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7 tips to build a script :: a Step by Step guide

I wish it was mathematical. But it isn’t. There are unlimited combinations when building a story. That’s what makes it so much fun to consume – you never know how the storyteller tells it… 

So instead of giving you tips in a bulleted format – let’s build a script together.

What we know (or must know) before we start:

  1. This is for a 60 sec pitch video about a product called Glitch from Triton.
  2. They sell to Hotels. Their audience is clearly marked out.
  3. What the product does has been clearly documented.
  4. We need to bring out a call to action so they visit the product website.
  5. We are selling to Hotel people – they don’t have time to consume long form content – so the video should not be soggy and heavy – it should be light and brief. This means no more than 2-3 propositions. 

STEP 1: Start with a problem

” Guests want something – you deliver. Its simple. But when this doesn’t happen – your guest will get upset and then…. she’ll tell the world about it. The last thing you’d want is to read about such episodes on Social channels. “

Your product may solve many problems – choose only ONE to start with. Choose the problem that’s closest to your customer’s customer. Your customer cares about that. 

As you can see, we get to the problem quickly. The script doesn’t teach anyone. It just sketches out a scenario that will happen when the problem arises – customers will crib about your hotel’s service.

So here’s the first tip: 

TIP#1 – Get straight to the problem. Don’t beat around the bush. 

The easiest way to do that is to think like a customer and ask yourself – WHY MY FEATURE. Think what makes sense for you (you’re wearing the customer hat mind you). Think about that exact problem it solves. And then write that problem in simple words. Be direct and obnoxious if you have to – we’ll soften it later. 

STEP 2: Lets talk about our product a little

” There’s an easier way. Triton’s Glitch. Glitch alerts you when something has gone wrong in the service. And what you had to give up to … well… sort it out…. “

Part 2 of the script talks about the product. But not too much. We’re just making an overarching comment about the product. This is the main proposition or a product ‘tagline’ if you will. 

Tip #2 – Resist the urge to start talking about features here. Instead – make an overarching statement that comprehensively explains the product. 

This is around the 20 second mark. This is the time your audience will make a decision if this problem-solution pair interests them or not. 

Tip #3 – To optimize your video – ensure that the bucket personas as close to each other as possible. In every way… 

If you know what fish are in the river – you’ll be more successful in fishing. That’s because you won’t need to change the hook after every catch – you can just add the bait and cast your line again with the same hook. 

STEP 3 – Explain the feature a bit

” Whenever a service breakdown happens – all departments are instantly alerted and the right manager meets the upset guest, apologizes and offers a compensation. “

We’re going to show how the tool will work. We’re being absolutely real. This happens and then this happens and then this happens.

Tip #4 – use real cases where your customer has benefited and use that as the central pivot to build a story. This is another technique of writing a script – where you start with a situation and come back to the overarching product tagline. 

STEP 4 – play the second trump card

“What you get at the end of the day are clean reports that mark out repeated service breakdowns and compensations spent on them – across multiple properties.” 

We play our second trump card – a business benefit around data. We’re telling the hotel people that they can track and audit their expenses. No business likes to lose money and we chose to work around that sentiment when writing this line.

Tip #5 – sometimes your product may not have a ‘reporting feature’. In this case – try to bring out another feature or proposition. For eg. – X-app can also send you instant alerts…, Y-cloud will immediately shut down ports…, Z-service will raise a ticket… This is the second trump card. 

STEP 5 – Wrap it up

“No wonder a renowned Hotelier claims 18% jump in guest satisfaction scores since they implemented Glitch. Check it out today.”

We use some of our customer conversations and pick out a data point that one of the customers mentioned. This brings a reality check to the audience about the 2 claims we made earlier – step 3 and step 4. 

Tip #6 – Nothing convinces like data. Use as much data as possible in your stories. Avoid fairy tale endings and princesses and frogs. 

Tip #7 – Though I just said don’t use fable characters – one of the techniques is to start a story with a misdirection. So use these animals to start stories – not to end them. 

– – – – – – – – –

Here are 3 criteria I consider when evaluating a script:

  1. Is there any humor in the first 20 seconds. If the script doesn’t have humor – animation should. Or the screenplay. Or the audio – something must make the audience smile.
  2. After reading the script till the end – I should be able to recollect the first line of the script – without having to go back to the script. This means the script is light and catchy enough for my mind to be able to recollect what I read a few seconds ago. The information ‘stack’ on me is small enough for my mind to register and remember. 
  3. Word limit and sentence size. No more than 150 words and as small sentences as possible.

– – – – – – – – –

 Together now – this is the script in its final avatar. 

” Guests want something – you deliver. Its simple. But when this doesn’t happen – your guest will get upset and then…. she’ll tell the world about it. The last thing you’d want is to read about such episodes on Social channels.

There’s an easier way. Triton’s Glitch. 

Glitch alerts you when something has gone wrong in the service. And what you had to give up to … well… sort it out…. 

Whenever a service breakdown happens – all departments are instantly alerted and the right manager meets the upset guest, apologizes and offers a compensation. 

What you get at the end of the day are clean reports that mark out repeated service breakdowns and compensations spent on them – across multiple properties.

No wonder a renowned Hotelier claims 18% jump in guest satisfaction scores since they implemented Glitch. Check it out today. “

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Product positioning and sales strategy must be approached the way an army fights a war

To position the product, you must first have clarity on the addressable market and its breakdown in terms of different industries or user communities (let’s call both of them as ‘verticals’ for simplicity). Then analyze which of them can benefit the most from your product, where your maximum contacts are, and which has the least competition.

You can accordingly initiate preliminary sales efforts with well-known contacts in verticals that appear to have the best potential. Initial sales in a start-up are opportunistic—you take the business that you get. Yet, over time, you can only gain by firming up your target client base and tailoring your product to them.

Product positioning and sales strategy must be approached the way an army fights a war. It may not be easily apparent which verticals to focus on. In similar situations, armies launch probing attacks to detect weak lines of defence, before deciding on the exact battle plan. Founders can test the market with different customers, who would help them to develop insight into which industries, user communities or geographies have the best potential.

Once weak links are identified, choose initial battles to be on your terms. In the 1971 war, the Indian army avoided enemy troops that were concentrated in cities in East Bengal. They quickly captured the countryside, surrounded the towns, until the enemy surrendered. Similarly, a start-up must spend its limited sales budget to target the right customers.

Positioning and sales are influenced by different factors, some of which are listed below:

Target Market

  • Your product may have the potential to solve similar set of problems for different verticals. However, limited finances will stop you from ad- dressing all of them. Focusing on one or two verticals can result in a more specific solution, thereby increasing total value delivered by the product. This improves the probability of converting opportunities to sales.
  • The best target segments are not necessarily the obvious ones. For example, a vertical may be large but should be ruled out if it has entrenched competitors, less appetite for IT products, remote location etc.
  • Conduct some research by talking to potential clients in various verti- cals, industry experts and reviewing market surveys.
  • Sometimes, you may simply stumble on the right vertical. Initial clients provide the momentum and knowledge base related to a particular industry segment.

Delivery Model  

  • Sales strategy depends on the kind of product: enterprise software for companies, consumer software, web downloads, hosted solution (SaaS) with subscription fee, or an ad-based ‘free’ web portal.
  • Your product may support more than one delivery model. Thus, vendors may target big companies with full-blown enterprise software, while providing a SaaS version for SMBs. Many companies offer a free downloadable ‘lite’ version of the product, which can be upgraded to a paid full version. A free website may charge a subscription fee for advanced capabilities or special content. 

Initial Support

  • Does your product work out of the box with almost no support? Or does it need some customization and training? Is the product serving an obvious need, or does it require substantial education before a client decides to buy the product? The answers will influence the sales model.  

Geography

  • Is your product specific to India or global in scope? Even if global, do you plan to sell in India first? Does your city and region have sufficient opportunities to sell the product?
  • Except with SaaS, targeting and supporting customers outside India can be very expensive. It is best to follow an ‘expanding universe’ model, where initial focus is in your immediate area, followed by proximate locations, and then a global market.

Product positioning is closely tied to licensing model and pricing. We will consider each one individually.

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Where is my story?

Most startups talk about product features and how they are better than their competition in terms of their offerings. They really don’t tell stories, however people remember stories for long and not the facts and figures. Most often than not, people say we are a startup, we don’t have paying customers and we do not have stories to communicate. The fact that they are developing a product itself is towards addressing a market gap that the incumbent solutions are not addressing – product creation story. Why don’t you communicate that as a story?

Let me give you a couple of examples.

I was consulting one of the product startups in the education space, which provides smart classrooms. They also were communicating features, benefits as a part of their communication, but they realized that they wanted to do stories. I asked them, why did you choose to develop this product and how did you go product startups about doing this?

In fact, when they wanted to develop their product, they understood the gaps in the market and they had an idea about how to address the gap but they weren’t very clear. In order to get the clarity, they interviewed hundreds of students and hundreds of teachers from across the country before beginning to design their courses. These interviews provided them with a clear idea of the instructional methods followed and what was lacking in it. With this, they started to develop the courses and after about 36 months of work, they have more than 6000 classrooms using their product. This is their product creation story, which they started to communicate very efficiently.

They also prided themselves on the usability of their product and its intuitiveness. I asked them, what does your customer feel about the usability of your product? They said that they are completely positive about the experience. I persisted, what do your prospects who are evaluating the product feel about usability? They weren’t very sure about it. That’s when, we wanted to influence their perception and we decided to do this as a story as well.

We decided that we would not demonstrate the product to the prospects; instead, we will install the setup and get a couple of volunteers from the school to play around with the product. Once they did that, they understood the usability experience, they felt a part of the experience and they started championing the product sales, which resulted in improved conversions.  This became their usability story, which is a part of their pitch now.

These examples are only triggers for you to identify where your stories are. I am sure that this would act as a starting point for you to find your stories.

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6th iSPIRT Playbook RoundTable: Challenges in building a global software product company from India

In the continuing series of Round Tables product veterans Samir Palnitkar, ShopSocially and Jatin Parekh, AirTight Networks took the participants through a journey of discovery about why they want to go global and taking a critical look at the challenges they must overcome.

It takes a guy like Samir to lay the foundation for such a Round Table, having stoked the discussion with his experience and adding fuel by way of eliciting ideas and experiences of others. There’s no quick formula but the session did throw up some easy mantras to achieve those Global ambitions…

Some interesting takeaways from this session :

TEAM:

–       Hiring for overseas is always a challenge and you can’t be careful enough

–       Get a co-founder with a sufficiently high stake in the game, and one who is ready to adapt to the call of the hour.

–       If you know the person from earlier, nothing like it

–       Stay away from expensive consultants and retainers. Find someone who will take less cash (and therefore has had a prior successful exit / financially secure)

–       Write down the issues, objectives, compensation, way things are done, who does what, 5 year vision, etc. These discussions need to happen 

Experiences of those present:

–       One of the RT participant founders even camped in the US for 3 months to find the right guy, interviewing over 15 persons identified through various contacts. They evaluated trust, skill and cultural fit before deciding.

–       Most people do not want to be the lone member of startup in the US because all decision making would happen in India. One of them had a member already selling remotely so were thinking of moving that person to US.

–       If there are 3-4 co founders, there is enough mental bandwidth to get one person to US for 6 months to set things up.

–       Get partners to sell for you, they front end and sift thru the leads. May be encourage one of the partners to join you, as did one entrepreneur who had a good partner in E&Y front ending and finally robbed E&Y to get his co-founder !

–       In a nutshell, don’t compromise on this first hire. 

PREPARED TO TAKE THE FLIGHT ?

–       Start selling globally only if you can fund the sales cost for at least a year

–       It’s ok to do some services revenue to generate some cash. But this is also the biggest pitfall, if you end up doing too much customization that cripples you later. 

Key considerations:

–       You have to learn how to sell if you don’t already. Thumb rule is – if you can’t sell your product, nobody can.

–       You should have a sufficient funnel and regular flow of enquiry / conversion / sales and cash flows. Ok that’s a lot to ask but then that’s what it needs !

–       Prepare the Sales play book. A new person cannot invent the playbook to sell in US for you. 

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

–       Do you want to keep Product Management close to the customer or close to the R&D team?

–       Typical challenges in this are the ability to be aligned. Clear internal communication is crucial in motivating the team for the higher purpose

–       Delivery teams are usually in India, however you need to deal with the challenges of motivating team from a distance and account for cultural differences

The practical Product Manager:

–       Understanding the higher purpose and communicating it again and again is very important. If engineers are in the same office as sales guys then its easy, motivation happens. But if teams are physically separated then you have to build the channel to keep that communication going.

–       Communicate back to sales what problems engineering is facing.

–       Product Manager must have a regular travel plan and must meet customers if working at a distance from the market. This is crucial to get the alignment early on.

–       The PM cannot be note taker, taking customer requirements and giving it back verbatim to engineering to build. He must understand, negotiate and make intelligent distinction between features and requirements.

–       Priorities should be clearly published in writing.

–       Engineers should have the freedom to think and push back on features, but within boundaries. That’s when they can understand the purpose vs just coding.

–       Engineers must have first hand communication with customers, go for customer meetings, handle support calls etc.

–       When hiring engineers, set the expectation upfront that you have to do everything, and even learn outside your core competence. A Startup cannot afford to have people rigid within their own area. 

MARKETING

–       The biggest conundrum is in expectation mismatch, US teams being very “look” orinted and India teams being “fact” oriented

–       Interpretation of specs is usually different for each team, and quality of collateral needs to be extremely high to appeal to a US audience

–       The simple approach is to keep everything that requires a “handshake”, in the US and to teach India teams to be perfectionists.

–       If you need to get copywriting, don’t even think of getting it done in India. The lingo, the flow has to be completely American – leave that to an American.

–       Use a professional UX design shop if you need to

–       Use professional agencies for PR, like PRWEB, etc. 

SALES

–       Necessarily should be close to the customer. If the product requires a handshake, then you definitely need a US team member.

–       At the very least you need someone to stay up at night and receive calls

–       Prospecting via Linkedin, using polls and doing cold calling from India are usually successful approaches 

Sales and Marketing in the US is a big discussion in itself. A lot was left to be discussed, perhaps deserving an entire session devoted to selling in the US market. Another day, another Round Table then. 

ProductNation is the Go-To destination for many a successful software product. There are several amongst us who have tasted success in the global market. Do share your experience right here.

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7th #PNMeetup – Get to millions of visitors without spending money

3 founders, 25 good listeners and a rainy Delhi afternoon. Topic: “Get to millions of visitors without spending money”. It was a perfect setting for sharing of experiences by those 3 doers (Ankur@Akosha, Rajat@Socialappshq, Pallav@Knowlarity) about their own experiences of getting users, when they started. Keeping in its tradition, Avinash and Nakul organized this month’s meet-up in the office of Akosha.

Ankur, started the afternoon with his thoughts on “Zero” cost marketing. He shared many simple things that start-ups can do or shouldn’t do. It is not easy in the beginning to get people to know about your product and/or brand. One would typically need to find innovative ways. He shared some of this tricks that Akosha followed and what worked and what not worked. One of the key takeaway was that one should never outsource SEO. The product is yours, outside people cannot help you out. You have to learn, try and make it perfect. One also need to know about google analytics, if one is launching a web product (or if I think about it, any web connected product. It could be a website or it could be an app). Audience also shared their experiences with SEO and many felt that if done correctly, it can do wonders.

Rajat also shared some neat ways where companies have taken help of SEO. If your product allows (or if you can find ways of doing so), you make others do your SEO work. e.g. you can do content partnerships where your content is shown by other leading websites.

  Many other consumer connect ways were discussed like Twitter, email marketing. Email marketing generated quite a bit of discussion given that different people had different experience. However this is also a fact that email is a very powerful tool. A trick, which I find worth mentioning is, always run your campaign in 2 steps. You always get email databases from market or from “someone”. Run a dummy campaign to exclude bad addresses (you can use a dummy domain as well for this). In Part 2, exclude bad addresses and use your actual domain to send your emails. 


For finding leads, in your early days, one need to think out of the box. e.g. if you are in classifieds business, visiting your competitor sites would give you quite a number of leads. It is also true that finding fist few customers if often way more difficult than getting your next 1000 users. When you start, many a times you believe that world is your playground. Problem is that you keep looking for that first mate to play with. As Pallav (Founder Knowlarity) shared an anecdote about how he got first customer, there were many oohs and aahas I could hear among audience. Getting you first customer also tests one’s persistence as was evident in the anecdote shared by Rajat. 

In startup, we always need people who can hit the ground from day 1. There is no, as they say it, settling in time. This was very well explained by Pallav. An interesting graph shared by Pallav


In a Start-up, you are typically looking for a Maverick sales person.

Overall, an afternoon, from which I could find many practical take-aways. There may not really be Zero cost way to reach million users, however there are many ways to do this in price effective way.

Guest Post Contributed by Ajay Bansal, Director, Product Management at U2opia Mobile

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Lead, but consciously nurture talent

My wife forwarded me an article recently that Booz & Co. had written on India’s leadership challenge. You can read the full article here.

This confirmed something I have long suspected. While there are great leaders in the Indian business, there are very few great companies. Let me explain what I mean by that. In the business, we are in, i.e. IT, some companies have done very well financially, and yet, if you talk to employees at the very same companies, you will realize very quickly that folks aren’t happy. That they feel they are under-valued and under-utilized. That they have limited growth opportunities. That they are stuck in a rut. That has made for companies that can execute well, but cannot innovate.

That niggly attrition problem that so plagues the India IT business? Well, guess what, it doesn’t have anything to do with making an extra buck somewhere else. It has everything to do with having equally dreary workplaces that stifle growth. So if one has a choice to make a little more money doing the exact same mind-numbing work, well, that’s what one does. This is not just me talking. Check this out

I can empathize. I’ve been there too. 

So what’s the point of this post? After all this is supposed to be a blog about the software product business in India. 

The reason I write this is because we have an opportunity to create an eco-system of companies in India that are creative workplaces. Where individuals want to have fun and innovate. If we want world-class innovation out of India it has to start with the work culture. So to that end, I jotted down some thoughts on what we should be consciously thinking about.

Money is only a motivator in the short-term  – Many companies believe, IMO incorrectly, that giving people great compensation is more than enough. This thinking is especially prevalent in sales groups within companies. While you have to compensate your employees adequately and at wages that are competitive, money is really not a great motivator. And if this is the only carrot you have, there is nothing stopping your best employees from seeking greener (more carroty) pastures. 

MBAs are great managers(leaders), NOT – Many years back, just starting out in the workplace,  there was a clear hierarchy in new hires. There were the MBAs (preferably from IIMs) at the top of the heap, then there were the engineers (preferably from IITs) in the middle, and then were MCAs. The MBAs were fast tracked on to management roles whereas the rest of the people were expected to be the worker bees. That is a ridiculous way to build an organization. Many years later, the thinking persists and the results are evident. A degree does not make a great manager. Empathy and interpersonal skills, among other things, do. 

Doing a job well is not a predictor of management/leadership talent – I have seen this many times in my work life. In one particular instance, a person who was a fabulous individual contributor was an exceptionally bad team player. Well, he was elevated to a very senior position because of the fantastic work he had done as an individual contributor. I have lost touch with him so I don’t know how he fared. He is a very smart individual so I assume he figured things out but the company had done no favors to him or the company, by not grooming him for that role.

Just some thoughts on a topic I feel strongly about. I keep hearing of all the fabulous things that are happening in the Indian product eco-system and I am excited about that. But we must always be aware of the cultural baggage we come with. And the cultural baggage has a strong authoritarian component to it. Where commands are given and dissent is not tolerated. If we want to build a generation of leaders that can spawn multiple companies doing innovative work, this needs to change.

But all is not doom and gloom. Things are changing. One of my clients, Moonraft Innovation Labs, a UX design shop out of Bangalore has created a relaxed work environment to foster creativity. Titles are fluid, no assigned seating and an entire floor devoted to artsy endeavors. The quality of work they are putting out shows their approach is working. This is just one example. I am sure there are many more. The objective should be to drive the old command-and-control structure into extinction.

Agree. Disagree. Or have another viewpoint. Would love to hear your thoughts.

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SaaS Pricing – the role of customer value proposition

The trend of pure-play SaaS providers and on-premise software ISVs diversifying into SaaS is on the rise. SaaS revenue for global top 10 ISVs forms 40% of all software revenues. According to Gartner, the SaaS revenues will grow annually at 17.5% to form 24% of all software revenues in 2016. This would amount to USD 22.5 billion up from USD 14.5 billion in 2012. While SaaS makes a perfect business sense in the long term, in the short term, SaaS providers face unprofitable business for two or more years among other challenges in marketing and product management. SaaS has given birth to new ways of pricing like fixed-fee or usage based pricing, pay-as-you-go, freemium model and so on. Pricing is an important aspect of SaaS business.

I will be covering SaaS pricing through a series of blogs on topics like concept of value pricing, role of segmentation and tiers, pricing structure, metrics, managing pricing over product life cycle, competition and product positioning. I start with concepts of value and role of segmentation.

A Google search throws up ‘n’ number of SaaS pricing models. But success of any pricing model is always rooted in a sound value proposition of the offering. Cost plus pricing is common, seems financially prudent thing to do but is known to leave a lot of money on the table. Also remember, even when offered free the customers would not pick up your offering if they do not perceive value in it. The first step in pricing strategy is to ascertain value of your offering.

Demonstrate value of your offering

The economic and emotional values are the primary drivers of purchase decision. The economic value of your offering is has two components – price of the next best alternative and the value of what differentiates your offering from the next best. You have no control on the competitors’ price. Therefore differentiation is the way to go to provide better overall customer value and better price. Sometimes customers may not perceive the value. It is critical your marketing communication ensure what is important to customer, specially differentiated features and benefits come to the buyers’ notice. So develop your value proposition and communicate it clearly to the customers.

A simple equation for the value proposition is (Value = Benefits – Costs). For this, you must quantify the economic value of your products features together with the emotional and psychological value. One way to do this is to quantify impact of your offering on customers’ revenue, productivity, profitability and so on. Here is an example of computing economic value of a feature.

A midsize software product MNC in India was considering moving to Google Apps. Google Apps offer benefits to two entities in an organization – IT and end-user. The IT benefits include cost savings on licenses, IT infrastructure and operations and maintenance. The end user benefits include – 1) productivity gain due to improved email search, spam filtering, archiving and improved response times, 2) quicker issue resolution and decision making thru shared editing of documents and 3) improved response time to customers and partners. Let us see how we can calculate productivity gain from just one benefit, say, and faster email search. Assume –300 employees, 5 day workweek, 50 work weeks, average per hour employee cost of $10, average 1 hour email usage per day, and a 10% saving (estimate based on previous implementations). This translates into an annual productivity gain worth 300 x 1 x 5 x 50 x 0.1 x $10 = $75 K.  The total benefits (productivity gains + IT cost savings) for three years operations worked out at $81K, $111K and $123K. Total subscription costs in this period were $18,900 (300 x $63 per user) per year. There were initial costs for transitioning from legacy system, testing, pilot and training amounting to $5K.  The overall risk adjusted net present value of benefits (including several other benefits like archiving, SPAM filtering, threading, IM etc.) was $205K. The customer went ahead with the purchase.

Segment your customers

All customers do not have same needs, value perceptions and the willingness to pay. Targeting the whole population with one product and one price is not the way t best financial performance. It leads to leaving money on the table for some customers who are willing to pay higher and losing out another set of customers who can’t afford the price. Thankfully, the customers can be sub grouped or segmented based on certain similarities. Value based segmentation helps create pricing commensurate with the perceived value by those customer segments.

Segmentation requires creativity in addition to analysis. It must reflect your marketing strategy. For example, Zoho, Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, compete in online document management area (word processor, spread sheet, presentations, email).  However, Zoho Docs views the market in three segments represented by personal, standard and premium licenses priced at $0, $3 and $5 per month per user. Office 365 has more complex view of the same market. It segments it into seven segments, namely small, midsize and enterprise business, education, government, professional and home with fourteen different licenses ($0 to $20 per month per user)! In contrast, Google Apps has just one offering at $5 per month per user. So, why does Microsoft has seven segments and fourteen price points? A closer study would reveal that the breadth and depth of features / functionality offered by Office 365 far outstrips Zoho docs and Google apps. It allows creation of diverse bundles of features and pitch them to different segments at price points that meet respective value perceptions. By doing this Microsoft is able to capture the students segments (low paying capacity) while maintaining premium pricing for the enterprise. Microsoft would lose both lot of money and a large chunk of market if they decided on just one segment with one price. Interestingly, it is possible to create segmentation and variable pricing without bundling different sets of features i.e., on an identical offering. For example, railways transports grains at much cheaper rates compared to manufactured consumer goods in the same wagon. There is very little difference in the inputs that go into transporting the two items. I have yet to see this in software or SaaS.

One more point in favour of segmentation is as follows. In a high fixed cost industry like software and SaaS, it is a good strategy to capture the large volume of customers in the long tail with a price that is just equal to the offering’s variable cost. This is good for revenue. Generally, more segments the better. The factors that limit number of segments are complexity and sales administration cost, smaller differentiation between the offering for adjacent segments and customer propensity to select the lower priced segment when differentiation is small.

I will close this blog with a quiz. Given below is the old pricing page of Serverdensity (http://www.serverdensity.com). Serverdensity is a provider of cloud based server monitoring. They have tiered pricing based on number of servers that a customer has. What is good, bad and ugly about this pricing?

Please look for the next blog on SaaS pricing metrics.

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3 Reasons why stories will help you win business

Your product does something unique and interesting and you tell people and they go …. Oh well, that’s great and walk away. Would you agree that they just do not get it? All of us have faced this problem sometime or the other.

Let me emphasize this with an example:

A large company was pitching to my customer for a partnership deal. Four French guys and I represented my customer. Into the presentation, they used words and phrases like propensity, appetite, whole nine yards of solution, womb to tomb, boil the ocean, and sweating the assets among many other jargons. In 20 minutes, couple of French guys almost started dozing off, one of them started fiddling with his blackberry, and the other one started ferociously working on the laptop. Obviously, there were not any questions from our side at the end of the presentation as they lost us much early in the pitch. The partnership talk also did not move forward.     

This anecdote emphasizes the fact that higher order words and phrases should not be a part of your vocabulary, as it does not let you connect with your audience. How do you go about connecting?

  1. Stories are a brilliant way to connect with your audience. They help people understand, remember, and re-tell them and this is how Dan and Chip Heath define sticky communication in their book, ‘Made to stick’.
  2. Human beings remember the narratives better than remembering unrelated stuff. This is what we have been doing right from childhood.
  3. Use stories to substantiate your product positioning – A positioning statement per se is a placeholder in your website, presentations and other collaterals. Beyond that, it actually does not do anything unless stories substantiate them.

Now, how do we go about creating stories? Isn’t that an artistic pursuit and a rare skill that only a few have? This is the common belief about creating stories, but in reality, you do not have to be a master storyteller to create your product story. Product creation itself is a story and you are addressing a need or a gap in the market. This would provide the benefits that your customers would get out of your product.

Your product stories ought to have the context defined, action performed by your product and the results expected from it.  Why don’t you start defining the context, action and results of your product and write down everything that comes to your mind? Put them together as a story once you have all the information. It’s that simple!

I would be sharing tips in the subsequent blog posts on what makes a great story, what do good stories have in common, how you can use your personal stories and how you can use stories in your pitch.

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You are not supporting a device, you are supporting people

Founders of iYogi, Vishal and Uday have a candid chat with ProductNation about how they started the company and the reason for their success in the support space. They assist more than 2.5 million individual and small enterprise users today across the globe. Interestingly the idea originated from a very simple notion – that of “people centricity”. 

Vishal and Uday, I was just curious about the origins of your company. So, when actually did you start and what was the context that you founded this company in?

We started working on the idea in 2005, and the context was, fundamentally, that in the consumer support business at that time no one was actually building a support capability that focused on the consumer. Everybody was focused on trying to figure out what the brand wanted to do. So, to give you an example, you know, if you called a PC manufacturer for support, they basically had rules of engagement for the kind of support that was required to be given – simple stuff like what part of the support is within the scope, what part of the support is outside of scope, and essentially you would get transferred from one queue to another queue based on the request, and then the entire service paradigm focused on cost management, cost reduction and the consumer was not at the center of the design or the process related to support. 

Also, the entire support service was mostly engineered around the fact that it was for an enterprise. There you have standardized technology and a ‘one size fits all’ kind of a process, which is followed and believe me that works. But when you start using the technology in your home or in your small business, the technology environment changes – you have a personalized environment, a personalized desktop. You personalize your settings. You have different kinds of Operating environments. Every home, every office is very distinct from the other. So, you can’t have a ‘one size fits all’ support, because people are so different in their use of technology.

You are not supporting the device. And we thought that was the big gap in what was being offered and what really the consumer wanted all over the world, and that was really the trigger. 

So we thought that there is a great opportunity here to create a completely different paradigm in business and do that using technology. Because it’s the only way to deliver very high quality services through a technology platform on a consistent basis that allows the consumer to select what help he needs and what time and how he wants to get that help; whether he wants it on the phone or through the self-help method; he wants to be educated via tutorials. Should the tutorial be on the web or should it be on video? Would he rather have a chat session with the technician and hand over a report or would he want to bear the project load himself? These are all the choices the consumer makes depending on his comfort and the nature of the fault that is raised and demographic and the kind of technology he uses.

So, we designed our support capability, to provide that flexibility to the consumer and put him the center of the entire design of those and that ultimately turned out to be the, you know, key and the major differentiators, not only in our business at the start but also, continues to be the sort of mainstay of our organizational design.

Okay. But when you started out, did you believe that the consumer would actually kind of, you know, be willing to pay for the service, because and why?

Oh. I think the first thing is that we have to understand that consumers all over the world are willing to pay for anything, which provides them value. And that is true even in India, where technology adoption is growing. As long as you can provide value in what you are selling as a service, the consumers will pay. But at the same time, you know, propensity to pay varies from geography to geography, based on people’s lifestyle and demographics. Demographics are different in even within this large geography, and so you need to be able to define which consumer segment you are targeting and you are marketing to and build your pricing and your product strategy oriented on the target audience.

So, what was your sales strategy basically? How did you kind of decide which markets you’d go after, and why did you go after those markets?

Well, I mean, if you’re in the technology business, I think the easiest decision is choice of market. You go after the largest technology market there is in the world; it’s the United States.

Traditionally, that’s been the strategy, that I think every technology company worldwide adopted until and unless they were building a product or service, which is specific to a local geography. So I think, you know, the maximum penetration of PCs, the maximum penetration of broadband and the high-value broadband customers were in the US, and so it was easy…it was an easy decision to say that there are 75 million broadband homes in North America. Those homes have between two to three PCs, their wireless networks in the home. People have printers, and…and they are truly dependent on using the internet for their day-to-day life, whether it’s for entertainment or it’s e-mail or it’s for commerce. 

Consumers needed a service, which is available 24×7 on demand and provides them peace of mind, which means their technology is up and running continuously. So, it was a pretty simple decision actually. But having said that, we actually tried the service in a beta mode in the UK first before we launched the US.

So having decided to enter the US markets, what’s the kind of preparedness you had at your end? 

When we started initially we supported the Windows XP operating system and 32 popular software applications. Our services was geared to deliver a personalized support that could proactively help manage the environment and since this was different that the traditional incident based services, we had to educate the customer on the new type of services we were providing. We were also creating a new category of subscription based support services, which amplified the initial challenge 

Education was based on creating an opportunity to engage the prospect. Our sales has been geared as an experiential model, where someone can get a free diagnostic or support incident and we use that service experience to upsell a subscription. It worked. Consumers were exhausted with oscillating in the support eco-system of device manufacturers, not understanding how they can connect their symptom to the problem. Our pitch was simple; call us anytime for any problem. We eliminated complicated IVR’s and call-wait times and focused on creating a new support experience with highly trained tech experts. 

The final part of the launch was basically on price testing. So, when we actually launched our service, it was initially priced at $99. Over a period of time, we started increasing the scope of support by including additional coverage for more devices, apps and also provided a different service level so we gradually increased the price to $169.99. Then there’s a Digital Home Plan which is unlimited for any device that you have and that’s for $30 per month. 

How did you manage your technology infrastructure?

First of all, in this space, you know, there wasn’t any platform which was a plug and play and which we could use to deploy in managing the growing complexity which is there in a home today or in a small business. So we actually invested in creating a platform, which is Internet grade and currently deployed across 11 geographies. It’s multi-lingual, multi-currency and agnostic to where services are delivered. But most importantly it actually harvests all the service incidences that we encounter and makes a rich database of scenarios in our knowledge base. We have invested in automating support through scripts that offer diagnostic and a higher resolution.    

Everyday we handle around 20,000 service requests. With growing footprint in 10 countries and the an increasingly heterogeneous technology environment we have increased our scope of support to over 500 different types of applications, 11 types of devices and over 33 different peripherals. This list keeps growing depending on the adoption of consumers and small companies we service. And we see a rapid adoption to a new set of cloud applications and services.   

So where is your team based for all the support that you provide?

We find geographies where they are pockets of talent that we can bring on board. So, Gurgaon is obviously primary center and we have around a little over 2,000 people that are employed here. And then we have people in Chandigarh, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune, Indore and most recently in Goa. It finally boils down to finding the right talent. But because we work with premium partners like IBM, Teleperformance, Infinite, etc. we’ve now got the ability to recruit some top talent 

The technology platform has a learning and performance module that provides a virtualized environment for training. That combined with greater support automation drives consistent customer satisfaction benchmarks from a new candidate versus a tenured technician.     

If you look back at your business these past few years, what are things that you have done successfully? 

I think the first thing was the whole approach of becoming customer centered. And there are certain basic tenants that we have put in place. For example, we answer every call within one minute, and have maintained that service level for 98% of all our calls despite the dramatic ramp in our business. Another metric we track religiously that endorses this success is our customer satisfaction metric. Since inception we have maintained a customer service score of greater than 90%. This is 20 percentage points higher than the industry average.

The second is actually in the investment in platform. It was the only way to scale our business and address the increasingly complex technology landscape in homes and businesses. We did a recent survey with our customers and on an average two members in a household have approximately 11 devices. So, what you’ve got is a heterogeneous environment, multiple operating systems being used for different kinds of purposes, and so to provide support in that environment you need to have a platform. This capability is fairly unique and we are licensing this SaaS based cloud platform www.digitalservicecloud.com to other companies that are at the frontlines of managing millions of customer problems.    

And the third, you know is people, and we’ve sort of been uncompromising in finding the right people. I believe we were also very fortunate because it was just that turning point where people were tired of working in the support backwaters of a third party company and not being able to innovate, and everything was driven by cost optimization with no sense of ownership. So when we said that we wanted to create a consumer services brand to stand out of India it resonated well with people.

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How to get your product’s content marketing juggernaut in place

Congratulations, you have just started up. It has taken so long to get here – you’ve worked hard, saved up, staved away every comfort, and your product is out, garnering rave reviews. Now you turn to the other important stuff you need to do – get your product in front of your market. It’s time for the marketing and selling push in a startup.

And this is when you know you have to set up a content marketing effort. You know it costs less, brings in way more, and can contribute to branding in an unimaginable way.

But how and where do you start?

I’ll try to answer that.

When I started out, content marketing was just about catching fire as a viable marketing channel. The field was nascent (and in many ways, still is) and everything we have learned about it, we have learned by doing. I’ve tried to make a small guide out of what we’ve learned.

The two towers of content marketing 

There are two separate efforts involved in content marketing. I call them the two towers. One of them is of course creating the content that will educate the market and convince people to buy your product. This is your first challenge. The other is getting it in front of them, what we call ‘distribution’. Even if you have written and designed amazing content, it’ll only be valuable if your audience reads it. Your second challenge lies in grabbing the eyeballs that will translate into greenbacks.

Wading in, then.

The first tower – content

1. Blog
2. Whitepapers
3. Case Studies
4. E-Books
5. In-product help texts
6. Infographics
7. Videos
8. Presentations

The list I have compiled above is just a snapshot of the things you can do. Platforms and formats abound for people who want to get more creative and tell stories in a new way. But to get started, the list above will do very well. For any B2B product, educating the customer about what your product can do and what your product can do better than others is the aim, and all the content generated should be tailored around specific takeaways for the audience.

I still believe in the blog as the key channel for any startup. A few months after my CEO Girish Mathrubootham had started up Freshdesk, he wrote a post on the Freshdesk Blog about how a Hacker News comment had been his inspiration to quit his job and start a company. The post went viral, people across the world read it, shared it, and were inspired by it. It brought us recognition on a scale we hadn’t even imagined. And this was when we didn’t even have a marketing plan in place. It is just not about the customers the blog brings as well; a good blog is a good branding statement. The first thing that most people look at when they reach your site is the blog. It just has to be amazing.

All of the rest come under the banner of educational informational content. Make it a point to tailor content to different stages of the sales cycle and deliver it when the customer has the most need for it. For example, when a customer is trialling your product, make sure he gets in-product help texts to help him navigate the newness of it. You can send him white-papers comparing your product with your competitors and tell him all the reasons he needs to choose you. You can send him videos showing him little tips and tricks in the product that makes his work easier. You get the point.

Now on to the trickier part of the equation.

The second tower – distribution

1. SEO
2. Social
3. The Community

Anyone getting into the Content Marketing equation should understand this first – one thing you do will feed into the other.

Now that you have created the stuff you think your audience will like, you need to get it to them.

Basic SEO is imperative. This is the most targeted form of inbound marketing there is. If you do not deliver content to the people who are actually looking for it, you might as well pack up and leave. And make no mistake about it, this is grunt work. You have to get down, get your hands dirty, pick through tags, metatags, best practices, measure impact, rinse, repeat. Use a tool like Scribe. Think keywords, SEO pages, landing pages and more.

This should get you started.

Now to the social web. Your social presence is your admit card to the masses. You now have access to people all over the world who are looking for and consuming information just like what you are creating and some of them are ready to open their wallets for the product you have made if it is going to give them any value. But again, it is not something to be totally enthralled by. The worst thing you can do is consciously try to ‘go’ viral. Get on the social platforms that make sense for your business, and build a consistent and interesting presence. Share stuff that your followers are interested in, and not just what you create. Build a social community. This will give you credibility as well as an audience that wants to listen to what to have to say.

For a product, it is sometimes better to build communities by themselves. One way to do this is like how Dropbox does it, forging a community by giving users incentives to evangelize the product in exchange for more space. This is a great way to growth-hack, if your product is something as inherently social as Dropbox. But for other ‘normal’ products, several support tools let you build your own community, including Freshdesk. When you let customers talk to each other, put forth new ideas for your product, vote on new features, share tips and tricks and so on, what you have is an engaged community that co-owns your product, has a stake in it becoming better and even more amazing, and will go out of their way to help you make it so. This community will be the greatest pack of evangelists you’ll ever have, and your content will be shared and trumpeted by them, thereby reaching audiences far beyond what you’ll be able to reach yourself.

I was talking to my boss Vikram last night, and standing on the balcony of our 7th floor office, he told me about how “There is no shortcut to slogging. You just have to. Only then will anything worth learning be learnt.”

An so it is with Content Marketing. To get better at it, you need to put in your hours, grind it out, make mistakes, learn.

So that is what I urge you to do. Start.

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5 tips to making a killer product video

Your product has something worthy – its just that no one reads now. So how do you make your audience appreciate the worthiness of your product. They’re hearing you – but are they listening to you? 

Videos use 2 out of our 5 senses and if designed right – a video can help you can slip the pill. A pill that will start a conversation. And a conversation is the start to any sale.

For hygiene – videos are of many types. A video can entertain (Avatar the movie), It can teach (NGC the channel) and it can sell (explainer videos). I’m talking about the last on the list – quick explainer videos that showcase a USP of your product. 

Here are my top 5 tips to making your product video stand out:

1. Number of propositions

Sure your product has half a dozen value propositions. But your audience can only remember a few of them. In a minute – try to restrict the propositions to 1 or 2 at the most. 

Its better you say 1 thing two times than 2 things once.

This is a proposition heavy video. (you’ll notice how little propositions you’ll remember after you’ve seen it) 

2. Number of seconds 

Brevity plays a big role in any content. Not at the cost of the propositions though – but exceeding 90 seconds can cause slow death. 

See this 2:28 min video we did for a tech startup and then compare it to the 68 second one for another product – you’ll appreciate the difference. 

3. Speed/Velocity 

The pace of the video is perhaps the trickiest to set. If the speed is too fast – ideas will zip by. If its too slow – your audience will lose attention. Damn these fickle minded audience I tell you ! 

The trick is to build the speed based on the propositions. At govideotoday, we set the pace based on how many UIs are to be shown, or how many propositions need to be delivered. We also take into consideration the pace of the narrator (voice over) and the genre of the background score. 

This is a fast video. The pace limits the understanding of the product. 

4. Audio 

Most forget that Audio Visual – is 50% Audio ! As a musician and a self-taught audio engineer, I can tell you that if you get the audio wrong – all hell will break loose. 

The trick to judge any audio is to close your eyes. Silly I know – but by closing your eyes, you’ll prevent distraction and you’ll focus on the tonal quality of the voice over, the beat in the music, the gain levels, and how the music contours the voice. 

I know this may not be precise but audio engineering is not a science yet and most audio engineers get paid (or used to) because they just had good ears. Its pretty much like a painting on canvas. After a few years of doing it – your eyes can detect the goods and the bads. 

In my opinion, this video has a good audio master. (notice the beat on the score)

5. Reality – use case 

This is the BEST way to make your video rock. Real use case of where your software made a hit with the customer. Call it a case study or a client showcase – the use case is real, therefore its something your target audience can relate to, and therefore its got trust written all over it. 

When people trust you – they’ll talk to you. What did I say about conversations earlier – remember? 

This is a video that you’ll so easily relate to.

If you’re a pastry fan like me – you’ll know that the light and crispy pastry always wins over the oily and soggy. That’s not a personal choice – that’s how we ALL like it. Any marketing content is subject to the same prejudices. 

Keep it short. Simple. and Humorous. Humor is the best way to break any resistance. 

What have been your favorite product videos? 

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Stairway to Success – Nurturing your leads online

It’s not all about leads. The sales process in the B2B landscape has embraced a significant change. A purchase typically involves multiple decision makers, multiple teams and multiple stages. Creating awareness and interest about your products is just the first step of a long process. The bulk of your prospects, while having a fair idea of what their objectives are, are unaware of what your company exactly offers. Only 27% of B2B leads are sales-ready when first generated, according to MarketingSherpa. The remaining 73% constitutes a glaring opportunity and a stairway to success for sales growth. There is a high risk of the leads generated being lost, ignored or scooped up by competitors. It is thus essential for marketers to educate prospects and move them ahead in the sales funnel in order to increase the lead-conversion rate. And this is where lead nurturing comes into the picture.

B2B Lead Nurturing caters to prospective buyers during the early stages of the buying process by providing them with highly relevant educational content. It can help build preference for your products and brand in the minds of prospects long before they are actively engaged and reach the buying stage. It is about building relationships and trust to ensure success at a later stage.

Traditionally, marketers and sales-reps responded to prospect enquiries and their interest in a company’s services and products. But with the advent of online channels and their ever expanding reach, prospects are spending more time online obtaining, researching and analyzing information. On average, customers progress nearly 60% of the way through the purchase decision-making process before engaging a sales rep, according to the Marketing Leadership Council. The companies are hence, although indirectly, meeting their prospects at a much earlier stage than before. There is where companies have to leverage digital marketing and capture leads; with an aim to maximize the conversions.

After you first identify interest and generate leads from different channels and awareness efforts – Social Media, PR, Search Marketing, Content Marketing or Direct connection – the next step to build this buying interest through relevant and valuable education efforts. Online lead nurturing, as a process, can target specific audience sets at different stages of the sales process with a singular aim of moving them forward. Once you set up your lead nurturing process, your campaigns can cater to someone who opts in at any of the early stages. There are 5 key points to optimize your online lead nurturing process.

Audit your current state

Before putting in place a lead nurturing strategy, audit your existing campaigns, current lead generation rates, traffic levels and the corresponding conversion rates. Having a lot of website visitors is great, but they are of value if they do not lead to any conversions. It is also important to evaluate what information you gather as part of your lead generation process. By gaining data like an email address, website, social media handles, etc. you can continue to monitor and engage them.

Establish the target audience

Once you have established your lead generation strategy, you need to create a plan in order to reach the right people at the right stage. Typically, there are different types of prospects with different requirements and objectives, at different stages of the sales process. You have to validate your prospects and identify who needs nurturing. There are different ways in which you can segment your customers – seniority, company size, industry, role, etc. Once you have the types of prospects in the bag, segment them accordingly and map them to their objectives and requirements.

Offer valuable and relevant content

Your objective is not to hit your prospects with one sales pitch after the other. Instead, offer them valuable and relevant information (for example, webinars, eBooks, and whitepapers) that would educate them and drive them to make the buying decisions. There are various ways in which a company can share lead nurturing information. Content Marketing, Social Media, Email Marketing, Mobile, Blog, etc. can enable you to share information different kinds of information depending on the nature of the content. To reach out to specific audience, you can target the prospects specific to the particular sales stage and deliver highly focused content.                 

Set concise and measurable goals

Once you zero in on the target audience and offer them content, you have to define the consequent actions that you’d want them to take. For example, once you share a white paper with your prospects, you may want them to visit a specific page on your website. After a webinar, you may want them to download a business case, or an ROI calculator that allows them to further investigate your products. It is important to define what you qualify and quantify as a prospect moving ahead in the sales process.

Establish timelines for your campaigns

Your prospects do not want to see a barrage of emails about your products, no matter how relevant and valuable, flooding their inboxes or on their social media profiles. It is always a good idea to have a lead nurturing cycle in place. How long do you want your lead nurturing process to be? How often should you share the content you have decided on? It is important to create a lead nurturing calendar for each campaign and set the timelines.

Analyze and optimize

As you kick off your lead nurturing campaign, you have to monitor its state with respect to the measurable objectives that were set in place before. The results can give you an understanding on what works and what doesn’t in terms of various parameters like prospect segmentation, timelines, types of content or even subject lines for the emails. Evaluate them against your set targets and optimize your campaigns.

Online lead nurturing, if done effectively, can work wonders for your sales process and improve the lead-to-customer conversion rates.

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Insights on Building Sustainable, High-Growth Product Company

Manav Garg’s career exemplifies the statement “where there is big risk, there is big reward”. Throwing up a lucrative, six-figure plus salary and bonus as a commodities trader to start a software company that would build a commodities trading product required guts. Manav took it in his stride and today has built a world-class company that competes globally with its commodities trading software. He’s also built a company – EKA Software – that is domain driven and highly customer centric. In this interview with ProductNation, Manav talks about the origins of his company and some key factors that went into building it. 

You began a career in trading commodities. So when and how did you foray into the software industry? 

Yes, I am not a techie. I used to trade commodities enjoying import and export for a firm in Mumbai. But during this time, I saw a need for software for commodity trading. So, I spent more almost 24 months meeting with customers as a trader, trying to understand how to fill the gap and how systems would be a boon to traders like me. Since I have no background in software, I researched for a year on the requirements of the commodity trading industry, how it works, how to install a system for a particular pain point.  I moved to Bangalore, and set up shop, hired people and started out, spending almost 50% of my time meeting and talking to people on the benefits they would get from the software. This was how I educated myself about software.

So you are saying that your entrepreneurial spirit was lit by your ability to identify an opportunity.  While there are opportunities everywhere, the main point is you  need to  have the guts to take a risk, and the research to back it to believe that  the opportunity can be translated into business success. 

Obviously, in my experience this is exactly what happened — careful research combined with my intuition that this opportunity will be a success.  Many times too much research is done with no action. I do not believe in market reports. I believe that research and  study done by yourself and through interaction with customers and feel of the market is what will make your product a success.   

How do you identify customers and ensure that they will give you the right picture while your product is being built?   

Since I was in touch with customers for 24 months before starting the business, it was easy to contact them.   It is important to know how to convey the right message to your customers, tell them about the kind of solutions you are proposing.  Moreover, if you are connected on LinkedIn through your professional contacts and friends, you can easily connect with customers. 

I don’t think it’s a big a challenge to identify customers. I think the biggest challenge is the right approach. I recall when I contacted people whom I have known for at least five years, be it in Hamburg or Amsterdam, we were able to relate because they felt that I understood their pain points and were confident that I would bring to the table valuable solutions.

So your next step was to build the team.  So how did you form the right team, especially the founding team? 

You must be passionate about your product because then you can speak with conviction about the advantages of your product. 

When I started, I used the personal contacts route. At that time, I did not know anybody in the IT sales or products fields.  All that I was confident about was that Bangalore is a good place to do business in the IT field.  I met people, worked with them for some time, and they helped me understand how the whole industry works. 

For product development, I also reached for professional assistance to some of the larger technology MNCs who had more experienced talent. Since I did not have a software background, I decided to concentrate on sales from inception. 

For any start-up I think it is very important to decide from an early stage as to what is the main driver in the business. If you are doing business applications then sales is key driver, if you are doing online sales then marketing will be the key driver and if you are making tech based products then technology is the key driver here. But if it is very important to identify the key driver that will then help decide the skill set of the team. 

Today, what would you say are the key things that differentiate EKA in the market? 

For many years, people have been trading in rice, sugar, wheat and metals. It is important to have a good supply chain to manage this trading.  And for this you need excellent software that simplifies the supply chain. This was the challenge as a trader I was trying to overcome.  We basically cover that need in EKA today.  

A lot of our competition, mainly in the US, is focused on crude oil, gas, trading industry. We were the first one to focus on the commodities industry and therefore had an edge in the market.  We carved a niche for ourselves. 

Please share with newer entrepreneurs the learning’s that you have had over last five years, especially  amidst the challenges you and other emerging companies in India face?

The biggest challenge is putting together the right sales team. The product might be good, but it is the taking of it to the market that will bear fruit.  You also need an efficient global online distribution model. Another serious issue is how to retain employees. How do you convince people that your product is here to stay for a long time and not just a couple of years.  Emerging companies need to convince employees that their products are not fly by night, but bring value to customers and, thereby, employees over a longer span of time.

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In the next 3 to 5 years, Jamcracker seeks to leverage and contribute to India’s product ecosystem, and bring the latest R&D and innovations in cloud brokerage solutions to Indian enterprises and SMBs.

Set up in 1999, Jamcracker develops and markets software, services and an ecosystem of cloud services that enable customers to become Cloud Services Brokerages (CSBs). K.B. Chandrasekhar, CEO & Chairman, was also co-founder and Chairman of e4e Inc., a business process outsourcing company. In the mid-1990s, Chandrashekar founded Exodus Communications, which he led to become the leading provider of enterprise hosting services. In 1999, Chandra was honored as the Ernst & Young Northern California Entrepreneur of the Year.

In an interview with ProductNation, Chandrashekar says he is bullish about designing and selling to the Indian market, but there are some specific challenges hindering SMBs, including low broadband penetration, and ubiquitous and cost-effective access to bandwidth.

1.    What is cloud service brokerage and is this phenomenon really desired?

Gartner defines a Cloud Service Brokerage (CSB) as an entity that will “play an intermediary role in cloud computing… [to] make it easier for organizations to consume and maintain cloud services, particularly when they span multiple providers.” CSBs broker relationships between cloud services consumers and multiple cloud providers, aggregating many services into one place with a single point of catalog management, user administration, access control and security, billing, auditing and reporting, and many other aspects. CSB operators are either Internal CSBs or External CSBs, and some will serve double duty. Internal CSBs are operated by centralized IT organizations that provide internal Cloud AppStores for employees and affiliated members. External CSBs monetize cloud services delivery by aggregating and selling from their own private-branded Cloud Marketplaces. An analogy is how the power grid interconnects energy producers with energy consumers. 

If we are considering a collection of interdependent cloud services taken from separate providers, what sort of help or value would cloud brokerage offer?

Cloud brokerages provide an abstraction layer that enables cloud consumers to have unified control – across disparate cloud services – of catalog management, user provisioning, security (including single sign-on), administration, reporting/auditing, support and billing.

This greatly reduces the overhead costs associated with procuring and life-cycle management for organizations that are incorporating cloud services into their businesses. It also improves their ability to secure and manage how their users interact with disparate cloud providers, to provide a unified support experience, and other benefits.

2.    Could you tell us about Jamcracker’s home-grown cloud services brokerage (CSB), and how do you differentiate yourself? What are your offerings as part of this solution?

Jamcracker develops and markets software, services and an ecosystem of cloud services that enable our customers to become Cloud Services Brokerages (CSBs).  Jamcracker’s CSB enablement solution – the Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN) includes a cloud services aggregation, delivery, and management platform; a pre-integrated catalog of cloud services; and  best practice enablement services that allow our customers to unify the delivery and life-cycle management of public and private cloud services.

The Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN) includes a white-labeled cloud aggregation and delivery platform, a global ecosystem of pre-integrated cloud services, and business operations that enable our customers to operate their own Cloud Services Brokerages. The JSDN is a complete services delivery solution that includes hosting, provisioning, licensing management, billing, identity management, compliance management, single sign-on, services administration, business operations and customer support—enabling organizations to get to market quickly and cost-effectively as a Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB).

3.    How will this solution help enterprises streamline their cloud IT services delivery to speed up organizational innovation, and provide a unified usage experience?

Cloud services provide significant benefits to IT operations. From an IT perspective, however, adopting cloud services presents significant challenges. Implementing cloud services from multiple vendors creates cumbersome management and complicated billing, and CIOs have compelling concerns around security, compliance, auditability, accountability and supportability.

A highly effective way for organizations to unify cloud services management and delivery is through internal cloud services brokerages (CSBs). CSBs can help IT provide unified security, compliance, license management, and support.

4.    What have been the pain points in designing a cloud brokerage solution given India’s existing eco system?  What were the challenges faced?

There are two aspects here: designing cloud solutions from India, and designing for the Indian market. In designing cloud brokerage solutions from India, we have benefited from the excellent developer pool in India. Regarding designing and selling to the Indian market, we are bullish but there are some specific challenges hindering SMBs including low broadband penetration, and ubiquitous and cost-effective access to bandwidth. In the next three to five years, we at Jamcracker seek to leverage and contribute to India’s product ecosystem, and bring the latest R&D and innovations in cloud brokerage solutions to innovative Indian enterprises and SMBs.

As an early market mover in this offering what gains have you realized?

Jamcracker is well positioned as a thought-leader and technology-leader with respect to cloud brokerage enablement solutions.  Now that the market is poised to see explosive growth, this puts us in a fantastic position to succeed.

5.    How do you envision the current cloud computing paradigms to evolve? In that context what innovation do you see forthcoming from Jamcracker in the cloud space?

Unifying cloud services delivery and life-cycle management is becoming a well understood need, and to a great extent cloud services brokerage platforms will become the virtual “platform” that combines the innovation advantages of distributed computing with the traditional IT management advantages of standardized platforms.  We’ve seen this need for centralized management controls with every new wave of computing innovation – starting with mainframes, desktops, client-server and the web.

What is your business revenue strategy from this cloud-brokerage solution?

We support a few different models based on our customers’ needs.  In some cases, our revenue is a purely license-based model of our platform, whereas in other cases it’s more of a revenue-share partnership.

6.    Gartner predicts that IT organizations will increasingly be assuming internal “cloud services brokerage” roles. What are the prospects for cloud brokerage in India? How mature is the market for such solutions?

After the U.S., India is the #2 source of cloud-based services development, so the CSB model will be an important one from a supply-side distribution perspective.

From the demand side of the cloud services market, India is an emerging market that is competing on a global stage. In this cloud services will play a critical role in enabling small to mid-sized Indian businesses to leverage IT and application services that would previously have been prohibitively expense for them to purchase and operate on-premise.

Larger Indian businesses that already operate on a global basis will increasingly look to the cloud delivery model as a means for them to compete more cost-effectively and in a more agile manner.

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Experiencing the product, or productizing the experience?

About 6 months back, I saw a print advertisement from a well-known job portal (I will call it SiteZ): “Free webinar and live chat with well-known Mr. X”. When I visited their site, they helpfully informed me that I need to be a registered user of their site (which meant I had to be someone looking for a job, which I was not), but it would take only 30 seconds to register. I didn’t mind giving 30 sec and a few bits of personal information to attend this webinar so I proceeded with registration. It took me about 2-3 minutes before I realized that this is going to take quite some time – they wanted all kinds of details about my profile, what kind of job I was looking for, what I had been doing so far in my career, etc.; simply uploading my resume didn’t SiteZ. So I abandoned my effort and tried to find a way of deleting this account I had just created. I couldn’t find it, so I just navigated away from the site and made a mental note not to use SiteZ again since they misled me with their advertisement and were not helpful when I changed my mind about creating an account.

Little did I know that it was not the end of my experience with SiteZ. A few weeks later, I started receiving email ads/spams about properties and other stuff. Spams are nothing new, so I kept ignoring them, till a few months back when I cursorily went down the mail and saw that it (helpfully!) mentioned that I was getting this mail because I registered on SiteZ. It also offered an unsubscribe link, so I was happy. I clicked on it and was informed that I have been unsubscribed. However, that didn’t change anything; mails kept coming. I tried unsubscribing couple more times, with no result. I tried to write to the email address mentioned on their site, the mail bounced. I again searched their website for any link to delete the account, but couldn’t find any. Finally I found that even though the mail sender text says some developer’s name, it actually is sent from a @sitez.com account. So I could block this address, and have some peace of mind.

To be clear, this is not some no-name company, this is one of the top 4-5 job portals in the country. So you would expect them to think more holistically about their product offering and put more efforts in avoiding frustrations for their users, not to talk of delighting them.

In case of SiteZ, incremental tasks/thoughts like below might have gone behind the experience they finally offered to me:

  1. Product Management – We want to be like #1 job portal site, so we will build all the usual features.
  2. Engineering – Let’s not give a delete account button, it is too hard and can be depriortized since these users are anyway leaving the site.
  3. Marketing – Great idea about not giving delete button, this way our metric of # of accounts keeps going up and we can keep using their data (or get them to call us and we can upsell them)
  4. Sales/Marketing – Let’s make sure we enroll all our users into our promotions email list, and also make sure they don’t notice it when they are registering.
  5. Sales/Marketing – We need more users, so let’s run some promotions like free webinars. We will use it to get the user into registering for the site.
  6. Engineering – It is too hard to build a 30-second registration page, so let’s drop the user into the regular registration flow which takes 10 minutes.
  7. Sales – Let’s make some money with all this personal data that we collect by selling email campaigns to 3rd-party.
  8. Engineering – It is too hard to implement unsubscribe, can be deprioritized since these users are anyway leaving the campaign.
  9. Sales – Great idea engineers. This way, our mailing lists will always have lots of subscribers.

Why am I writing this?

First, it left a very bitter experience in my mouth and now I am very skeptical of any site that asks me to register; I have started reading terms and conditions of the sites that ask me to register, which is a painful process!

Second, and more importantly, I want to make the point about considering end to end experience (including support) as the product, rather than just the core feature set you want to offer to the customer. In this case, my experience with SiteZ was what made me to abandon them, not necessarily the core feature I was looking for (webinar, which I could never reach!). To be clear, SiteZ is not an isolated case, there are a large number of products out there which suffer from this problem of focusing just on the product and not on the experience (see ‘experience is the product‘). Product Managers need to exert more control (and influence) over the overall experience and not just focus on core product, otherwise they will be leaving a lot on the table. Maybe the way is to start from experience when building/changing the product, and embrace ‘experience is the product’.

What is your take on product vs. experience question?