Startups!! Do You Know Your Customers Well?

A business exists only till the time it has paying customers. The day your customers cease to exist, or have no reason to pay you for your products or services, your business is in deep trouble. So, if we consider all the stake holders in a corporate, an i.e. employee, executive management, investors and customers, the customer is the most important. Now the chances are that you know all other stake holders reasonably well due to daily interactions in the office or board meetings. The question is that do you know your customer well? If not, what can you do to know them well?

Especially important for a startup to know, as his starting up, sustainability and scaling up are directly dependant on the customer !

There are several stages of knowing one’s customer. What business they are in and which industry they belong to are the easier ones. The more challenging aspects are:

Who are your customer’s competitors in the industry? What are the competitor’s differentiators vis-a-vis what your customer is offering?
What is their vision of the industry that they are a part of? Where do they think the industry will be in 2 years and 5 years from now?
What is preventing your customer to secure a larger market share in their industry?
Who is your customer selling to, i.e. your customer’s customer. (By the way, this is the end customer from your perspective). What is his ask? In which industry is he sitting and how’s that evolving?
How is your customer’s roadmap evolving with respect to the developments in the end customer’s industry? Are the two aligned or are they diverging? If they are aligned, you are in good shape but if they are diverging, you may go out of business because your customer will go out of business.

To summarize, knowing your customer is a three-tier process: I) knowing the immediate (paying) customer, II) knowing your customer’s industry and its trends and III) knowing the end customer’s (your customer’s customer) industry and how it is evolving?

The problem is that in most of the organizations sales owns the customer and acts as a heavy-handed gatekeeper for any and all customer interactions. Since sales is transactional by its very nature, knowing the customer stops at the very first step of knowing who is making the purchase decision, who will issue the purchase order and release payment. Mostly knowing the customer stops here! Unfortunately, none of these guys can give you long term visibility into the customer’s business which is so essential for long term sustainability of your own organization.

What you need is a three-tier customer relationship, each focusing on one aspect of knowing the customer.

Starts with sales at step (I) where a relationship is built around a transaction and customer organization is mapped.

Then your product manager (for products) or domain expert (for services) has to focus on step (II), i.e. reach-out to its peer at customer’s end and engage him on a product and industry-centric discussion.

The common pitfall here is that product managers tend to get far more engineering (inside) focused in delivery. Their external interaction is mostly limited conferences and exhibitions to collect generic inputs about the industry. They really don’t spend enough face time with their customers directly to get to know customer’s industry, competitors and the customers’ customer industry. Most of the time they depend upon sales to provide the inputs against questions (a)-(c) above, but that’s a wrong expectation. It will never happen.

Now coming to step (III), i.e. knowing your customers’ customer industry. This is where a free exchange of ideas at the executive level starts to matter. The CTO/CEO of your company has to engage his peers at the customer’s end (could be CTO/CEO or BU head) and understand the industry trends. Your executive management needs to collect this information from threads picked across all of their key customers and then make a sound call on how they expect the very end customer (customers’ customer) to evolve. It has to be more than a gut feeling or some internet-based research. Their assessment has to be based on hard data collected from discussions done with your customers.

Once you have a sense of changes in end customer’s industry, address the question (e) above, i.e. is your customer helping to shape the industry or is he trying hard to catch-up? Once you know which customer is sitting in which bucket, you know what to do for your own long term growth and survivability.

Unfortunately, what happens in CXO-CXO meetings is that it gets limited to resolution of tactical issues which couldn’t be resolved at lower levels like price, contract legality, delivery issues etc. It rarely goes outside of this sphere, of never-ending business issues and any discussion to get a deep understanding of their future gets sidelined. In turn, your future gets compromised as it is directly dependent on your customer’s future!

Everything starts with the customer – June Martin

Gues post by Suresh Kabra – Founder, PriceMap

26/06/201515/03/2017

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

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

0.8x(x is the sales person’s salary)

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

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

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

10/06/201510/06/2015

What’s the one tool all successful brands need? Are your listening?

A brand is representative of the source from where a product or service comes from. Over the years consumers have learned to associate a word, combination of words, tagline, logo and colors with their respective brands. A brand signifies a set of attributes. Leading brands spend a fortune to re-inforce these attributes, which are tweaked time and again to seek resonance with the ethos of their audience.

“Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief” Leo Burnett

What’s the one tool all successful Advertisers are predicted to spend close to $600 billion worldwide in 2015. By 2018 they are expected to spend $194.5 billion on internet advertising. They will be spending all those billions of dollars to educate, stand-out and resonate.

With the dawn of social media, brands have been laid bare to uncomfortable and tricky situations. Over the last few years brands from sectors which were previously considered to be shy about opening up, have jumped on the social media bandwagon. Think of traditionally tight-lipped brands from telecommunications, banking, financial services, insurance, travel and hospitality. The constant onslaught of queries, opinions, criticisms & rumors have compelled them to be active on social media.

The information age that we live in is irrevocably dominated by social networks and smart devices. Brands are no exception to this change in status quo. Brands who are new to being ‘open’ have found themselves in unchartered territory. Whereas those who have turned social savvy are now reaping the benefits through engagement-driven content.

For most leading brands, it’s counterintuitive to ignore negativity directed towards them. The ubiquity of smartphones, high-speed networks and a variety of social networks means that: consumers are better informed and aware than ever. Social word-of-mouth is the order of the day, it is steadily changing advertising as we know it. Brands need to be particularly cautious of their social word-of-mouth. Is it good? Is it bad? Even the most well-established brands can find themselves in hot waters if they don’t pay heed to it.

Brands cannot feign ignorance in the face of a socially mature audience. For the lack of timely response, this audience is inclined to assume that you’ve heard them but continue to ignore. There is no bliss in such ignorance laden instances for brands. And as far as the audience is concerned, there is clearly no incentive for them to be loyal. Negative reviews, posts on complaint forums, funny memes are some of the ways they vent out their frustration. Anything that sounds even remotely scandalous can end up becoming viral fodder.

Social media has led consumers to expect more transparency from brands. It’s not just social media networks like Facebook & Twitter, but review sites, complaint forums, news sites and personal blogs that complete their social experience. A popular brand can find itself mentioned on any of these feedback avenues. It’s therefore important for brands to keep their ears to the ground.

To be successful across the digital landscape brands are required to listen and analyze not only their own conversations, but also the competition. Engaging, responding and disseminating content are other important activities for brands to conduct. Listening is the most important activity for which a variety of tools are available.

Through social listening, brands can not only soften the blows from social criticism but also turn things around. Listening is a great way of gathering business intelligence. It can be argued that traditional market research is slowly but steadily being replaced by social listening. Brands can uncover the most frequently raised issues and brand perception. It’s also possible for them to gauge the impact of their social media campaigns. Since brand conversations tend to be public, brands can track everything that is being said about their competitors too. If done correctly, there are a lot of actionable insights that can be gained through social listening.

Guest Post by Sundeep Dawale, Marketing Communications Head at KonnectSocial.com

27/04/201527/04/2015

How to move from “selling through my network” to “building a sales process”? #entrepreneurSales

MANHATTAN (2) Most every entrepreneur does things initially that don’t scale, and that’s okay to start. Pretty soon they realize that the things that made them successful enough to get initial sales and customers wont work for them to reach the next level at their startup.

One of the most frustrating things for the entrepreneur is when they run out of folks “in the network” who they can sell to. After having sold to their ex colleagues, friends, etc., their network dries up. No longer is it possible to sell via the network to sustain the growth.

That’s when they realize they have to build a sustainable sales process and organization to grow the business and increase revenues.

They then encounter 3 most frustrating things as they try to recruit sales people, define the sales process and grow their sales muscle.

1. How to hire the right sales people who are motivated by commissions alone?

First, realize that the market tends to be fairly well balanced. It follows consistent demand and supply constraints. Most good sales people have many folks chasing them to work in their company, similar to good engineers. If you wont expect an engineer to work for stock options alone, then expecting a sales person to work for commission alone is something you should be able to relate to.

The problem I hear from many entrepreneurs is that they are unable to determine if the sales person would actually close any deals, so they are unwilling to make a commitment to the sales person. Well, that’s the chicken and egg problem for sure, which means that person who’s more in demand will not make the compromises. Most likely, you the entrepreneur will end up finding some small amount of money to pay as base salary to give the sales person a start to get going. The best sales people are smart about risk and reward. If they see the opportunity to make more money by forgoing their base salary but get a much higher commission, they will.

2. How do they share the details of the “sales process” that they have perfected with the nuances that make the new sales people successful quickly?

As an entrepreneur and the initial sales person, you understand the sales process for your product the best. You have likely sold to many potential prospects and have addressed many objections and handled the toughest questions. So, it is best for you to detail the steps of your sales process to on-board the new sales person. It is best if you do it in a 2 step method.

a) First you can tell – take the sales person through the steps in your sales process via examples. How you sold to the first 5 prospects is more important than how the ideal sales should happen. Take them through the detailed steps in the number of meetings, the different people you met and what questions came up at each stage.

b) Follow this up by showing them – go on the first 5-10 sales calls together so they can learn from your initial pitch, the questions, etc. Show them how you demo, how to position the product, handle pricing questions etc. This also helps you build a bond with the sales person so they can be honest with you later when it comes time to ask the difficult questions.

3. How can they determine if the sales person is on the right track?

Initially you have to be on all / most of the sales calls after you hire a new sales person. Hopefully you have hired someone ambitious and mature, so they will be able to then build a sales organization for you instead of you having to hire a new VP of sales above them. The Tell and Show approach works best for sales people, is my experience.

Use this time to determine and evaluate the sales person – are they able to build relationships with the prospects? Are they able to handle questions effectively? Are they following through on their commitments? Are they able to keep activity level high consistently?

The other thing you should do is to take your average sale cycle time – lets say that is 8 weeks from introduction to close. Double that and evaluate the sales persons ability to close deals in that time period. The reason is that the first cycle time is usually the period of extreme learning. It is rare to get a sales person that will shorten the sales cycle right away unless they come with connections in the industry who have the problem you set out to solve.

13/04/201521/04/2015

3 companies who are doing content marketing in the right way

branches&creatures According to Content Marketing Institute, 90% of the companies are using content marketing, however only one third of third of them are satisfied with the response that they get. According to DemandMetric, it is 62% cheaper than the traditional marketing.

Is content marketing an integral part of your startup? Are you pouring in hours of hard work and efforts to build a strong brand on the plinth of content marketing yet failing in some way to get the desired traction? Often it is beneficial to adopt strategies that made the existing brands the best in business rather than searching for never-before tried techniques.

In this article, lets learn from these 3 companies who do content marketing in the right way to build customer centric brands, increase the product users, signups and get established as thought leaders in their niche.

HubSpot – HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales software started in 2006 with 3 employees, 3 customers that gained more than 10,000 customers, 668 employees and $77.6 million revenues in 2013. A feat almost impossible to achieve for a Business-to-Business enterprise.

How did they grow – HubSpot generates a huge amount of free content in form of e-books, webinars, blog articles and infographics that gets them millions of page views. The CMO at HubSpot Mike Volpe says that the inbound (organic) leads are converted twice more than the outbound (paid) leads. The strategy that worked wonders for them is that below each blog post is a free e-book or webinar based on that topic. The reader doesn’t have to look around for free resources, the relevant freebies are presented to him. So suppose I am reading an article on “How to create my Facebook business page”, at the bottom of the article is a call-to-action link to a free e-book on setting up the Facebook page and how to master all its features.

Key takeaway – HubSpot uses a range of educational, informative and actionable free content and free tools to help the potential customers. The content is separated into 3 categories – sales, marketing and agency to ensure that the content doesn’t mingle with the other niche and they allow their employees to create expert content for the blog.

Dollar Shave Club – Getting a sound footing in the shaving razor industry niche dominated by traditional honchos like Gillette and Procter and Gamble is a thought that would scare most of us. A four year old brand, Dollar Shave Club broke into this market with their own razor blades shipped to men on a subscription model using video content marketing to gain 12,000 customers within the first 2 days of their product launch. They now deliver razors and other men’s personal grooming products to more than 1.5 million happy customers who have a great relationship with the company.

How did they grow – Dollar Shave Club Wiki uses funny and entertaining videos to connect with their target audience and gain their attention. Their CEO Michael Dublin stares in each of these videos, they have no celebrity endorsements, they use such videos to launch a new product and their first video garnered 5 million views within the first 3 months. After understanding their audience’s pain points, they launch products to help the audience and speak in a humorous language that can be easily understood by even layman.

Key takeaway – Your content marketing doesn’t necessarily need a blog. First zero on the social networks where most of your audience is present, (in this case YouTube) and then adopt a content strategy that’ll attract the audience on each of these networks. Conveying your message in a humorous tone and with visual content has a better impact.

Buffer App – For the social media scheduling app Buffer, content marketing accounts for 70% of their daily signups. Each of their blog posts gets on an average 1900 shares! Buffer uses content marketing as their primary channel for growth, they’re known to have built their company on the platform of content marketing and guest blogging.

How did they grow – A blend of data-driven insights, curated content, storytelling and transparency has helped them catch attention of the target audience. Their content focusses mainly on making the job of their target audience (content crafters and marketers, digital marketers and social media marketers) easier. Their founder, Leo Widrich used guest posting to gain from 0-100,000 customers in the first year. Their blogs are an excellent example of content curation, which points to another fact – you don’t always have to reinvent the content creation wheel.

Key takeaway – Actionable, unique, thorough and detailed listicles that help your target audience simplify their task are always well-received by the users and audience. Guest posting unique and valuable content is far from being dead, it helps brands gain immense traction.

Content marketing doesn’t give instant rewards, it takes time to craft the best quality content, distribute it among the media sources, get attention of the target audience and gain the market leadership. When done consistently over a period of time, positive results start showing and it’ll help your brand scale up immensely.

06/04/201515/03/2017

Here’s how we get more than 50% conversion in cold emailing

For any SaaS sales team, cold emailing is the life line of the sales funnel. For organisations like ours, with smaller ticket size deals, the cold emailing channel has to work, otherwise the CAC vs LTV balance can go for a toss.

Every entrepreneur, whether in sales or not, is selling something. If you are pitching investors, you are selling a vision and a team; if you are mailing potential hires, you are pitching work environment and potential gains; if you are mailing a potential mentor, you are pitching to his altruistic or “giving back to the society” tendencies. For any cold email to work, it is essential that you understand how a conversation with a stranger on a digital platform is structured.

This sounds fairly simple doesn’t it? We have tried so many variants of cold emailing at Betaglide and the truth remains, in most cases it doesn’t work. Imagine yourself in your customer’s shoes and assess “Why would I ever be interested to read this email or even opening this email?”. There are multiple ways an email can be structured and different ways work for different people. For us, most things didn’t work but thankfully, a few did! Here’s the outline and our learning behind it and how we approached it.

Subject Line: This is the first line your receiver is going to see and is going to make the decision whether to open the email or not in a split second. The key here is to respect your customer’s time. S/He receives hundreds of emails every day and what makes your email so special for her/him to open it? This is the questions you should be answering in your subject line. Also, don’t make it generic or loaded with data. Email is extremely personal and you would do good to remember that. For us, subject lines like “Increase/boost your user retention”, “Decrease your churn with retention.ai” just didn’t work. We had less than 5% email open rate with such subject lines. That is pretty bad when you are trying to scout for beta users who need to trust you and your product to become an early adopter. What instead worked was “Hey John, a message from Manan”, “John – Become your app’s rockstar”. The subject line should be catchy enough to garner curiosity in the reader’s mind for her/him to decide to open the email.
Introduction: This is one of the most trickiest part which took us a whole bunch of experiments to crack. The first couple of lines in the email is going to decide whether the receiver reads it further or not. With most automation tools, now you can personalise emails that you send. It is a no-brainer to start with “Hey John or Hi John” instead of “Dear John”. Especially if you are selling to C level executives and product managers. This makes them immediately comfortable and as they have already seen the salutation multiple times in their regular email conversations. The next part is first few lines of the email. This took some really hard thinking to crack. Most of the times, we are eager to say something about us but that is a wrong way to look at it. The first few lines should be about the recipient of the email! Research about the person/company that you are sending the email to. Congratulate them if they recently got a promotion or if their company recently achieved a milestone. This immediately grabs her/his interest in your email and decides to read on. We find tools like Linkedin sales navigator and Rapportive ideal for such research! If you a know a better tool for this, do tell!
The pitch: After all, you are writing this email to sell him something. In his book, “Zero to One”, Peter Thiel explains that best sales process hardly ever looks like sales. We initially made a mistake of writing about our product and its features in this section. No one cares a penny’s worth about what your product does! Make the pitch about her/him! What are the problems that your customer is facing and how you can solve them along with a number. If you can not pitch your product in just two lines, you really need to work on it. We used to have an eight line pitch! Never worked! Talking so much about your product just seems very salesy! The point is that your pitch should not sound salesy but something that can genuinely help the recipient achieve her/his goals. That is your pitch perfect. Remember, the purpose of the first email is to start a conversation about the problem that your customer faces and then slowly convincing her/him that you are the man to solve it!
Closing: This is the simplest part and most people do it right. If you are mailing directly to the person who is going to use your product, ask for a “brief time for a call”. If you are mailing founder/VP who might not be the primary user of your product, ask them to connect you to the “relevant person in the organisation.”

Email, when done right can become the cornerstone of your sales process and open the floodgates of hot leads! One might say that the approach is time consuming for you have to do research on each customer you are sending the email to. But remember, sales is about relationships and trust you build with the stakeholder. Invest that time for the clients that are essential to your growth and it is going to be worth it!

Guest blog post by Manan Shah, Retention.ai

26/03/201515/03/2017

Jump Start Your SaaS Business by Selling to US Market: Learn the Nuts and Bolts from Whodunnit

Are you a first time SaaS entrepreneur targeting the US market? Learn it from the masters through the Jump Start Guide to Desk Marketing and Selling for SaaS put together by Krish Subramaniam (Chargebee), Niraj Ranjan Rout (GrexIt), Sahil Parikh (Brightpod), and Suresh Sambandam (KiSSFLOW). Aaron Ross launched the guide during the first SaaSx event in Chennai put together by iSPIRT, attended by more than 100 SaaS entrepreneurs.

The following are the take-aways. Use the guide to understand in-depth and develop your strategy to hit $100 million in sales. All the very best!

Marketing

There are four different strategies employed by Indian entrepreneurs for customer acquisition: Learn from Wingify, KiSSFLOW, GrexIt, Freshdesk.
Free trials don’t work for higher sales value. And prices are not listed publicly by most companies.
What is the right pricing? There is no one sutra to it. But get it right before you push your sales pitch. Learn strategies from the hackers who did it before.
Have a team in place to handle marketing efforts with clear segmentation of the team: marketing/product/sales. Have clear-cut roles as they often blur.
Understand the 10 recommended activities before you start marketing.
Focus on building the trust of the customer visiting your product website for the first time. To make it attractive, for example, think of a “Benefits” page instead of listing “Features.”
Learn how to build content around long tail keywords for effective SEO.
Marketing based on content generation (content marketing) has many dimensions to it. Use all of them for maximum benefits.
Social channels ensure better outreach. Make your presence felt on social pages.
Retarget your customers who just dropped by your website.
You can innovatively market using your product itself.
Get a marketing team in place.
There are some sales channels you must ignore before starting the SaaS company.

Selling

Learn what catching, coaching, and closing mean.
Winning the first few customers is the founder’s job.
Learn what tools to use for customer development.
Develop an effective funnel.
Facilitate self-selection and build engagement with the customers.
Collect key information during the engagement process.
Post-trial offers work for closing the customer.
Learn the customer closure techniques to use.
Structure your sales team clearly.
Doing a great customer service after sales is essential to retaining the customers. Learn the tips.

Download the guide here{link}.

14/03/201512/04/2015

Who plays a more incremental role in building brands? Loyalty or marketing

Congrats for climbing the corporate hierarchy to become the Chief Marketing Officer. You deserved it, after all the hard work that was poured. Now I offer my condolence. Until you step into the shoes of Chief Loyalty Officer, you’ll sooner or later be by replaced by someone else.

Am I sounding preposterous? Here is the best proof. Apple that dominates the smartphone market. Their all-time record breaking earnings released officially last year show that more than 87% of their revenues are generated by the sale of their iPhones. Although they come up with dazzling products such as Apple HealthKit, Apple Pay and Apple watch, disruptive technology and ideas, but our loyalty will always tilt towards the iPhone. Come in any polished iOS version or starts the preordering of a new iPhone and either we or some of our friends pre-order them before even its entry into the market. What sort of loyalty does Apple garner? The sale of 74.5 million brand new phones with least efforts in marketing and advertising! Apple’s marketing and advertising simply constitutes a few TV ads and bill-boards.

Yes I know very well that not every company wields power and dexterity equivalent to Apple and allowing the product to be the sole story-teller is a luxury very few brands can afford. But the lesson every brand can learn is: Try concentrating on building a solid customer loyalty rather than pouring in all efforts over traditional and modern marketing.

Almost every other person I ask derives the figurative meaning of marketing as selling a product. However it’s a one-sided endeavor where marketers are given the sole responsibility of selling the product. This may have worked previously, but social media has transformed the consumers into the sole advocates of a brand, their voice and opinion more influential than the traditional marketing.

While buying something, wouldn’t you prefer a brand which you’re more loyal to then going in for the one that has excellent marketing? Yes initially influential marketing plays a small role but it doesn’t always lead to inculcating loyalty. People are more inclined to choosing a brand whose brand values they want to be affiliated with. With a plethora of options available in the market why will a person choose your brand over the others? Does the brand resonate with the priorities and beliefs of the audience? So here comes the nagging question, how to build a brand powered by loyalty? A simple answer, curate or deliver content that is so specific that is defines the users/ consumers and the brand itself.

Another example, Chipotle, the good junk food brand with healthier meat that is antibiotic and hormones free, cheese obtained from pasture-raised cattle and produces that are local resonate a very high level of loyalty among fans. They are socially conscious, conveying their ideology that a person’s meal is not merely just food, it’s more than that. They come up with campaigns, one among them was “Cultivating Thoughts”, with writers such as Malcolm Gladwell coming up with small texts to appear on their cups and they have a dedicated microsite for them. Such ideas do not come from the marketing team’s cubicle or a PR’s agency, one fine day Jonathan Safran Foer was out of stuff to read at Chipotle. All these efforts are directed towards building loyalty. These efforts or resources won’t make direct money for the company, but sheds light on the efforts to build good faith, perfectly tailored for their customers.

What makes fans come repeatedly to brands such as Apple and Chipotle? It is their assurance at being a kind of person their target audience wants them to be. Apart from the convenience of transaction, people desire to understand the meaning behind a brand. A marketer’s words are merely a jumble of disorganized sentences aiming to make the customer buy a product that often bounces off the brain walls of the audience. While building loyalty involves loving the users, knowing them and interacting with them every single day. Each of these interaction should emancipate passion and a hunger to know the users deeply and their way of interacting with your brand or product. So what is the role of a Chief Loyalty Officer? To concentrate more on “What should our brand be?” rather than focusing their efforts on thinking about “What should our brand say?”

10/02/201510/02/2015

A successful sales team recipe

As sales leaders, we all know that crafting a skilled, productive sales team is essential to our ultimate success; experts consider the keys to building a successful team a balance between art and science: a careful combination of skills, experience, education, and personality traits. New research, however, reinforces what we at ValueSelling Associates have long believed to be true: there’s a recipe for success we can all follow to develop a successful sales team.

Of course, the right leadership goes a long way in shaping our teams, and a recent study from Software Advice supports that managers should seek to hire for certain fundamental skills, education, and experience. Following this recipe will yield success every time.

Education: Part of being a great salesperson is connecting with customers and knowing what they want. That means developing our writing, listening, and business acumen, all of which education can teach us. According to the study, 67% of sales industry employers involved in the study require candidates to have a degree in higher education, and the remaining 33% regard experience as an equal substitute to it.

Experience: Software Advice’s research indicates that 72% of employers look to hire folks with industry-specific sales experience. and if it’s technical or management experience, even better. We agree: the most successful sales professionals have a deep understanding of the customer’s business, that is built by working in the industry they serve.. Having knowledge and experience specific to customers’ needs and their industries enables us to better understand what specific issues they face, and how to best communicate with them. That experience translates to the ability to deliver and communicate customer-specific value.

Skills: At the end of the day, it is critical that the sales rep knows what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Sales is a communication process that is based on a number of different skills. Education and experience are great to build upon, but they won’t suffice alone. Our sales teams need the right expertise and abilities to actively listen and manage an effective sales call and conversation. Negotiation and presentations skills are among those critical for sustainable success in the sales profession.

Sales Process: Once you have the key ingredients, it’s important that they are mixed and blended properly. Every world-class organization has a well-documented and defined sales process. Adherence to the sales process allows sales teams to leverage best practices, communicate with a common language, and productively allocate resources.

Building a world-class sales organization rarely happens by accident.

30/01/201530/01/2015

40th #PlayBookRT in NCR on “Break the Barriers of Selling” by Deepak Prakash

iSPIRT kicked off its first roundtable for 2015 on 17^th January at the office of Eko India, Gurgaon. The PlaybookRT was led by Deepak Prakash, Former VP of Sales at Tally Solutions. He has led building the entire sales network bottoms up and was the #1 sales person at Tally. Under him, Tally evolved from direct selling to single-tier home grown network for dominance and further evolved into a two tier network to create availability supplementing with all possible marketing activities with money/without money to reach-out to every potential buyer of our product(s).

The theme of the PlayBook Roundtable was something that poses a challenge for all tech entrepreneurs – Sales. Sales is what riddles most of the IT Product company start-ups – each one to his riddle. The intriguing problem of sales combined with Deepak’s experience and expertise in this subject ensured we had a full house on cold Saturday morning.

Overview

There are roughly about 1.25 crore SMEs in India, and about 40 Lakh of them have computers and are ready for automation. This provides a huge opportunity for enterprise software providers. Most of tech entrepreneurs have built interesting products to address this large market, however sales has always been the Achilles’ heels. Deepak broadly outlined the following sales strategies to tackle this market.

Building an effective sales team

Understand the sales psyche

In order to build a successful sales team, it is imperative to understand the psyche of sales people. As tech entrepreneurs, we usually tend to apply the same yardstick for both technology folks and sales team. This approach is incorrect.

Engineers and techies can accept failures easily, take it up as a challenge and build upon it. If there is a defect or something is not working, they will try new approaches to solve it. But for a sales guy, who is in front of a customer alone, failure can more often than not challenge his pride and ego. It needs a lot of effort for a sales person to swallow this failure and start afresh next morning. Inorder to keep his motivation high, it is necessary that we celebrate small sales victories and communicate the role he is playing in the organization.
Developers and tech teams go by logic and enjoy data, analytics and whatsapp/SMS. While sales teams enjoy phone call over IM and there is more emotion in place. It is very easy for a sales person to become lost or feel small in a tech setup. Entrepreneurs need to work and ensure that both teams understand each other’s importance.

Hiring A Sales Team

In response to a question on what traits we should look for while hiring for a sales position, Deepak mentioned:

The person should be able to make the customer comfortable and make him speak about his problems and needs. Only if a sales person can understand the pain point of customer, can he suggest the right value proposition. Someone who talks a lot and does not let others talk is not necessarily a good sales person.
A good sales person will typically have his pipeline on tips of his fingertips. He should be able to spell this out at any time.
Someone who says I can sell anything and I don’t need to know the product is a person you want to avoid. Because as an entrepreneur you want him to focus on product demo, and confide in the fact that your product is good enough that sale will happen if the right message goes to the customer.

In response to comments that it is difficult to find sales people who are ambitious or motivated, Sumit Kapoor from Employwise mentioned that it is not entirely correct. It is for the leader to inspire their people. We are able to inspire and motivate tech people easily but not sales people.

However, before hiring a sales team, founders need to ensure that the product or startup is at a stage where someone else can do the sales for them. E.g. if the sales calls become repetitive, you know that our sales process and collateral are ready for delegation.

Sales Team Training and Measuring Success

Deepak also shared his approach of measuring the success of sales teams:

Do not measure the success of a sales person by the number of cheques he gets but by the number of demos he makes. As an entrepreneur, we need to believe that our product is good and so if the sales person focuses on a good demonstration, cheques will come and business will happen.
The target or objective for sales team should be to talk about your passion, your innovation and your pride.
We need to understand the dream of sales people. Rather than imposing our dream on them, if we start worrying about their dream, they will start worrying about yours.

The discussion then meandered into how to train and motivate your sales team. Everyone one chimed in with interesting thoughts and here are some of them:

The first sales call for a new joinee is like sending a child to school. As parents we have to hold their hands and be there at the background. In case we close sale, do not ever say that sales happened because of me. Motive the new member and make him feel that he was the one who closed the deal.
In technology, we attempt to solve problems that are under your control, while sales depend on other people (end user, decision maker and several stakeholders) and so we have to be patience and cut the sales team some slack.
The only fear that sales folks have on the road is that sale will not happen. With every rejection, they lose a bit of self esteem. They have to recover from this loss over the night and get ready for a new day and a new fight. And on top of it, we as organizations impose tools such as CRM they have to fill in. These CRMs do not talk back and understand their feeling. At Tally Deepak used to call his boys everyday at 7 pm and hear them out, giving them a chance to vent out their feelings.
In a tech company, usually a sales person is considered an outsider. But if the rest of the team starts seeing as a bread winner and if the sales person gets a feeling that the team depends on him, this will give him a high.
As entrepreneurs, we also need to understand the difference between entrepreneurs and employees. Employees live for a lifestyle while entrepreneurs live for building an organization. Employees will plan for vacation, holidays etc. and we need to appreciate this.
Normally we give just product training to sales teams but customers usually want to talk to someone who understands them. So domain knowledge becomes important.
We try to surround sales people with tools such as CRM citing terms such as productivity, efficiency etc. These terms more often than not are Greek to them and they feel you are trying to control them, while the feeling inside them is freedom. We have to explain them to them that the tool is for liberation so that they start enjoying it.

Digital vs. Feet on Street

The discussion also got into choosing between Digital and Foot on Street and whether startups should try both. Sumeet opined that it is best not to get into a situation where we do both.

A digital strategy takes time to build as you have to create content, online brand etc. that does not happen overnight.
You also need to ensure that your customers are comfortable going through the entire sales cycle digitally including making payments. If there is any trade deficit, digital may not work.
While building your digital content strategy, you also need to ensure whether your target SMEs are coming online to search for data. Do they have enough time or knowledge on how some of their problems will be solved.

While if you are going for feet on street, you need to remember to bring in processes that will help you scale. E.g. you have to build a sales engine through which if you run a new hire, he can go and sell your product.

Sometimes combining both digital and feet on street can mask problems in either of the approaches. E.g. if customers are not comfortable making payments online, we get our sales team to talk to them and make payments offline. This prevents us from addressing the real problem, which perhaps could be a trade deficit.

Building a Channels Strategy

The mantra of success was that they created their own channel network, this lead to a dedicated network which will take all the products Tally would have created or will create. They ensured that their channel has enough activity to do, opportunity to encash and inclusive work for their growth was charted.

Channel works well when people already know your brand. There are three major things that channels can help you with:

Sell your product
Act as fulfilment centres for your product
Extension of network for messaging

Your channel strategy also has to evolve in-time. When you want to create deeper reach and availability you need to recruit another set of partners, and in parallel ensure that the already present channel also gains from your expansion.

Channel strategy has changes considerably between pre MNC and post MNC. Earlier there was a lot of relationship building, but now most of the channel partners play around very low margins. Entrepreneurs need to be wary of which strategy they want to adopt here.

Bundling Your Products

Another strategy tried by several companies is to bundle the product with another product that sells more. FMCG industry has done it very successfully. A couple of things that need to be taken care when pursuing this path are:

The product you are bundling with should resonate with your own product. E.g. both products can complete each other
Are the sales people selling the original product understand your product or are able to explain to customers about your products.

Referrals

Referrals are another avenue that startups can explore, however before doing so you need to ensure that you are capable to handle all the leads that come in. Throwing a bigger net that you can manage can actually backfire for you.

Right Business Model

Several SaaS based business have a monthly model where they would call businessmen every month to pay. This may not work well with SMEs. Your customer’s business is not to buy software with you. He would rather want to concentrate on his business. Hence it may make more sense to opt for an annual model. The serious customers will anyways buy this. Exotel had a similar experience.

Reaching out to different stakeholders

Often in an B2B setup, the user, decision maker and paying authority are different. The discussion moved to what should be the order in which different stakeholders are reached out. Usually sales team members are hesitant to meet the owner as they face the possibility of heavy rejection. Also owners are not interested in features but in how the tool can either help them save money or make more. However, they do depend on feedback from the user or beneficiary. Hence the sales team should first reach out to the user or beneficiary and then the owner. Sometimes the owner also depends on inputs from a Subject Matter Expert, who could be an IT guy or engineer in his friend/family and sometimes others (e.g. CAs in case of Tally)

However, in case of channels the approach is opposite. You first reach out to the owner to get them buy your proposition. Following this you want to reach out to the sales team of the partner so that they are well educated and trained to sell or demo your product.

Monopolistic Market

Dinesh Agarwal from Busy Software shared insights on how they penetrated a market which was dominated by one large player – Tally. He banked on users and stakeholders in accounting software to identify niche features that were required by a segment but not offered by Tally. One of such feature was statuary compliance. They launched this feature at half the price and this helped them penetrate. They also carved out their channel strategy and ecosystem that helped to build a strong market base.

Going International

Deepak also touched upon some key considerations while eyeing international sales:

Your product will need to be adapted to the particular market you intend to tap into. It could be for example statuary compliance or local language support.
International markets can be expensive and hence you need to plan well
From a sales strategy, there will be broad similarities. E.g. international markets also have channels that work on the same motivations and contours.
You need to accept the fact that no one in a new market knows you or your product. So if you start from scratch.
The business problems and challenges are similar in different markets. They too have similar HR problems or business problems.
There also needs to be a culture adoption, especially the way you communicate or conduct your sales effort.
Before starting to build a channel in an international market, it usually makes sense that you acquire the first 10-20 customers yourself. This will help you understand the market better, ensure your product is ready and help you exploit the channel strategy much better.
Set clear expectations and objectives so that you know when to get out if things are not working.

Conclusion

One thing that stood clear from inputs of all participants was that there is no size that fits all. Different solutions and strategies yielded results for different teams and entrepreneurs. It is imperative not to wear someone else’s stripes. Pick up a strategy that is doable for you based on the types of person you are and situation you are in.

2015-01-17 13.36.59 The high level of interest and engagement from all participants was evident as the session that planned for 3-4 hours got extended to beyond 7 hours. We finally concluded our first Roundtable for 2015 with a promise from Deepak that he will back with us in a couple of months.

07/01/201507/01/2015

Location is a context, not THE context

Being context aware is about knowing location, identity, activity and time.

Many context-aware technologies give a huge importance to location, but location is just one aspect of context, not the context. Location awareness can improve user experience, but knowing a user’s preferences and specific environment makes it all the more personal and all the more powerful. Mobile apps and devices can tap into this information, as can ad platforms, to create relevant experiences for consumers. Location is certainly important, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle.

There are plenty of applications that use location-awareness successfully from tracking deliveries to managing inventory or simply helping a user find their lost smartphone, or even a pet. But what if those same applications could know, not just where you are, but what you’re doing? Or better yet, what you’ll be doing or needing in the future. In that case, you’ll get a lot more targeted and helpful information rather than educated guesses.

The experts say…

According to Gartner Inc., “context-aware technologies will affect $96 billion of annual consumer spending worldwide by 2015.” In addition, the company’s research shows that by next year, 40 percent of smartphone users will opt-in to context service providers that track their activities. This would equal about 720 million people, by their count. The research company believes that transportation, utilities, energy and healthcare firms, in particular, stand to gain from these trends.

“Context-aware computing is the method by which new experiences are constructed that blend information from mobile, social, digital and physical world sources,” said William Clark, research vice president at Gartner. “The disruptions caused by context-aware computing will include major user, technology and business shifts, including the use of model-driven security in fraud detection and prevention, convergence in television, game, Web and mobile advertising, and new styles of application programming.”

He added that “organizations that do not prepare for thoughtful information sharing — balancing usage, privacy and business models of consumers, context providers, and the enterprises themselves, will be at a severe disadvantage.”

Currently, context-awareness is being leveraged by mobile applications and wearable technology such as fitness trackers from companies like Fitbit, Garmin and Nike as well as numerous smart watches like the upcoming Apple Watch, and finally, Google Glass. In the app realm, one example is Easilydo, a virtual assistant that manages your contacts, calendar and more, in much the same way that Google Now does, by learning from your actions and stored data.

These smart apps and devices are still limited in their intelligence; they only know what a user shares whether it be actively or passively. For example, location-awareness becomes a challenge when one is indoors and out of range of Wi-Fi. Beacons, standalone devices that beam Bluetooth signals, are one solution that can be seen in the retail sector, where stores can communicate with shoppers, for example. Apple has joined the game with iBeacon, which is built into its devices and OS and can communicate with compatible beacons at retailers. Additionally, apps like Placed can be used to launch apps based on which room of your house you’re in, which makes the beacon experience more personal. But there is so much more potential to be tapped in this arena.

How business benefits

On the business side, mobile ad platforms can use your location to serve ads, but they can become more targeted through user profiling. Here too, location is just one tool at their disposal. InMobi, a mobile ad network, uses context-aware technology to create “SmartAds” which exploit a user’s immediate environment to trigger relevant ads. For instance, a user checking the weather on a hot summer day might see an ad for a cold drink or an air conditioner; conversely, on a snowy day, that same user might see an for a hot drink or winter boots. Looking into the future, a platform that knows not only that a user is at a ski resort, but is actually skiing, could serve ads for nearby après ski locations, or other relevant businesses and services.

These apps and devices are only scratching the surface. Currently, all of them require at least some user intervention or prompting. Eventually, we’ll see smarter applications that can infer more about a user, digging deeper into their interests and preferences and learning from mistakes. For instance, apps could know without explicitly asking, where a user works and lives and what their regular schedule entails, and when they might need a break–almost reading one’s mind.

The possibilities are endless

Guest Post by Prima Dona, Keypoint Technologies

03/12/201403/12/2014

When anxiety is a good thing

Ever wonder why some buyers effortlessly make decisions to move forward, while others never engage or take action? When momentum with your prospect stalls, it could be time to shake things up. We need a fresh approach to turn cautious prospects into active clients.

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Consider this: Prospects expect a sales pitch. They expect us to tell them what we’re all about. Rather than tell our prospects what might happen if they don’t do anything, we need to be prepared to ask questions that allow them to imagine the negative consequences of their own inaction. In the few seconds it takes for them to consider their anxiety, it’s likely that their unique personal motivators will surface. Then we can offer our solutions to ease their anxiety and fix their problems.

Let’s dig into the best practices for telling stories that establish credibility.

Example anxiety questions:

“Are you confident that you can eliminate the backlog of IT requests without increasing costs?”
“What’s the impact to you if the cost of management initiative is delayed?”
“What would be the impact on your ability to raise capital if financial information is not readily available?”
“Are you confident that you will be able to support management’s 35% annual growth plan without impacting costs?”
“How safe will your job be if revenues don’t increase?” (This question practically guarantees anxiety!)
“I noticed that your return on assets is below the industry norm. If this situation continues, what will be the impact on your stock price?”

When asking an anxiety question, we need to integrate what we know about prospects and/or their industry. Being specific makes it more effective. We can also trigger an emotional response by making a direct connection, such as referencing war stories about people the prospect knows or leveraging relevant third-party information. The question should require prospects to imagine the future. Along the way, we must be careful to avoid insulting them or damaging the trust and rapport we’ve already established.

Asking anxiety questions is a reliable way to reignite the sales cycle. By reshaping prospects’ perspective of what they need and want, we can lead them to focus on a future in which we provide the solution. We have to begin with the end in mind. In other words, we start with the value we believe our products or services can bring. Ultimately, by cultivating a sense of urgency within our prospect, we can shorten the sales cycle, which will have a direct impact on our success.

01/12/201401/12/2014

An Imaginary Start up Case Study- Need for a planned Marketing & Sales outreach

The need to be viable in terms of paying customers and indeed the very survival of start ups are dependent on their ability to attract as many paying customers in a short time frame- however a majority of early stage start ups do not look at a planned approach to their marketing, branding and sales and depend a lot on their individual jugaad. The case study written down will capture a start up who was not successful-in an attempt to highlight some of the common sales and marketing blunders start ups make in their journey.

Case Study: Amit had been the best student in his IIT days plus when he did his MS his professors where extremely impressed with his ability to work hands on in cutting edge engineering. In his career Amit had been a success as an engineer and a technology manager: Amit decided to start his own venture in India. He chose a domain he was comfortable with- IT Assets and its effective utilization. However his approach was different. He chose a niche which was high end and a product which relied more in audit & governance for effective utilization of IT assets. He started with a core engineering team India and invested 3 years to build a product framework which was ready to be taken to the market. He then hired senior sale persons with successful track records in India to sell the product to enterprise customers. However adoption was slow & at the end of 5 years most of Amit’s cash had run out with only one low paying customer.

The above scenario perhaps may have similarity with many start ups and let us introspect a little bit more deeply from a marketing and sales perspective on what could Amit have done better.(For the sake of brevity the case study may not mention each of the aspects in great detail)

Research your market: One of the fundamental flaws in the above case study was a lack of comprehensive research into the market before entering the fray. While the product at some level was solving asset utilization problems for customers however the market was not ready in India to adopt the product –it was not a fundamental problem for them. The market growth in the US was faster and there was no plan to address the US market. Besides there were many players with different offerings.
Differentiate your product and position it at the right place in the market: As we now know that Amit did not research the market, his positioning in the market was not right. He did not find the niche in which he could position the product with an unique value and kept on changing the positioning and the messaging from time to time confusing his customers and his sales team.
Time to market & customer validation: In the above case study little attention was paid to get quickly off the block. The product was developed from an engineering perspective i.e. to develop a perfect product; however that ate up a lot of resources in terms of time and money. Customer validation only started happening post the sales team got on board thus loosing crucial time to market.
Promotion & marketing: There was no attempt to provide a marketing cover to sales people. Low cost marketing options like social media, blogs, white papers, webinars, digital PR, ambush marketing at high profile events was nearly absent. Sales people where left to their own network to generate leads thus merely duplicating the personal network based approach of Amit. Training of sales people was not up to the mark and the collaterals provided to them were of poor quality.
Pricing: As we have seen that the market was not well researched, pricing was left on discovery and individual intuition of the founder- which is of doubtful efficacy. The sales people were not prepared with pricing plus Amit was not present in many of the discussions and hence intuition became a liability.
Proper capitalization of marketing and sales: Amit did not properly capitalize his marketing and sales initiatives which led to inability to spend on crucial must do plans thus in a way underutilizing his resources.

Though the above case study does not explicitly mention the following points but I thought I should bring this up to highlight their importance:

Advisors: Amit chose advisors who he knew personally typically past colleagues or friends with differing start up backgrounds. They were necessarily not experts in the domain or understood the market & geography very well. This starved the company of wisdom and path setting.
Thought leaders, Academia: No attempts were made to cultivate relationships with thought leaders and academia. Amit was deprived of crucial knowledge which could help him come out with a more effective & relevant proposition.
Investment community: Unplanned & sporadic attempts were made to reach out to the investment community. The approach was transactional and not long term in terms of continuous engagement & building up a consistent pitch.
Personal chemistry with sales teams: Amit chose not to heed his own sales team in terms of leads to prioritize & qualify. Since he came from an engineering background his attempt to qualify leads on his individual intuition led to sales people chasing dead leads some of the time.

The above is a fictitious case study. This article only attempts to put in perspective some of the challenges start ups face from a sales and marketing perspective. They are not insurmountable-with a methodical and planned approach most of the challenges can be mitigated

27/11/201427/11/2014

Five things about Product Marketing you can learn from Chetan Bhagat

As a product marketer specialising in content, I’ve always found it irksome to explain to people just how difficult my craft is, and how much time it takes to do it well. Building a brand isn’t easy; it takes a lot of effort, planning, strategy & execution, and involves as much editing out as it involved creating more. And even then, one misplaced word or misguided blog post can turn around and bite you (a case in point is the much maligned Uber’s Rides of Glory blog post, since deleted).

But there is one gentleman (or a brand, however you choose to see him) who has consistently been so good at product marketing, that it would be a shame not to try to learn from him. Chetan Bhagat has been so good at selling books that several of our more established, critically acclaimed (and might I say, better) writers have had to go into therapy to treat their egos. He single handedly changed publishing in India, and though his methods may be suspect, they are nothing if not effective.

From the beginning, I’ve looked at Chetan Bhagat as a product marketer, and not as a writer who’s good at selling books; one reason for that is that his ideas (& tradition, as he has spawned several copycats & me-too writers) offend my literary sensibilities. Books are respected repositories of our knowledge, wisdom & stories for a reason, and somehow Bhagat’s books (or products) seem to undermine the very reason books are written & read.

None of that, though is relevant in a discussion about selling books, of which he is an absolute master. There is much to be learnt about product marketing from this seller of mass-market paperbacks, and I’ve distilled five of them.

Here goes –

1. There’s no such thing as bad publicity

Bhagat goes out of his ways to court attention. There is a reason he consistently picks fights with what he calls ‘the literary elite’; they are a self serving bunch not concerned about writing for ‘the common man’, he says, and is constantly getting into debates with them on national television. He has no original ideas to share at these platforms; all he does is reiterate that India’s new English readers need simplicity and stories that make them feel good, and that he is providing it to them. But intellectual debate is not the point of his appearances at all. The point is to stay in the news and never to go out of the mainstream. If you are always in front of your potential consumers, of course the probability that they will buy your product goes up exponentially. This is Marketing 101!

2. Revenue doesn’t care if it comes from shameless self-promotion

All of Chetan Bhagat’s books have one very prominent (& jarring) common factor. He appears in all of them in the beginning, as himself, listening to the story he is going to tell. It is a cringeworthy opening set-piece that smacks of supremely lazy writing, but what it also is is a reiteration that the book the reader is holding in his hand is part of the Chetan Bhagat brand, more a proclamation of allegiance than worthy literature. In marketing, we call this real estate. If you have a place you can showcase your brand or your product, every inch of it has to be used. Chetan Bhagat is so good at this that he has literally used the product he sells, that is, his books, to sell his own brand. If that is not genius, I don’t know what is.

3. Create your own market

The Blue Ocean strategy was something that was taught to me in my MBA days. I remember thinking that it was a pretty neat concept, but then as college students are wont to do, promptly forgot about it. The first time it struck me how Chetan Bhagat had applied it, I was mesmerized. In short, the Blue Ocean strategy puts forth the idea that instead of trying to compete against an established company in a congested market, a better way to create value would be to create a new market in the first place and then, by virtue of being the only players in that space, surge ahead before anyone even thinks about catching up. Before Chetan Bhagat came into the scene, the simple language/easy to digest/cheap paperback novel did not exist, simply because no one knew that such a market existed and that it could be serviced and made heaps of money off. I wasn’t paying attention during my MBA, but Chetan Bhagat certainly was.

4. Tailor your product & communication to your audience

Chetan Bhagat know who he is writing for. His audience is not the reader who has been reading for years and knows the kind of books he prefers or doesn’t, who already has a favorite author or authors or who can distinguish between a Mills & Boon and a Penguin Classic. Bhagat does not write for them. He writes for an aspirational middle class for whom English is a distant second language. And he makes no bones about that fact; Bhagat never claimed to be Naipaul. When you are this clear about the market you are selling to, you usually cannot go wrong. And he doesn’t. His books are not high literature, but they are perfect for the people he is selling to.

5. Go for the low-hanging fruit; grab the easy-to-acquire customers first

Though product marketers are beginning to catch on to the fact that pageviews is largely a vanity metric, there is a certain segment of the online content factories that have made this their field of expertise. And the foremost among them is of course Buzzfeed. The overwhelming majority of Buzzfeed’s content are listicles and feel-good stories that can only be described politely as great for passing the time. But there can be no argument with the fact that they work. Buzzfeed is an extremely intelligent, data driven company (run on Valley money) that knows exactly what it is doing. It is low-brow because it chooses to be, because that’s where the money is, and because it’s so easy to get that money. Chetan Bhagat understands this. India’s English book readers are a minority; in a country with so many regional languages and low literacy levels, the market for literary fiction and nonfiction in English is relatively miniscule. But there are millions of people who can read and understand simple English, and since they had never been sold books to before, all Bhagat had to do was write his books and spread the word. The low-hanging fruit was his for the taking.

I’m sure there are many more things we product marketers can learn from him. If there is anything I’ve left out that you’ve noticed, do point it out. As they say, knowledge shared is knowledge gained, and a discussion featuring books, in whatever oblique way, can never be not fruitful.

19/11/201420/11/2014

Nuts and Bolts of Marketing & selling SaaS products to US customers from India for First Timers

In innumerable brainstorming and “gyan” sessions with friends, mentors and experts, one of the most stressed focus area is getting product market fit as soon as possible and then follow it up with scaling sales. I think most early to mid stage entrepreneurs are instinctively aware of this but struggling with “Hows”. So when I saw this playbook promising precisely to explain how, I grabbed a spot. I wasn’t disappointed. Suresh Sambandam is very down to earth and spoke earnestly and in detail about different steps he took while selling the OrangeScape’s product KiSSFLOW. Attendees who themselves run early to mid-stage companies and Kishore Mandyam of Impel CRM chipped in with their stories and inputs. Here is the detailed enough capture of the same.

The relevancy of this session is greatest to Early and Mid-stage entrepreneurs going from $0-5K MRR to $50K MRR selling to US MSB. This session is NOT meant for discovery or product market fit but I have inserted the discussion at the end.

The blog is organised as below Product Market Fit / Pricing as step 0; Followed by Inbound Sales and Marketing and then finally Outbound Sales and discussion on tools.

Product Market Fit

The absolute first step (may be zeroth step) in Sales process is getting the product market fit. You know you have a Product Market Fit with a B2B Mid-Market SaaS product when unknown folks start buying (Inbound sales is picking up traction). Unfortunately in cases that were presented at the session, the discovery process of the product happened organically based on another product that they were building.

However the generic solution for early stage product discovery goes like this.

Create a landing page with a “notify when ready”.
Create a SEO/Adword campaign for getting early adopters. You need to be very clear about the product category and fine tune your Adwords to exactly match what product aspires to solve. There are usually two approaches to any product i.e Disruptive Innovator or Faster Better Cheaper. So Adwords need to be in line with these
Once people signup engage with them and partner with them to fine tune the product.

To put succinctly Bring-> Engage->Convert->Succeed; As you can clearly see from this model, “Marketing Comes Before Product” or as Suresh puts it bring the horse to the water.

Nuts and Bolts of Marketing & selling SaaS products to US customers from India for First Timers from ProductNation.in

Pricing and “Freemium v/s Free Trial”

So which model suits best for a SaaS product? Is there one preferable over another? Very subjective topic but the thumb rule seems to be for SMB / Mid-market SaaS Free Trial is a best method to go.

Models aside, what matters most to the conversion is the post-signup engagement and the price factor. Faster conversions are dependent on many factors but one of the key factors is pricing. If pricing is within the decision-making authority of the midlevel managers, it is easier to convert. The discretionary spending seems to be around about USD 5K. Keeping the price low per user and making minimum unit purchase of say 10 users per bundle works quite great.

Inbound Sales

WebSite – Suresh firmly believes that Website is a core asset for a B2B SaaS company and hence should not be outsourced. He advises to have a minimum team of Web Developer, Creative Designer and Automation Engineer. This would help perpetual A/B testing in short cycles..

Couple of nifty tricks to make the whole experience frictionless is to have a one click signup. Visitor should be able to experience the main software within few seconds. The other participating companies in the round table have used various techniques to authenticate emails like SMTP Ping, email pattern matching, etc.

It is also important to closely monitor the users interaction with the website, capture it and feed it back to the Engineers to close the gap and arguments between Sales/Marketing and Engineering. One of the recommended tools in this category is FullStory.

SEO

Lot of interesting debates on this; discussion ranged from how get the right keywords for searches and what optimization works and how to track the metrics. Suresh again firmly believes in having a dedicated SEO guy and focus on defined key words. They manage about 28 keywords and track them very meticulously. Some thumb rules and objectives again are

Do it Slowly but Steady
Don’t alert Google
Build Backlinks (Naked and Anchor)
Improve Google Crawl Frequency

Adwords:

It is preferable to have one dedicated person with number crunching and finance background. This will help track the cost per signup for search ads

Content Generation:

While it is important to have this come from founders, it is very hard to find time for the founders. One technique employed by KiSSFLOW is to hire fresher from visual communication background who has a grammar nazi attitude and give a very specific target like 2 +2+2+1 per week (2 blogs published 2 interviews done, 2 assured interviews for next week and 1 research post). He also uses 10-80-10 formula for the content itself where beginning 10 and ending 10 percent are reviewed in detail by founders. One of the other key points stressed was to have self ads in each of the content which leads to signup.

Outbound Sales

Contact DB

Obviously the most critical first step here is having a database of all the companies and the decision makers that you want to reach out. Linkedin Premium works best. This is how Suresh does it. He uses Linkedin DB to create a list of all target companies and then assigns the task of creating the contact details to an online consultant who was discovered on Elance. It usually works out to INR6-INR10 per contact. There are other dbs one can purchase directly from companies such as Data.com, Discover, rainking and slew of others.

Once contacts are obtained it is very important to use direct emails as opposed to using mailchimp, constantcontact, etc as most of them will not land in inbox. It also helps to be as personalized as possible.

Sales DNA

It is absolutely essential for the founder to set the tone of sales. For US be ready to pull night shifts continuously. Although it is the founders calling, it is good idea to assume the persona that appeals to US clients say Bob and position one as a sales manager. It is also important to make the sales hire to listen to the call handling to build on this.

Channels

Not all channels are suitable for SaaS and one needs to do some trial and error to figure out the best channels. The channels include Events, Road Shows, Reselling Partners and Referral/Affiliate partners, may work well but Orangescape has ignored them.

Metrics, Tracking, Tools

Meticulous tracking is critical and many tools are available to manage and measure the process. Some that are being used by the roundtable companies are listed below.

Metrics to track

Tools

These are the various tools used by the KiSSFLOW team and other participant companies who attended the roundtable

Conclusion

Very hard to summarize such a detailed session, but one parting thought stands out. Attention to details followed by automation and customization seems to be the way to go.