquisition & serving is always going to be more than the average revenue for these customers. Similarly, up gradation to the existing customer may enhance profit margin significantly.
  2. Ask the customers to pay for the product you are providing, you will be getting right kind of feedback about product & business model, if majority is not willing to pay, it’s a red flag and one may need to modify the business model & product
  3. The pricing model should be taking care of mind set of customers so if the target customers are not in a position to shell out big amount of money, the pay as you go model may be applied with known risk that churning of customers is going to be high risk for the company.
  4. Payment term is also quite important, For example – Even in SaaS model once can ask for yearly payment rather than collecting on monthly basis. It has got several advantages-a) Advance cash flow b) reduced tension & effort of collecting money c) you have got a time in which you can make customers use the product and take benefit out of product.
  5. Make customers’ use the product so that they can feel the business benefit. A happy customer’s life time value is quite high for the company. The companies need to make as many happy customers as possible as a brand ambassador so after getting word of mouth publicity /referrals the cost of acquiring customers reduces significantly resulting in better profit margin for the company in long run.

Enhancing Velocity of Sales:-

A lot of participants expressed their concern about increased sales cycle and discussed the ways to reduce the cycle time & find a right process for reaching out to prospects.

  1. Network is very important in finding first few customers; it was observed that most of the companies got first few clients from personal network which resulted in an early traction for products.  So build a network of mutually beneficial relationship much before you try to reap the benefits.
  2. For reducing the time cycle, team should focus on finding the person in the target companies who is feeling the maximum pain for the problems you are going to solve and identify the decision maker such as CEO/CMO.
  3. For finding the relevant personal details such as mobile no. /email id internal to an organization, various tactics may be employed such as finding details from LinkedIn & Naukri profile, calling the board member as a journalist for interview etc.
  4. It is always advisable for going through a referral route if available so that the prospects would be in a frame of mind to hear. Moreover, while interacting on phone for the first time, you have just first 30 seconds to impress, be precise to what you are going to deliver in terms of benefits not about details of products. You will be getting enough time and a meeting with all the key executives if you can hold call for first 30 seconds.  The benefits should be clearly leading to either increasing the revenue or reducing the cost in direct or indirect ways such as, “I will help you in making additional money from existing customers” or “I will reduce the cost of serving to your existing customers”.
  5. If your product is new in market, one needs to identify the early adopters who are willing to take chances for launching the product with assessment of the probable competition, barrier to entry, market potential & preferred business/ revenue model in different markets.
  6. If the product is a replacement of the existing product then value from the replacement product should be of at least 10x more value than that of the existing product. The product companies need to understand & answer the key questions- why people should be replacing existing system/products? The mindset of a customer is always going to maximize the value per unit cost. One needs to find a solution of this puzzle for individual prospects before reaching them so one needs to concentrate on understanding the pain points with existing product and how to help prospects with those pain points while still providing the others as usual benefits to the customers.
  7. Both tangible and intangible value should be taken into consideration while evaluating overall value to the customer. One needs to be very careful if you are changing the path of doing business as usual for the prospects as there would be a degree of difficulty in doing something new for the customers. This is going to create negative value to the prospects.
  8. Keep customers / prospects engaged in a personalized way such as sending some information that may or may not be relevant to the product but may help prospect. Always keep a updated social profiling of the prospects from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and find an excuse to follow up such as Congratulations for getting award etc. One need to understand that we are dealing with human beings not machines so clubbing of trust and emotions is extremely important to reduce sales cycle.
  9. The first point of interaction with customer is what you are going to provide. Talk to the customers in a language they can understand rather than focusing on product and features, it comes later in answering to the question how you are going to provide. For example- Our product will reduce the serving cost per customer in call center from 50 paisa to 10 paisa or our product is going to help in your business conversion by x% that is going to increase your revenue by y%.
  10. Even from the same target customer segment, different prospects are at the different stage of the sales cycle so marketing pitch should be in line with different stages in a sales cycle i.e Awareness – attract – Engage- Convert – Happy customer – Referral / word of mouth – new customers and so on.

Scaling up:-

  1. Product companies should connect to prospects to understand the pain points of the customers rather than building a perfect product with no market requirements. They should start talking with customers even if the product is not ready to receive valuable feedback.
  2. Time to make entry in the market is quite important as  it decides the opportunity windows of a company to tap maximum benefits in minimum time & effort
  3. The system & processes during the early stage of startup should be highly flexible. After a certain period the same flexible system should be converted into process driven system to run the show. Therefore, one should evaluate & understand the system / processes / resource that are needed to drive the expected sales after scaling up & manage the changes from the existing level to the future level smoothly.
  4. One needs to find the sales model that is highly effective and scalable after market test and multiple iterations. Once you have found the right kind of value proposition and target set of customers for that value proposition with effective sales channels, you can scale up same model exponentially.
  5. The choice of domestic vs. international market is quite tricky. In developing market competition is less, quality expectation is less, market potential is high but customers are not willing to pay so ticket size is small. One of the biggest obstacles is the mind-set of customers in developing market. However in developed market ticket size is high, less hurdles with mind-set but competition is intense with very high expectations on front of quality. So considering these two facts one can take domestic market as a test market for testing and enhancing the product. Once it reaches the level of international standard, one can make international markets as the primary source of revenue. Jumping to international market without having a tested product may block all the future chances in that market forever.
  6. The selection of appropriate sales channel may be explored after trying established model such as telesales, channel, face to face & enterprise sales. Only after market testing, one can determine the right way to get more profitable customer at lower costs.
  7. The product companies need to create a sustainable source of inbound leads rather than outbound leads to improve efficiency of the sales system. Sales people should not be engage with every potential customer, they should be getting filtered list of potential customer for engaging & converting
  8. Another basic question is how customers are going to discover you? One needs to see the whole picture from the lens of customers for scaling up. Depending upon the computer literacy of the targeted customer offline or online or combination of marketing tactics may be deployed. For example- if customers are searching heavily over internet for the keywords associated with the products- Google organic and paid search could be good idea to hook the prospects. However if the search volume is less then display tactics may be needed to create the awareness among targets & later for hooking.
  9. The product companies need to understand the mindset of channel partners and dynamics that is happening in the channel partner industry. As profitability is going down, existing good partners may be looking out for new streams of revenue. So, they would be happy to work on a more profitable venture for taking a new product to the market. Apart from that capability, influence into target market and willingness to sell must be evaluated for potential partners.
  10. The big channel partner may not be a good partner unless the new product can create immediate good streams of revenue for them, so small partners would a preferred set of partners because they would be devoting dedicated time even for small revenue however the impact on company’s revenue per partner would be limited so number of such working partners come into picture for getting maximum revenue in a given time.

These insights were the result of the sales round table meet. The round table meet ends with a promise of meeting again for discussing and sharing experience again in coming month. Thanks to  iSPIRT ProductNation in being instrumental for building core competence in product organizations.

Guest Post by Manoj Kumar, a volunteer for ProductNation

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iSPIRT ProductNation Branding RoundTable: Why Product Branding is important for Startups?

As usual, the 16th iSPIRT RoundTable was a great learning experience. Many thanks to Avinash Raghava & iSPIRT for conceptualizing it, and to Helion Ventures for sponsoring the venue and the snacks.

Dhruv Shenoy of Knowience Consulting, a well-known Marketing Guru, was the facilitator, along with Rajan from Intuit. Thanks, Dhruv and Rajan, for an educational and entertaining session.

I used to think that product branding is only for large companies and startups and early stage companies don’t need to worry about it.  So I was skeptical at first – but I trusted Avinash’s judgment in putting together this session.  And it was an eye-opener.  Dhruv explained to us what “brand” is and why it is important for products at any stage of maturity.  Building the product without doing an exercise in defining the brand can lead to lot of wasted time and money.

Branding consists of three high level activities “What to say”, “How to say” and “How do we reach the target customer”.  This round table focused on “What to say”. Future round tables will cover the other two high level activities.

Starting with the definition of “Brand”, we covered “Customer Insights”, “Product Proposition”, “Target Audience”, “The Six Tenets of Product Branding”, “Brand Essence” and “Brand Positioning Statement”.

After reading this article, give a shot at creating a Brand Positioning Statement for your product.  From my personal experience, I assure you that it is time well spent.

What is a brand?

We normally look at only commercial products, but the concept is broader.  Mother Teresa, Lord Ganesha, Santa Claus are also brands. So are Diwali and Valentines’ day.  Or even the concept of “Brand India”.

The three key attributes of a brand are:

  1. Most Unique (not overlapping with others).
  2. Most Relevant
  3. Large following

For example, among the 33 Crores of Hindu Gods, which God is known for removing obstacles and hence needs to be worshipped first?  Everyone knows it is Ganesha. Ganesha satisfies all the three conditions above.

Brand is how consumers identify the product and recall it. Brand is built over a period of time by the consumers/target audience.  The manufacturers can do brand building activities keeping the above three attributes in mind. Brand building takes time. For example, Gmail built it over several years to overtake Yahoo.

To be successful, the product should not be a commodity. It should be a brand. For example, rice is a commodity and is talked in terms of Rs. 43/kg or Rs 50/kg. But Kohinoor Basmati is a brand.   A brand kindles attributes about the product in the mind of the consumer.

Brand creates a promise. This needs to be delivered by the product. Otherwise, it will backfire badly.

So how do we go about creating a brand for our product?  The first step is to get customer insights.

Customer Insights 

It is very important to realize that there are thousands of things going on in the customer’s mind.  How do we get into the mind of the customer and grab mindshare?  Even if you have a great product, if the customer cannot identify and recall it, you have lost the customer.

To understand how to get the customer’s mindshare, we need to get customer insights. Customer insights are at a deeper level and not just at the level of product benefits/features.  These deeper insights should be used to differentiate your product and get the customer’s mindshare. 

Here are some examples of customer insights:

(Disclaimer: All the statements about different brands and products in this article are hypotheses made by RT participants as an exercise for better understanding.  They may not reflect reality)

  • SalesForce:  Before SalesForce, companies had to make large investments in Software and have it installed and maintained on premise. This was keeping SMEs away from expensive Software. They could not afford to make such investments to see value. Subscription based, on-cloud service appeals to this customer segment.  SalesForce targeted this customer insight.
  • Dove: As women get into early 30s, they have the insecurity that they are looking older.  Dove promises that they will look younger.
  • LinkedIn: Man is a social animal and wants to keep in touch with his contacts.  In the offline world, the mindshare of friends (whom you meet at home in a relaxed environment) is different from mindshare of professional contacts (whom you meet in a coffee shop with some agenda).  LinkedIn’s insight was that what you do offline (meeting people, networking etc), you can do online also in a separate way. Online life mirrors real life.
  • Instagram:  People want to look like professional photographers. People are taking photos from their mobiles and sharing, but the photos were not looking professional.  Instagram lets you do that from your mobile.
  • Scooty: Kinetic Honda is very heavy for young girls.  They need something lighter without gears.
  • Gmail: Other mail providers were limiting the max space. Gmail came up with 10GB space.

Focus on only one thing from the customer mindshare point of view.  Which part of the customer’s problem are we solving? Focus on the deeper benefit.  David Ogilvy said “Interrogate your product till it confesses its strengths”.  What can my product do that others can’t? Without this, your brand will not have recall value.

If we have multiple product lines, then we should have a main mother brand (e.g. Microsoft) and the sub brands for individual product lines (e.g. MS Office).

Study the market dynamics and focus on customer insights.

  1. Customer Insights should be the foundation of business planning.
  2. Remember that customer attitudes are never static.
  3. Customer insights are the key to building a discriminator.

How do we go about getting customer insights?

  1. Usage.  This is the best way – find out how the customer is using your product and take feedback.
  2. Observation.  For example:  shopping insights, product usage analytics, surveys, research.
  3. Probe. Ask open ended and close ended questions and analyze responses.

The best way to get consumer insights is to go back to the people who are using your product and find out why they are using it.  This will also give you insights on your product differentiation.

Ask customer to describe your product.  It can illuminate you on what you think your customer thinks (apologies for the thought twister).

Once you’ve got the customer insights, the next step is figure out which insight you want to target.  And that brings us to “Product Proposition”.

Product Proposition 

How will my product be different with respect to the competition?

  1. Filters down from consumer insights.
  2. Discrimination starts with the product.
  3. Brand builds on product promise.

Here are some examples:

  • iPod: iTunes + iPod. Buy one song instead of an album. Biggest storage capacity.
  • Nissan Sunny:  More legroom for people sitting in the back seat. Longer car in the same category (i.e. at Sedan cost).
  • Google:  With earlier search engines, you had to think what to type. Google addressed this with “Search the way you think”.
  • Flipkart: Hassle free delivery.  Very fast.
  • Maruti Car:  How much mileage? Value for money.

It is very important to be unique on some dimension – even from the day you conceptualize the product.  And, the product proposition has to be very simple to have recall in the customer’s mind.  One rule of thumb is to aim to explain your product to your child/grandmother.  Typically, this can be done.

Think of what is keeping your customers awake at night.  And use that to grab the customer’s mindshare. For example, let’s take my company’s product – KeyMails – which solves the problem of email overload for Microsoft Outlook users. The insight could be that the target customer is worried about missing an important mail. So, something like “Never miss an important mail” could be one approach to branding.

Think in terms of “Unique Atomic Unit” about your differentiator.  For example, with facebook it is “update status”; with twitter, it is “very short message”.  Spend some time thinking about what the unique atomic unit is for your product.  Do it now.

Go to market with the differentiating “hero” feature.  Other features are needed, but they do not form part of go to market strategy.  Example, Scooty is a vehicle that has good mileage and a good engine, but they focus on their differentiating factor of being usable by girls.

Once you have the product proposition, the next step is to understand the target audience.

Target Audience

You need to have answers to the following questions about your target audience:

  1. Why should we understand the target audience?
  2. Who are we talking to? And why?
  3. What are his/her attitudes to the category?
  4. What defines him/her?

For example, for Naukri, the recruiter thinks he needs their service if he needs to hire 200 people in a month. If it is just for one or two positions, consultants might work better. This customer attitude is important to know.  Online recruitment is for scaling.

You need to create a persona for the target customer. In the initial stages of a startup, it is better to have only one target persona.  Having multiple target personas causes confusion.  Pick the persona that is most promising.  The persona needs to change and be refined as you get more data.  For example, though Practo is a general purpose solution for doctors, they first picked dentists and later expanded to other segments. “Everybody is my customer” does not work.

Give the target persona a name – say Molly/Tom/Rohan and write down as many attributes as you can about the persona – what is the annual salary, spending habits, attitude towards buying products similar to yours etc. This helps in identifying who is a target customer and who is not. This will also help in decision making – for example, if you want to add a feature – ask if Rohan will like that feature. And base your decision on the answer to this question.

You can have multiple target personas once you become more mature.

What if there are multiple people who are involved in the buying decision for the product? Who should you focus on? Your pitch should be to the buyer. You have to talk to the users and the influencers too, but the pitch must be to the buyer.

With this background, it is time to introduce the six tenets of product branding.  This is a concise summary of the discussion so far.

Six Tenets of Product Branding

You need to study and arrive at your understanding of the following six pillars.

  1. Market Dynamics
  2. Target Audience
  3. Consumer Insights
  4. Competitive Environment
  5. Key Brand Benefit.
  6. Reason to Believe.

If even one of the above is not satisfied, you might not get the results. For example, one of the most common reasons for failure is that brands do not address the “Reason to Believe”. It is easy to make tall claims, but the consumers must clearly see the reason why they should believe your product’s differentiator.

All the learning above are inputs to two tangible outcomes for your brand – (a) Brand Positioning Essence and (b) Brand Positioning Statement.

Brand Positioning Essence 

“Brand Positioning Essence” typically consists of two to three words.  It is that one aspiration of the core target audience that the brand would like to uniquely own.  For example, “Feminity Restored” can be the essence for a soap targeting middle age women.

Take a few minutes now to think about those two or three words that communicate the essence of your product.

Brand Positioning Statement

Create a Unique Brand Positioning Statement that covers the six tenets above.  A template for your statement is given below:

My product is a ________ (market dynamics) for ______ (target audience) who are ______ (consumer insights) and my product does _________ (key brand benefit) because ____ (reason to believe).

Here is a shot at KeyMails brand positioning statement.

“KeyMails solves the problem of email overload for business people who use Microsoft Outlook, and who do not want to miss important mails; by ranking the mails in the order of importance to the user, by automatically learning from the past email behaviour and easy and minimal configuration.” 

I request other participants to write down their unique positioning statement for the benefit of the readers.

For your reference, here is the silde deck used by Dhruv for the round table.

Conclusion

Branding is a must for any product, whether it is in a mature stage or early stage.

Particularly for product startups, the “brand” of the product is important. It is more challenging when the product is still evolving and the startup is trying to figure out the product-market fit and a minimum viable product.  However, brand is in the mind of the customer and it is evolving. It can change with product market fit, but it has to be present at every time.  You always need to have a differentiating factor that addresses a deep need for your target audience.  And your brand positioning can and must change as you change product strategy.

It is similar to your business model.  It is not advisable to start building a product without having a business model and business plan.  Sure, it will change and evolve over time – but at any point in time, you do have a business plan.  Same thing with branding.

If you’d like to share your knowledge on product branding, please do write them in the comments section.

Tweetable Tweets

Branding is as important to startups as it is for mature products. Tweet this.

Brand creates a promise. This needs to be delivered by the product. Otherwise, it will backfire badly. Tweet this.

Thousands of things are going on inside the customer’s head. How do you get mindshare for your product? Tweet this.

Even if you have a great product, if the customer cannot identify and recall it, you have lost the customer. Tweet this.

Customer insights are at a deeper level and not just at the level of product benefits/features. Tweet this.

Focus on only one thing in the customer’s mindshare. Without this, your brand will not have recall value. Tweet this.

The best way to get consumer insights is by asking people who are using your product why they are using it. Tweet this.

Ask your customer to describe your product.  It can illuminate you on what you think your customer thinks. Tweet this.

Go to market with the differentiating “hero” feature.Tweet this.

Create a persona for your target customer. Give a name like Tom and write down Tom’s attitudes. Tweet this.

Brand positioning essence is two or three words that you’d like to own in the customer’s mind. Tweet this.

Create a brand positioning statement addressing the six tenets of product branding. Tweet this.

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Some Takeaways from the #PlaybookRT on Effective Product Mgmt: Applications and Benefits for Technology Startups and SMB

The fifteenth #PlaybookRT with focus on Product Management was held at PubMatic office in Pune. It was led by Shrirang Bapat (VP Engg at PubMatic). Shrirang set the stage for RT by sharing the importance of ‘What NOT to do’ which comes from years of experience. To accentuate his point, he shared a story of introducing handhelds in the market beginning of 1997. Through this story he explained the importance and process of getting into customer’s shoes when defining the problem and designing the solution. The message was clear don’t be Tech arrogant! Be empathetic towards your customers. Understand their pain points and solve them by creating simple yet elegant solutions…

After the setting the tone for the RT, Shrirang formed pair of twos in which each person in the pair would introduce the other person by sharing the following information:

  1. Name
  2. What you do?
  3. What does your company do?
  4. What do you expect to get out of the RT?
  5. The person who had influenced the most?

This turned out be a great ice breaker session. Participants really got to know each other and understand each other’s perspectives. Answer to ‘The person who had influenced the most’ where interesting. Here’s what some participants answered:

  1. Founder of Toyota –  Kiichiro Toyoda
  2. Father
  3. Steve Jobs (3 nominations)
  4. Jack Welch
  5. APJ Abdul Kalam
  6. Mahatma Gandhi
  7. Wife
  8. Leonardo Da Vinci
  9. Rahul Dravid
  10. Cousin
  11. Kiran Karnik

The RT participants wanted to have a conversion of variety but related topics such as:

  1. Product Strategy for Go To Market (GTM) , especially globally
  2. Increasing product adoption
  3. Scaling UX and Selling in Indian markets
  4. Process for validating ideas
  5. Feature prioritization process
  6. Product globalization
  7. Implementation of Product Management practices
  8. Product Management in Start ups
  9. Product Management best practices
  10. Scaling operations and Product Management

After some deliberation the participants were divided into two groups:

  1. GTM (Mentored by Aditya Bhelande, led by Sandeep Todi and Nitin Seth)
  2. Product Management processes (Shrirang and led by Gaurav)

Each group got approximately 1 hour to discuss on the following lines:

  1. Define problems
  2. Measure problems
  3. Analyze key issues
  4. Provide specific examples
  5. Recommendations / Solutions

After about an hour leaders from each group shared their discovery with all the participants. Here’s the summary:

GTM:

  1. Issues:
    1. Scaling globally
    2. Customer segmentation and market validation
    3. Spreading product awareness
    4. Customer discovery
    5. Creating trust with global Customer
    6. Solutions

Market Discovery

  • Better analysis of user  / customer traffic and leads
  • Competition presence
  • Availability of infrastructure for product usage
  • Language and cultural differences

Customer Discovery

  • i.     Web PR
  • ii.     Blogs
  • iii.     Local community

Building Credibility

  • i.     Local presence
  • ii.     Local employees / consultants (for example using commission junction (cj.com) or shareasale.com)
  • iii.     Travelling and attending conferences
  • iv.     Customer case studies and having customers talk about the company

Product Management Process:

  1. Problems:
    1. Prioritizing features
    2. Poor UX
    3. Lack of cross functional collaboration
    4. Lack of Product orientation
    5. Managing roadmap
    6. Solutions:
      • When changing feature priority think about why. For example are you changing the feature priority to get a new customer or to retain the existing customer?
      • Create a balance between time and resources. Consider the impact of cost of change in direction. If a feature if 3/4th done, then are you better of completing the feature before changing the direction. Are you willing to give up that work that has already been done?, etc
      • When adding new feature think about technical challenges such as scalability and Customer facing issues such as performance impact.
      • Analyze if the feature is merely ‘gold plating’ or helping get new business.
      • Ask ‘Why’ to get a deeper understating of the customer / sales need to set the priority. Try to understand the impact of not building the feature.

These were some of the key take aways for the RT group that came from a very lively and engaging discussion. The group decided to meeting once a month to talk about various topics other than Product Management such as Sales and Marketing.

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120+ companies in 120 days – Come join the movement to revolutionize India’s Software Product Landscape

iSPIRT’s roundtables create a buzz in the Indian software product community. Shehjar Tikoo doesn’t like conferences and seminars. The entrepreneur of e-commerce enabler Unbxd finds them boring and one sided. But all that changed when he attended the iSPIRT roundtable on Product Management in Bangalore. Says Shehjar, “I liked the fact that the audience was very carefully chosen as were the facilitators. The discussion was very healthy and I came away with some great learning. In fact, I still refer to my notes and each time it has something new to say to me.”

iSPIRT is known for bucking the trend. At the heart of the iSPIRT movement is the spirit of democracy. So just like decisions are made collectively and jointly, roundtables are whiteboarded and collaborative. It’s a joint learning exercise for both facilitators (note they are not speakers) and participants (not delegates).

Says Aneesh Reddy, Capillary Technologies, “It took couple of calls to talk about the challenges of product companies and the team defined three problem areas  – Product Management, Sales & Positioning & Messaging. The format was very clear in the minds of everyone – peer learning where founders come and do a deep dive, the objective was to create a cancer survivor network model for product start-ups.”

The first playbook Roundtable went on for around 260 minutes and attendees spent another 30 minutes outside the office networking.

“Round tables are a great way for teams, entrepreneurs to cross learn about the best things that worked in their scenarios and some of it can be implemented and experimented by other startups too, cross learning from startups is essential for this ecosystem to build and am glad iSPIRT round tables do exactly that.”, said Vijay Sharma of Exotel.

Since the first program on April 4, iSPIRT  has covered more than 120+ product companies (up to August 3). While the impact of the programs is slowly percolating the software product initiatives of different companies, what has proven an instantaneous hit is the format of community learning – for founders, by founders – little wonder it’s called a [Playbook] roundtable!

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India as a Product Nation is in good hands – Insights from the Lean Sales Roundtable

The fate of the future of India as a product nation is in the hands of 20 somethings and 30 somethings.  Whether it is sheer luck or sheer brilliance or sheet hard work, or all three I don’t know, but what I do know is that the future of India as a product nation is in good hands.

I attended a Lean Sales Playbook for about 3 and a half hours.  I had no idea how the time flew as  Pallav Nadhani (fusioncharts.com), Varun Shoor (kayako.com), Paras Chopra (wingify.com) shared from their companies’ experiences.  The attendees got a great insight from these three founders on how to make sales and marketing efforts pay.  Every talk was littered with “what works and gets customers in the door” versus just some sales and marketing theory.

The team intensely discussed generating MQL, SQLs, role of marketing, role of sales, organization setup, hiring, compensation, etc..

The insights below are from Pallav, Varun and Paras – however, for purposes of confidentiality it does not state which company has done what specifically.  The below insights could have worked at one or multiple of these start up organization:

Leadership

  • The founder is the first sales person
  • “Founders must obsess about things that they want their teams to obsess about”.  One of the founders believes in Content Marketing and has written 180 articles himself.  Another founder is a strong believer in leading sales, and the third in building quality software himself.

Getting your first few customers

  • “Marketing is about finding channels that give volumes / returns relative to cost of the channel.”
  • What worked for initial sales was to work on “influencers”.  Identifying experts on various in-depth forums and working on them as initial customers.
  • Product is not different from “sales”.  The problem of sales comes only when the products’ value is not known – when the team doesn’t even know if the product should exist or not on this planet.  Do customers really require it?

 

Managing the Sales Funnel

  • The start-ups give a lot of focus to containing “churn”.
  • Converting site hits is monitored in a very rigorous manner by all founders.
  • Once the free trial starts, the impression formed in the first 2 minutes is critical.  Customers should not get a whole lot of options.  Its  a minimal set of 1 or 2 options so that making decisions on how to proceed is a no-brainer.
  • Its difficult for the customer to give large commitment at once – so try to get their commitment in small steps … and then get them truly engaged with the product.
  • Sales and trial requests are managed rigorously.  There are both automated and manual communications that go to potential customers.

Marketing

  • The marketing team has used among other initiatives –   SEO, Content Marketing and word of mouth.  Content Marketing has been used very effectively.  The articles have to be well written and the product has to be pitched subtly so that its value is understood and appreciated.
  • For SaaS software, the sales person is more of a “sales enabler” rather than an outright “sales” person.  Marketing and the Product do most of the work.  “Sales enablers” need to describe product features and not really sell.
  • One of the organization’s target market is the CMO organization, even though the person reached most times is an executive or a manager in that organization.  A lot of importance is given to reaching the users who will actually use the products – and not just the IT organization.
  • Drip marketing is also used effectively.  Information of a customer is collected in many ways.  E.g., you don’t ask the customer which industry they are from, but collect information on which demos they want to see and try to figure out the industry.
  • Offline conferences are more expensive.  One of these startups went for it only in their 7th year.

Building a Brand

  • Building trust and credibility with customers is crucial.  Its critical to have a website that speaks in the language of target customers (in the US and in UK).  Websites targeted at Indian customers and those targeted at US customers can be very different.  A lot of time is spent in identifying these differences and ensuring the website is culturally accurate.
  • All success stories are tracked and converted to case studies.  Potential customers are able to view success stories that are relevant to them and are from their industry.
  • Ensuring top class support, ensures that the brand continues to grow and strengthen.
  • Execution Excellence builds a brand.  Even though these are start ups, what really works for them is creation of internal Knowledge Banks.  EVERY mistake or gap a customer reports goes back into the Knowledge Bank and everyone gets trained.

Talent and Hiring

  • Ensure you are hiring good people, especially in Sales and Marketing.  When hiring at senior levels, e.g., a VP of Sales its important to know if he is working out or not right at the word start.  Taking 6 months to a year to figure out that he is “not working out” is a huge loss to a start up.
  • Get creative about hiring the talent needed.  One of these startups have used expats that have returned to India from various countries and do not want to leave their home state.    So, the recruitment team ensures that they hire Australian expats to support the Australia customers and UK expats to support the UK customers, etc.

It was enthralling to see the energy and wisdom in this young team.

Even as I left, a list of topics went up on the board.  Sales compensation was the top one and there were a few others.  Am sure the active discussion lasted for another couple of hours.

I left invigorated and excited.  Is there a way for these young, smart product companies and their founders to inspire and spawn a product culture in India?  Yes, I think there is and I for one am a believer.

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iSPIRT Sales RoundTable – Startup Sales, Lead Generation, Channel Partners

First of all, huge thanks to Vizury for sponsoring great food and the premises to hold the round table. Many thanks to Aneesh, NRK Raman and Srirang for leading the session and providing valuable inputs. And of course, to all the participants for the energetic discussions and knowledge sharing.

Here are the key takeaways from my notes.  Please note that there are several nuggets of practical advice based on the experiences of the session leaders and the participants, and not just standard text book stuff. It was a great learning experience for me and I hope I can pass on some of it to you.

While we touched upon a lot of topics, we spent considerable time on startup sales, channel partners and selling to geographies outside India, and lead generation and qualification.

Read on to know more.

Startup Sales and Hiring Salespeople 

Best guys to sell during early stages of the startup are the co-founders themselves, even if they don’t have sales background.  Initially, you will stumble, but you will learn and figure out what works for you.  If founders cannot sell the product in the first 1 or 2 years, then you must seriously evaluate the viability of the business

Once you’ve made the initial sales yourselves, then you put in a structure. External sales guys need to have conviction in the product to sell it.  That will be lacking during the early stages of the company – but founders have that conviction.  Hence founders can sell better during the early stages.  One participant mentioned that for the first 3 years, he and his co-founder were selling and only later they looked at a professional sales person.

Getting the first reference customer is always the toughest part. One you have a reference customer, momentum will build.

Hiring an external sales guy is not a good idea at the beginning.  Identify folks from engineering and customer facing teams who have the aptitude or inclination to do sales and ask them to lead Sales.

Culture fit is very important in a sales person. Also, check if the person has spent 4+ years in a single company – that shows that he has been delivering results.  Sales people should also be pushing back to you.  This shows that they are getting feedback from the field and are informing you about market situation.

It is a good idea to raise investor money to scale up business development.  Investors are willing to invest in this once the product has been validated and you have a few customers.

You need to experiment to figure out what works for you. For example, for a company that made trading software, an ex-trader worked great as a salesperson instead of a seasoned sales guy, because the ex-trader was able to relate to the customer.

The sales person should have hunger and also have a good history of past successes.  Consider the age of the sales person too – in some industries, an older person might work better as the customers expect to see maturity.

Like pair programming, “pair selling” is also a useful thing to try.  This helps in DNA match, culture fitness.  Some companies have paired an account manager or a product manager with the sales guy.

In complex sales where there are multiple stakeholders from the customer’s side, ensure that you sell individually to all the influencers.

You need to pay close attention to how the customer buys.  Branding and marketing engine is also very important in “creating a desire in the customer to buy”.

Channel Partners (local and global)

When creating partnerships (in the context of channel partners and resellers) globally, be careful what works and what does not in that culture.

In general, partnerships work well outside your headquarters and you can have multiple non-exclusive partnerships.  People like to do business with a local person.

Look at the credibility of the partner.  Is the partner knowledgeable and up to date in your domain?  For one company, partnerships worked well in Brazil, but did work very well in Europe.

When you set up an office in other countries, you need to be aware of the labour laws regarding how easy/difficult it is to fire non-performing employees, taxation, accommodation etc.  Going with a partner alleviates all of this to a great extent.  However, you need to have someone from your team who is responsible for managing partnerships.

Remember that the main motivation for the channel partner is money. So make sure there is enough for them so you have their mind share.  Even if that means that the channel partner makes more money than you.  Initially, you need to be very involved so the partner tastes success. For example, you need to generate leads to the partner, go along with him to complete the sale and let him make the money from your efforts, initially. This will get them excited.

Similarly, if you want to have sales offices or channel partners in other locations, encourage well performing sales folks from headquarters to move to that location, stay there for a few years to set up processes, signup channel partners, hire local people and train them.

You can start by signing an MOU first and have some targets.  Then after 6 months of so, you can sign a formal partnership agreement.

One company also pays 20% of the salary of an employee of the channel partner.  Then you can have a joint business plan with your partner to set goals, metrics tracking etc.

You should look at your customer acquisition cost and consider pay a huge chunk (say 80%) of that cost to the channel partner.

While making sure that you do not have exclusive agreement with a single partner, be sensitive that having multiple partners in the same geography can lead to partner conflicts which in turn could be bad for your business.

Also, look at companies that sell complementary products. Maybe you can partner with them too so they make money by cross selling your product.

Channel partners are not really a must. If you can make your product easy to setup and use, then you can focus more on marketing, google adwords etc (e.g. SAAS models).  Also, in these models, you need to ensure that partners have good incentives as typically the ticket sizes are smaller and they don’t have opportunities to make money from “implementations”, training etc.  One company took an approach to let the partner decide the pricing in a particular geography with the agreement that a percentage of the revenue goes to the partner.

However, if the product is not easy and you need people on the field to educate the customers, you should definitely consider channel partners.

Sales Engine is similar to Engineering Engine

One of the biggest challenges faced by Indian product companies is that the founders do not have a sales background.  Our ecosystem has evolved to a point where we can build great products, but lack the sales acumen.  There was consensus among the participants that sales is much harder than engineering. Engineering, while no doubt hard, is still manageable.  We know the inputs, outputs, risks and mitigations with a high degree of certainty.  Sales is a different beast with lots of uncertainties.

Srirang guided us to treat the sales engine also similar to the engineering engine.

The three pillars for the Sales Engine are (a) People, (b) Processes and (c) Technology.

People: Competencies, Incentives, Org Structure.  As in engineering, there can be a magnitude of difference between an average sales person and a good salesperson.  So hiring the right candidate is very important.  And you have to set up the correct incentive program and org structure to ensure motivation and excitement in the sales team.

Processes: Strategy, Execution, Metrics.  Again, as in engineering, you need to define the strategy, the execution plan (who does what) and what metrics you are going to use to measure execution. 

Technology:  Enablement, Communication, Monitoring.  Sales team needs to be enabled.  For example, ensure flawless demonstrations and training to the sales people so their selling experience is smooth and they focus on the customer.  Use the right tools (e.g. Excel, CRM, SalesForce) to track and monitor their activities.

At different stages of the company, you need different kinds of pillars – which means you need different kinds of sales people, different processes and different technologies.

Lead Generation and Qualification 

The classic sales process consists of five stages:

  1. Lead Generation.
  2. Lead Qualification
  3. Relationship building
  4. Solution design
  5. Negotiation and Closure

Depending on the kind of product, some of the later steps might not be relevant, but lead generation and lead qualification are of primary importance.

Focused lead generation is better than generic lead generation.

Some companies have used databases of leads to generate leads and have found it useful for mass email campaigns.

LinkedIn is a good source to connect with prospects (with premium account, you can send InMail too).  After connecting, you can then try to have a call/skype to show your value proposition, if there is interest.

Someone mentioned that LinkedIn Ads worked for them.  On Google adwords, there were mixed reactions.  Some say it is costly, but it helps to put the word about the product. Google adwords can generate a lot of leads, but people also noted that there was a lot of churn from these leads (in the context of SAAS based business).

If you have a horizontal product, make a vertical offering. Your campaigns have to industry specific and you should talk their language. Customers are looking for a reference customer they can relate to.  This produces better results than targeting all verticals with a horizontal positioning.

Metrics is very important in the sales engine.  You must be measuring and tracking customer acquisition costs. And track them at various stages of the sales funnel.  For example, let’s say you generate 1000 leads, out of which 600 are then qualified, 400 of them get to proposal stage, 200 get to negotiation, 150 closed and then 130 retained for renewal.  At each stage, you must count the man hours spent and put a cost for that.  This will help you improve your sales processes – particularly in the area of lead qualification as you can see what kind of leads are working and you can pursue folks who are likely to buy.

The first step is to establish Qualification Criteria. Then evaluate each lead and assign score to lead based on the qualification criteria.  Based on the score, put the lead in one of three action buckets – pursue, drop or nurture (i.e. keep warm).

Also, ensure you pay attention to negative attributes to qualify leads based on your experience and judgment – e.g. if a company has greater than 2000 employees, then they might not be suitable to your business.

Don’t take up a wrong customer at startup stage. It can be a drain on your resources.

There are three main aspects of lead generation.

  1. Publish
    1. Blogs
    2. Website
    3. Industry Magazines
    4. Whitepapers
  2. Promote
    1. Speaker in conferences
    2. Advertisements
    3. SEO
  3. Connect
    1. Email
    2. Cold call
    3. Road shows
    4. Referrals
    5. Social Media

Conclusion 

The discussions “raised awareness” and provided lots of data from practitioners.

The key thing to remember is that there is no silver bullet and what worked for someone else may not work for you. Kishore Mandyam went one step further and said that what worked for them six months ago might not work for them now!  While there is no magic wand, you can look at general guidelines and best practices from the experiences of 20 odd practitioners.

If you have any more tips or best practices, please do write them in the comments section.

Tweetable Takeaways

Best guys to sell during early stages  are the co-founders, even if they don’t have sales background. Tweet This.

Getting the first reference customer is the toughest part. One you have that customer, momentum will build. Tweet This.

Channel partners should make enough money off you. It is OK for them to make more money than you. Tweet This.

Invest in channel partners so they invest in your product. Tweet This.

Sales Engine is similar to the Engineering Engine. Tweet This.

If you have a horizontal product, make vertical offerings. Industry specific campaigns work better. Tweet This.

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Fellow Entrepreneur, Ask not what the Buyer can do for your company!

For about 2 hours in the RoundTable session, the intense discussion was centered around how to be ready for M&A. Buyers, who have an interest in your company will ask about your product, your markets, your customers, your revenues. As an Entrepreneur, what is your first ask in return? Usually they are any of the following. What will the buyer pay us? Is this the right time, should we wait for a better valuation? What will the buyer do with us post acquisition?

Jay Pullur, CEO, Pramati Technologies, helped us realize, that the first question should be, what will our company do for the buyer? What is the fitment of our product or solution in the buyer’s vision? You need to ask and most importantly answer this yourself. Don’t expect the buyer to answer this, if you are, then you are not ready for any deal. It was a moment of epiphany. Fellow Entrepreneur, the first step to readiness for an M&A is to ask, what your product does to the buyer’s company, not what the buyer can do for your company.

Four hours of entertaining stories by both Jay Pullur, Pramati Technologies and Sanjay Shah, Invensys Skelta, 12 companies and about 20 participants got the opportunity to interact and learn many of the wise nuggets from these industry leaders. Not all elements of the session can be reproduced here, but below are some of the key highlights and learnings.

Wise Nuggets – Its all about Knowing (see below for details)

Wise men plan ahead. The pain or the gap that your company addresses should itself be strategically planned. Positioning your entire company, like a pretty bride will ensure the suitor will come. According to Jay, technology buyers in the US do several acquisitions in a year, so for them its just another transaction, they are not emotional about it, not attached to it, its just their job. So the interests of the suitor should always take precedence, otherwise the suitor will move to the next company on the list. Sanjay added that using an iBanker to help you in the match-making process or to source the right type of buyers is also a very beneficial activity. To sum it up, like for any Sale, Seller has to make it absolutely comfortable and easy for the buyer to buy. The checklist includes, but is not limited, to the following.

    • Know or Define the right fitment (addressing the GAP in the buyer’s arsenal is most important)
    • Know your Position (be clear on the landscape and position your product very clearly)
    • Know when to exit (constantly guage the pulse or the sentiment of both the market and the buyer, macro-economic conditions can play havoc, sense the weight of an opportunity)
    • Know your Buyer’s problem – Demonstrate that you know the Customer’s Exact Problem (POC, Story boarding the Pitch and strategy all come into play)
    • Know your Product (Don’t use flowery language and adjectives- show the customer, you are only solving a pain – which is not a glamorous job to do)
    • Know your Buyer – Gauge the buyer’s impending need to buy (They will usually reciprocate with the same rigor as you)
    • Know the Competitors, their strategies, their features, their benefits and most importantly their weaknesses.
    • Know your-self (You know that you have built a rocket or a rickshaw – if you are in a rocket, you should be on-top of the short-list)
    • Know your price (indicative pricing is most important – make sure all research leads to a best possible quote)
    • Know how to close (all the criteria for success should be met, there is no alternative for preparation and effort)
    • Know your readiness (systems/processes for closure, like record-keeping, employment contracts etc)
    • Know what the deal entails (who brings the deal – may be an iBanker, upper thresholds, lower thresholds, etc)
    • Know your Organizational structure (are you are platform, are you embeddable, do you need domain expertise)
    • Know the parties and their motivations (Eng Team in California v/s CFO in London – who is the deal maker, who is the deal breaker)
    • Know the term-sheet (if not hire legal guys or ibankers who can help).

Insights and Learnings

There were many learnings, which definitely are tied to the personal experiences. Some of the key ones are

When Jay sold Qontext to Autodesk he found them to be extremely professional and did not find any price penalty, or discrimination, because of the Indian-ness of it. In fact, he was able to sell it for a very good multiple. The best valuation/revenue multiple silicon valley companies to could get. So its a myth to think that a technology product from India, might get the raw end of the deal.

When Sanjay sold Skelta to Invensys, he understood the weight of the opportunity. Even though the conversation was not intended for M&A, both parties realized that its mutually beneficial to do so within a couple of hours of conversation.

Sanjay’s additional advise, raise adequate money at a comfortable time, and continue to stay relevant via media briefings, etc all the time.

    • Other general learnings were also discussed. To note a few,
    • Learn about Earn-outs, ESOPs, Liquidation Preferences (Be real to scale)
    • Invest if you have clarity on Exit (do everything possible for the deal to come to a fruition, POC, be aggressive, call the CEO if needed)
    • Learn about Black duck tests, acqui-hires, escrows for indemnification, etc.
    • Define the outcome post M&A and get consent.

Conclusion

Overall M&A stands for all your Moves & Acts. Its all about the Story, your clarity of all the characters and props in the story, and their acts. Commercial success is most important, direct accordingly. Re-takes’s are possible, in-fact easier provided you make your first venture successful.The hilarious moment and the most catchy line came from Jay. Someone asked about honesty and truth, during the process of due-diligence, for which Jay laughingly said, “Tell the truth with such conviction, that the buyer will lie to himself”.

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iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable: Positioning and Messaging – Lot of it is common sense!

If your grandmother does not understand your message, then you might as well not communicate is the crux of what was discussed during this Roundtable facilitated by Shankar Maruwada and Nandita Sinha.

This roundtable discussed the ‘What’ of the positioning and messaging and not the ‘how’ of the positioning. There was very little theory except perhaps setting the context and the entire session was practical.

To illustrate the significance of positioning and messaging, one of the participating companies gave an elevator pitch thinking the rest of us are his prospective customers. Then people spoke about what stuck in their minds about the pitch. It varied from ‘I lost him’ to ‘I was thinking of a completely different business model’. The person who gave the pitch looked at all the responses to understand if there were any surprises and what needs to be the part of their messaging.

Discussion on the first pitch led to the understanding of the following:

  1. The curse of knowledge forms a part of all the messaging – what is easily understandable for us is not understandable for the market.
  2. Often times, people start to have internal chatters – they start to think even before the pitch is complete and the attention span is just about 30 seconds.
  3. Most messaging is at a conceptual level and addresses the left-brain of their audience, which does not persuade people to make decisions. Try addressing to their emotions, their right brain and the easiest way is to do these through stories.

Using the first pitch as an example, Shankar explained what goes into creating a tight message and it was

  • Identify the customer segment. You can have one overall messaging of your offering and can have multiple messages for multiple segments
  • Setup is the context of your offering. It can be some challenges that your customer segment faces or the industry faces. There can be multiple setups to your messaging
  • Explain the benefits of your solution. How your offering is unique to the customers need will be the persuasive part of your pitch. Setup combined with benefits is what would make the message that you communicate
  • Features and supporting credibility will have to come after this phase of setup and benefits

After this, one more exercise was carried out where all the participating companies were asked to write down 3 setups and 3 benefits while avoiding features. All the pitches were discussed at length and I am sure all those who attended the Roundtable went back a lot wiser about messaging.

Shankar emphasized on a very important fact that you may not crack your messaging in one sitting and it has to be an iterative process. He also asked people not to think in words and instead begin with stories, then move on to thoughts and then switch to words. This is the best way in which you will get to do your messaging right.

This Roundtable was attended by 9 companies with 12 participants and 2 facilitators. This roundtable kicked off to a hilarious start, during the introductions most people in the room claimed that their Saturday night favorite drink was either butter milk, tea or coffee.

I am looking forward to more such sessions.

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Don’t try to solve every customer problem by a line of code.

My First playbook roundtable. iSPIRT’s first initiative at Hyderabad, was a 4 hour insightful RoundTable that was  organised by the ProductNation free of cost for the attendees, which most Hyderabadi entrepreneurs gave a miss and are sure to be regretting the missed opportunity and the learning possibility that it offered.

Sridhar Ranganathan, ex-VP of InMobi, a Product Guru and Aneesh Reddy, the CEO of Capillary Technologies, which is in the business of providing mobile-based customer acquisition, tracking, and loyalty business, were the key speakers for the day .The first half of the session was mostly participants- driven where each of us were asked to share our day-to-day stories at work along with our expectations from the workshop.

Below were the most common challenges that emerged from our discussions:

  1. How to validate the need for a product?
  2. How to prioritize from the features wish list?
  3. What is the exact role of a Product Manager to drive successful product deliveries?

Validating the product need

Sridhar began the afternoon session by saying that, “The best way to validate the need for a product was constantly interacting with the customers and understanding their requirements.” He said there are 2 primary things for a product startup to be successful in the long run. One is Speed- wherein it is important for start-ups to be iterating faster as its always better to Fail Fast and recover quickly.

The second is to be data-driven wherein start-ups should be religiously looking and researching in terms of numbers both externally and internally .He recalled a popular quote, “Data is God and code is only a messenger”, which was truly an eye-opener as it made me realize the importance of constantly looking at data and then using that to validate the need of the product.

Aneesh shared a few of his real-life examples on how during their initial days at Capillary Technologies, they had spent over 6 months talking to every store owner be it big or small, to understand their needs and how they literally changed their product idea thrice before conceiving the final version. He also said that listening to customers played a prominent role in shaping the product rather than merely selling. He also spoke of how Capillary mainly stuck to one mantra i.e.- “Locking down on the cheque with the customer even before building a feature for them,” which not only drives a sense of stickiness and commitment with the customer but  also ensures the right customer need is addressed.

Priortizing from the Features Wish list

This is by far the most common challenge faced by all of us today, which Sridhar strongly advocated by highlighting the need for PMs to start questioning  every feature-benefit ratio in order to prevent any feature overload. He also stressed on the need for every PM to evaluate if every feature was designed for the ease of the end user. He added that it is important to add features in a disciplined manner and remove the excessive features ruthlessly. Bottom-line being – “Don’t try to solve every customer problem by a line of code.”

Aneesh also shared on how Capillary builds prototypes and demonstrates them to customers to ensure if the customer’s wish list has been fulfilled or not and that this has helped Capillary to keep the fine balance between what their customers are looking for and how the future of the product would shape up.

Role of a Product Manager (PM)

Sridhar began asking each of us to define what we considered the role of a PM to be and after everyone was done presenting their respective  viewpoints, he mentioned the below as some of the qualities he would expect a PM to possess:

  1. Empathy towards customers – the willingness to engage, understand and appreciate customer needs.
  2. Confidence to have a point of view
  3. Ready to build a product for the future
  4. Culture of experimentation and being data-driven

Personally what I considered the best piece of advice for PMs is, “to be responsible for the Outcome and not the Output”. This actually accelerates the need for PMs to question every effort for a feature request and evaluate what would be its ability to generate revenue.

Overall, it was an immensely insightful session. I would also like to thank Sridhar for taking time out from his busy schedule to enlighten us. Huge thanks to Aneesh for being extremely patient and for responding to all our queries.

I highly appreciate the efforts of Avinash to create such a splendid product management session wherein we not only get a chance to meet/network with product gurus but also help us rethink our working strategies. Last but not the least, I would also like to thank Pramati Technologies for being an excellent host for this Roundtable.

Eagerly looking forward to the follow-up session soon!

Post Contributed by Thulasi, Associate Product Manager at Versant Online Solutions Pvt Ltd and can be reached at thulasi(at)moozup.com

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Product RoundTable Bangalore @ Vizury Office

We had some very good hosts @ Vizury office and also joined by their product folks Shiju and Subra for the Product Round table that was organized last Friday. The other awesome people who were part of the event were Siddharth Ramesh (Exotel), Jose (Weavedin), Vinay Simha (Dfy Graviti), Sridhar (ex-Inmobi), Avinash Raghava (Product Nation), Nari Kannan (The man with experience of over 7 startups and currently working on a project for Barack Obama), Anjali (Capillary), Chandra (i7networks), Santosh Panda (Explara), Venkatesh (Insieve), Pandith (Impelsys).

The discussions revolved around 3 things in Product:
1. How to track growth & health of a product or Product Metrics
2. Product v/s Sales (When to listen to customer and sales person and building the feature)
3. Product Marketing

and 2 small sessions of Santosh explaining his re-branding story from Ayojak to Explara and Venkatesh about how they balance in a unique way not building before selling and working on product demo’s without having to build the features.

Sridhar led the moderation of the session and showed his secret sauce of a graph designed for Product decisions:

The graph helps Product folks take decisions based on a problem, and how ideally first level and second level product problems when probed can be solved by Education & Processes. This sort of product thinking gives more bandwidth to technology & product managers to focus on building the tech as well, apart from features as a solution to everything. It helps keep your product from being stretched into a services play.

Nari Kannan & Sridhar again spoke about how the health of a product and its metrics can be linked to the business metrics by the GEM (Growth, Engagement, Monetization) theory.

A lot of discussions around how sales folks like to ask fore more features, and how to decide what to build and what not to, but the graph helped a lot.

A snippet on the learning from Santosh’s Ayojak to Explara journey was that he communicated the brand change much in advance internally and decided to leave aside feature requests etc. and kept focussed on the UI/UX and internal communication of the change. It helped everyone realize that multiple massive changes should not be attempted together.

Venkatesh also spoke about how they develop new feature requests in a staging environment, and release it just for the customer in a prototype without pushing the code into the product, and ask him/her if they will pay for this and is this what they want. It is an interesting way to get a yes from the customer before getting your tech team working on something which might or might not sell.

All in all, everyone had some great learning’s, a few beers and cookies along with chai and coffee thanks to the Vizury team, and we hope to get some more Product Roundtable’s running consistently and involving more of the product companies to have cross learning’s via sharing best practices.

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Learning and growing together at the iSPIRT #Playbook Roundtable

iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable in Delhi Flickr Stream

The Product Management Playbook roundtable repeated last week with an intent to check progress. The mentors – Amit Ranjan & Amit Somani were keen to know the problems product managers faced while they executed on ideas discussed in the previous episode.

We could guess this would be one power packed session, especially from the conversations that ensued over lunch. There were active discussions, funny anecdotes and heartfelt laughter which filled the Eko cafeteria. New bonds were built and older ones renewed as we savored the delicious dishes.

The RoundTable was started with Vikram Bahl of Yavvy.com presenting his product management approach. Presenting a meticulously planned mind-map, his presentation discussed the challenges, the solutions and their outcomes. Elements from the previous round-table were clearly visible. “All of our metrics have now been divided into 1/1/1 (1 day/1 week/1 month)”, he told picking up on the 1/1/1 metric philosophy suggested by Amit Somani of MakeMyTrip in the previous round-table. He also mentioned that the “email-suggestion” and “leveraging-existing-paradigm” suggestions by Amit Ranjan (of Slideshare) had done them loads of good and the results were very encouraging. “This time, I got advice on stuff that goes beyond traditional product management, it was more around positioning and marketing”, said Vikram as he reflected upon the discussions.

Next, Bishal Lachhiramka of Drishti soft spoke about his own product management approach. Touching upon organisational structure, product manager roles and global benchmarks, this was another amazing discussion. Participants shared their own experiences and what has worked for them and what hasn’t.

Tarun Matta of IIMJobs also got some amazing feedback on some of the things they intent to do. Picking up on the experience in the room, he picked up on strategy and executive advice on what could propel IIMjobs onto the next orbit of growth.

We also had Shantanu Mathur introducing ‘Smartwards’ and Mayank Dhingra of Paytm bouncing off ideas on how to build product-management metrics for online products. Even though, this was their first round-table, they found themselves brought upto speed by the mentors.

The final few minutes of the day were spent discussing “how to divide and structure roles and responsibilities of different program managers”. Avinash Agarwal and Abhishek Sinha of Eko, presented a delightful case-study which helped sum up the discussion.

As Nakul Saxena of iSPIRT summed up, “I just see so many product managers negotiating the learning curve together. That is the surest way to move quicker and grow faster. In contrast to any other conference or discussions, the round-table presents every product-team with a close-knit group to discuss personal challenges and personal experiences. ”  

Doesn’t that sum up what these round-tables are all about. Participate in the next one to find out!
With inputs from Vikram Bahl of Yavvy.com