Using the product roadmap to keep an organization in sync

When organizations are relatively small, it is possible to keep all parts of the company – execs, PM, sales, engineering, QA, operations, etc – in sync with the direction and with the vision of the company. Communication across the company can be seamless and everyone can remain aligned to what they are working on and understand how their work maps to the broader vision.

However, as companies scale up, it is very easy for this chain to be broken and for a hitherto finely tuned company to get out of sync. Examples of this happening:

Deal-driven features: Sales promises a feature to a customer to close a deal and it gets added to a plan. After a few months, everyone forgets about it and it gets dropped. Eventually it blows up as an escalation when the customer is now upset that promises were not kept.
Vision changes: The exec team makes changes to the vision as the markets changes. This requires a replan with new features coming in and some features in plan being dropped based on shifting needs. This does not get communicated down the chain and development remains marching to an older beat.
“All Features Accepted”: Every few days a new feature request comes in and gets added to the plan. Nobody says “No” early enough, a commit gets communicated externally and in the end the product becomes a mish mash of features, with no clear vision and becomes impossible to use. Without a consistent plan that resonates to the vision, the product manager risks putting out a product that makes noone happy. The PM is the gatekeeper to avoid this from happening.

These are all examples of breakdowns in communication. It is the product manager’s responsibility that this does not happen. A product manager can use their product roadmap as a central part of a simple process to make sure that all parts of the company remain in sync. Changes will happen – that is a part of startup life – but the important thing is to make sure that the changes as they happen are clearly rationalized, communicated across all teams and all teams are kept in sync with where things are.

The best product roadmaps define the themes of the market that are relevant, the long term vision of the product (about 2-3 years out) as well as the shorter-term term features (quarterly breakdown over the next one year). While this is maintained by the product manager, this should be communicated regularly to the sales, dev and engineering teams. The product roadmap should be shareable externally to prospects, customers and other external stakeholders. Done right, the product roadmap becomes the central part of the process of keeping the various teams in sync.

Product Alignment Process

The process involves creating:

A vision document : Simple 1-2 pager describing where the company will be in the next 12-24 months. This is done in concert with the execs and aligns with the company’s overall strategy. This is shared with everyone in the company and externally as well. Normally this is part of the lead-in to a detailed roadmap but sometimes this can live separately (especially in multi-product companies where the vision is broader and maintained by execs). This is versioned and is available to everyone. I prefer the use of Google slides with read-only link shared across the organization. A well defined and strong vision ensures that any feature request that does not align with the long term vision can be dropped early. The product manager meets regularly with the execs and keeps this in sync.

An external “one-slide” roadmap : This is the product roadmap as it is traditionally defined. The deliverable here is a simple one-slide roadmap showing the quarterly deliverables of the marketable features for the next year. This can be shared externally. As above, Google slides with a shareable read-only link works great here. It is versioned to be consistent with the vision document.

Figure 1 : Example external roadmap for a fictional car ride share company. One Google Slide with the next 4 quarters of marketable features.

An internal / detailed roadmap: This builds on (2) and adds internal deliverables – like performance improvements, UX changes, engineering focused tasks, etc. This is the detailed, internal-facing roadmap. This version allows the team to make sure that the engineering focused improvements are not lost in the shuffle. This allows the team to make progress on reducing technical debt while continuing to execute to the market.

XYZ Internal Roadmap
Figure 2 : Internal roadmap shareable with dev and QA managers. One google slide that builds on external roadmap.

The details from the internal roadmap are then mapped to a tool that allows for backlog tracking and planning. I prefer Trello for a Kanban-like tracking system but there are various other tools that work very well.

Trello schedule

Figure 3: Using Trello to schedule the work outlined in the internal roadmap as a set of cards

Sprint planning: With the details from (3), PM works with dev management to build out the detailed plans for each sprint and map it to a tool to track this (I prefer Atlassian Jira) for this. At this level, this is really a detailed work plan that’s aimed at PM, dev and engineering teams

Figure 4: Using JIRA for sprint planning. See blog for more.

And thats it.

What we have done above is create a predictable system where all product planning deliverables are kept in sync with one another. There are three critical attributes to making this process work:

Versioning: All the documents above should be synchronized. The latest versions of each should all relate to one another. Where a change is made, the older version should be versioned and there should be a clear indication for the reason for change. It should be possible for any stakeholder to review past documents to understand the reasons and the velocity of changes.
Relevant Access: To avoid irrelevant information being communicated to the wrong audience, appropriate access should be given to the right stakeholders for the vision (everyone), external roadmap (sales, execs, PM), internal roadmap (PM, execs, support leads, dev leads, QA leads) and detailed sprint plans (all dev and QA)
Single Owner: One owner should be responsible to make sure that they are in sync. The PM should own 1-3 above and work with engineering management to align it with (4)

Summary

Plans can and do change. The product alignment process defined above allows for the different planning documents across the product organization to remain in sync at all times so that as these changes happen, they can be rapidly and consistently communicated. This allows every employee to be confident that the work they are focused on is in sync with the vision of the company. And that will help the company move quicker and more efficiently as a result.

05/04/201615/03/2017

Write up the Business Plan !

Most of us have read the famous story about Jeff Bezos’s cross country trip from New York to Seattle. Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994, writing up the Amazon business plan on the way. Jeff’s important advise for startup company or any company is to write up the business plan.

Now if Jeff Bezos has done it, and become one of the most successful entrepreneur in the internet era, why not just do it ? By writing it down, you will certainly get a lot of clarity and reference point for what you want to achieve….

Here are some thoughts of what and how should this business plan be written to become a continuous reference point for your startup and growth story. The examples and references of this is more on Software Products in B2B (Enterprise) based on my own experience of writing business plans and working with startups whom I have mentored, however many of this can be relevant for Software Product in B2C (consumer) as well. Also this business plan should be ideally written by founder or a product manager…

What it is and some guidelines?

It’s an internal and confidential write-up – Don’t confuse it with presentations and business plans to be shared with people who will fund this – that should just be a subset of this
Is reference plan, and should be revisited frequently to change
Prepare it in word /excel, bit free form with text (power points constraints you)
Prepare atleast 3 scenarios – aggressive, best estimate, conservative plans
Do it for 1 year (short term – in greater detail), 3 years (medium – bit higher level) and 5-10 years (long – very high level) – Remember Bill Gates quote “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
Write it free form, and then organize it later, go through several iterations, review, review and review

Start with a summary:

Like an executive summary, this is the place you start jotting down the highlights of your road ahead – covering Introduction of yourself and the team, your idea, product space, history and market definition (presuming you have researched it), clear USP & value, challenges & risks, and overall KPIs that will come out of the rest of the business plan. The summary is most likely to change once you have written the rest of the plan.

Customers & Personas:

Who are the users, what are their current problems and how does your solution solve this problems.

Who pays for the software, what are their challenges and what are their company /career goals that the software would help solve

What are the financial/non financial benefits for the customer based on using this product or the cost reduction using the software, measured by productivity etc. Can there be a customer ROI estimated

Market:

Define the market category and market size ie today, and in the future that you want to focus. Try to break down into 2 – 3 levels of hierarchy and in a multi dimensional way by Business type /Geography / Revenue potential of customer/Size of the customer or any other business context.

Define the share of the market you would like to achieve of the market size, on key market segments in 1/3/5 years. What’s the customer IT spends planned for solving such problems

Market is the most key aspect that is going to drive you to successful product, so understand the potential market, research and put it in there

Product:

Now on to the product – write up about the product, to cater to the above market opportunity, with lot of details and value propositions, differentiations and what problem it solves.

Whether the product you are planning is a pain killer, vitamin or vaccine…

Product priorities and use cases – focus is the key, focus on the key market, focus on the design and so on and so forth…

Product Roadmap – at level 1 (vision), at level 2 (product category ) , at level 3 (feature /function level). Product roadmap is your product in the growth face

Competitors and other players in the market, and what they have today, in their roadmap or what they are trying to do. Your differentiation against each of them,plans to differentiate. If you don’t know it, some tips for this are here

When will your product be available , the minimum viable product and is there enough time to get the baby out ?

Monetization:

How do you plan to monetize your product, don’t build a plan that ignores monetization.

Revenue and Customer Goals – Quarterly, yearly and medium/long term goals, subscription revenue including projection of drop offs etc.

Pricing model description – different options to be considered, domestic vs international, subscription based vs fixed etc

Risks , probability and dependencies to achieve these goals

Technology:

Explain the technology used for the product, how it would scale, Ux differentiations, clear differentiations due to tech architecture, performance, simplicity, implementation effort. Important this is not technical architecture , so keep this high level.

Talent:

What the skills required to sustain the business – development, design, sales, customer support, channels marketing etc. Challenges & risks associated with this.

Identify gap in availability of talent.

Layout if its important for you to relocate to be successful, due to availability of talent. Place is super important for success – what are the options – what are the pros and cons.

Customer support & feedback:

What is the strategy around customer support & feedback, how product roadmaps are affected by feedback. Level of engagement required initially and as the product matures.

Past learning’s from customers, what went right and what went wrong. How was it addressed?

Challenges of remote support and how it was addressed /planned to be addressed

Draw your effort, cost and cash flows:

You don’t have be finance person – its like putting forth your personal finances, or just google for templates – put together your estimate of people cost, server /cloud Operating costs, sales & marketing costs, other infrastructure cost – space/communication/support/software etc, any other expenses required to do scale the product. Link this with your monetization plan, to ascertain your overall profit or loss over the years.

As you see above, there is a lot that can be written up – as you write up in detail, your thoughts on what you are setting forth gets clearer….

But don’t worry if what you plan is not exactly how it’s all turning out to be in reality…..but its important to have a plan, adjust it for reality…

So now pack up and start off on your cross country trip from Mumbai to Bangalore, to write your Business Plan in Bezos style !!!

30/03/201615/03/2017

CRM for startups: Opening the world of endless possibilities

Startups today have become a major driving force for the economies around the globe; they not only contribute to the GDP but also decrease the unemployment ratio of the country. Millennials everywhere are changing work dynamics and do not prefer to sit behind their desk, but to follow their dreams and take risks. Such shift has also being witnessed in India, a country with a majority young workforce that has seen successful start-ups such as Shopclues, Limeroad, OLA cabs, Zomato, and many more. With a lot of venture capitalists funding and backing startups, it is no surprise that a lot of people want to taste the entrepreneurship fruit.

Only last year over $ 3.84 billion was raised by startups in the third quarter. Such rising opportunities have also caught the eyes of many people, resulting in top minds leaving their corporate jobs and following their dreams. It wasn’t long before the Indian government saw this dynamic shift and became keen to bring these startups to unleash their full potential, increase employment opportunity and eventually enhance the economy of the country. It was truly remarkable seeing the government put their best foot forward with the launch of initiatives such as “Start-up India” and “Make in India” to encourage and promote start-ups in the country.

To add more to it, Hon’ble prime minister of India has worked hard to raise the foreign investment too, bringing in investors to venture into the countries brightest startups. If that is not enough, even top names such as Google have their reward set for the best start up plan from the country. And its outcome being a rapid surge in the number of start-ups increasing every year with the current statistics showing more than 4000 startups in the nation.

Startup India

With so much fuss over startup, an obvious question that pops up is what exactly makes a startup eligible to avail the benefits of the scheme? Which can be simply stated as one / few innovative minds putting up a unique business idea or development process in a form of a new business, aging below 5 years and a turnover not exceeding 25 crore rupees. The product should be innovative and commercial while adding value to the consumers. The said startup should be approved from the designated DIPP.

Benefits:

To sum up a startup under this ambitious scheme will enjoy;

IT tax exemption for 3 years
Easy availability of seed funding
80% return of patent fee
Capital gain tax exemption and more

Since now there is a lot of focus on startups and even growing competition, the question arises: how can a startup keep itself ahead. The answer is simple: a business application platform to seamlessly integrate all processes and give greater control and visibility to the management.
CRM for Startups:

Now being compact in size, a startup can manage all the data and contacts on a spreadsheet easily in the start, however when the business grows, various process are incorporated as well as maintaining the clientele becomes a hectic chore and a proficient management of sales and customers becomes a priority. To add more burden to it, competitors keep multiplying every year, which makes retaining your customers as well as getting new ones even more tough. Thus, for efficacy and proficiency in business management, various start-ups opt in for smart business management suites like CRM.

But can CRM software solutions be helpful for startups?

Definitely yes, for a startup, building customers is among the top priorities and CRM software have their proficiency in managing and retaining customers with ease. However, its potential does not ends with it. A smart leader, who can mould out new ways of possibilities for the software, can take its usability to another level. Having said that, let us have a look at some of its cool features that have been proved helpful for the startups.

Share information: When you have your teams working on different processes, sharing information amongst each other can be a tedious task and any missed data can cost you a valuable customer. Nevertheless, the CRM software can function as a platform wherein the team can share the information with ease and initiate further processes.

Opportunity tracking: The saying goes as “Opportunity knocks only once” and CRM solution providers in India have made sure that you not only grab this opportunity but also nurture it until it starts giving you fruits of your hard work. Simply putting, CRM can help you find better leads and turn it into sales easily, which is something very crucial for any startup. Thus, with CRM, never miss any opportunity.

Foresight: CRM for startups can generate precise sales reports on daily to yearly basis, this reports can give you a foresight of how much production is to be done and process marketing and sales strategies. It can also help you track team’s performance based on their areas of operation.

Better and targeted marketing: CRM for startups can draw sales pipeline that can give information on how your marketing strategies is functioning, that can be filtered on location, products, etc. as well as analyse the requirements of the clients. Hence, it can aid you in evaluation of your marketing processes and target better prospects.

Notification and reminders: CRM can automate all your notifications and reminders i.e.

Sending notification to your customers related to any updates, offers, packages, etc.
Sending reminders of upcoming deadline to submit data, pay bills, renewals, etc.
Email and SMS follow up to leads and prospects that can be designed with its inbuilt template designer.
It can also remind you for upcoming meeting, follow-ups, demo and implementation, etc.

The above-mentioned gestures can improve customer satisfaction with your start-up as well as bring in new customers. Hence, building up your start-up company in an efficient manner.

Data storing: the modern day CRM software are provided with cloud server, which securely save all your data. For instance, for any mishap occurring in your company, the loss of data with others can be too much for a start-to bear. However, the data stored on the cloud are safe from any such mishaps; moreover, the encryption of your data can secure your data from online threats as well. In addition to it, these data can be made available on any device by multiple (and authorised) users irrespective of their location and time.

Social Media: social media is a necessity for every company, no matter how big or small. The customers/ clients prefer following the company of their choice to get updates and stay connected to it. Moreover, social media can easily help you reach wide and better audience quickly in a cost effective manner, thus CRM software solutions like Social CRM now a days can be integrated to all your social accounts with ease, allowing you to track, monitor and stay connected to all your customers and prospects easily.

Mobility: for a start-up, employing large number of employees can be taxing on their budget and you may be needed to multi task, which is not possible while sitting on a single workstation. The CRM software linked up with mobile apps and cloud servers can grant you the mobility to manage your sales and marketing process as well as manage customer complaints and feedbacks on the go.

To further continue with the list, the CRM software can increase sales, give better ROI, maintain transparency, help you set goals, and the list goes on with endless possibilities. A CRM software cannot only help you manage your start-up but also assist in every stage of its growth. Thus, a CRM software can not only help your startup, but also add wings to it to fly through the stars.

Guest Post by Kalpesh, Sage Software

06/03/201607/03/2016

SIX INDIAN COMPANIES EMERGE AS WINNERS OF GREAT TECH ROCKETSHIPS 2016

UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) India and iSPIRT announce the winners of the Great Tech Rocketships Initiative 2016 (GTRS)

The 6 winners are:

Wigzo – A machine learning engine that understands user attributes, and allows marketeers to personalise and engage each user 1:1 onsite, and on communications
Tydy – Employee Onboarding & Engagement Software. With automated & paperless data collection, a process built on best practices, customized workflows based on teams, groups or locations and a complete feedback management system – tydy makes onboarding a really seamless part of building a successful organization
Silver Push – A platform which measures true ROI of TV ads, by mapping TV ad spots with digital performance, backed by 15 patents (pending) and real-time TV ad tracking technology
SayPay – Provides voice biometric authentication solution that eliminates hardware tokens/OTPs used by financial institutions for wealth management & corporate clients.
Project Mudra – Technology for Braille-based education for visually impaired people and innovative solutions for non-visual data delivery to meet the growing accessibility needs of smart urban spaces.
FT Cash– A mobile app that allows micro-merchants to come on-board in less than 5 minutes and allows customers to make payments electronically through credit/debit cards, mobile wallets and PayPal.

In its second year, and part of the India-UK Tech Bridge initiative, the Great Tech Rocketships awards connect India’s high-potential technology companies to the business and entrepreneurship ecosystem in the UK. This ambitious initiative was launched in 2014 and this year applications opened on January 14, with a call for submissions from the most impressive emerging Tech companies in India. The competition offers the opportunity to fast-track their international growth through access to the UKs leading tech clusters.

Kumar Iyer, Director General of UKTI in India said: “We are really excited to see the high growth potential among young Indian entrepreneurs. The competition was tough but it shows that “Start-up India” is alive and kicking, and through these awards the winners will not only be national winners but hopefully internationally successful too. We hope this is the beginning of a fantastic journey for them where UKTI is here to help and introduce them to international networks, mentors and new ideas, starting with their upcoming visit to the UK. There really are some GREAT companies here!”

The UK is an excellent platform for Indian companies to gain access to the right exposure and resources to assist them to go global. It is the number one destination for FDI in Europe, having attracted a record number of FDI projects, bringing in the largest financial value and associated jobs over the past year. Around 50% of that figure is in Tech. The UK has a vast pool of experienced industry leaders, veterans, venture capitalists and mentors that can provide the right direction to startups to establish a firm footing abroad. One of the greatest barriers new companies face in their journey is access to capital, and this is an area where the UK can help significantly.

This year’s winners get a week long fully paid trip to UK that includes:

Bespoke interaction with world class investors, incubation hubs and science tech parks
A guided tour of Tech City, Europe’s most vibrant innovation hub
Networking sessions with like-minded entrepreneurs, start-ups, research scholars and pioneering companies

Through this trip to the UK, the winners will get an opportunity to interact with the local technology ecosystems; meet other entrepreneurs; identify funding options and build product propositions to fit those markets.

Sharad Sharma, Co-Founder and Governing Council Member iSPIRT said: “A number of technology startups in India are now well-prepared for global markets. Through this initiative we provide high-potential companies with assistance and access to the UK market as a first step for them to go global.”

The nationwide initiative saw 285 applications from across India. Applyifi, the program partner for this initiative curated 40 for a jury across 4 Indian cities (Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad and New Delhi). 11 startups were shortlisted in the regional rounds and were reviewed by an international jury comprising Julie Lake (Co-Founder The FinTech50 and Director FinTechCity), Sharad Sharma (Co-founder iSPIRT), Baz Saidieh (CEO TrueStart), Ian Fordham (CEO of Edtech UK), Satyam Bansal (Director, Strategic Alliances and Gift Cards), Alpesh Patel (UK Government Dealmaker, Private Equity Fund Manager, Fintech Entrepreneur) and Prajakt Raut (Co-founder Applyifi).

Further Information:

UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) is the Government Department that helps UK-based companies succeed in the global economy. UKTI works with UK based businesses to ensure their success in international markets through exports. We encourage and support overseas companies to look at the UK as the best place to set up or expand their business.In India we do that through a network of diplomats and local specialists spanning the entire country. Our trade and investment experts are based in the British High Commission in New Delhi and in our Deputy High Commissions in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Chandigarh, Pune and Ahmedabad. Our sector expertise covers mass transport, financial services, infrastructure, life sciences, creative industries, energy, business and consumer services, education and skills, defence and security, healthcare, advanced engineering, aerospace, agri-tech, chemicals, automotive, smart cities and ICT.
GREAT for Collaboration is an ambitious and exciting new campaign showcasing India-UK business collaboration. The campaign, launched by Prime Minister Modi and Prime Minister Cameron, will inspire new partnerships and encourage greater awareness of the scale of the UK’s commitment to India. The overall objective is to increase business between the two countries across a range of sectors, such as energy, healthcare, advanced manufacturing, financial services and infrastructure. GREAT for Collaboration video link: bit.ly/1PS5Pag
iSPIRT Foundation connects and guides software product entrepreneurs and catalyzes business growth. It’s an enabler of a stronger ecosystem. We encourage buyers to improve performance by leveraging software products effectively. We advise policy makers on interventions that can set the industry on a higher growth trajectory. We are a not-for-profit industry think-tank founded by key participants and proponents of the Indian software product industry
About Applyifi – Applyifi is an online pitch deck & assessment report platform for startups. Applyifi guides startups in creating a comprehensive pitch deck, and provides startups and investors a 36-point scorecard and assessment report on the startup’s investment-worthiness.

03/03/201602/03/2016

Going From Negative To Cashflow Positive

This is not a new story. At least, not the first part of it.

About two months ago, the company I had founded, Synup had grown 4000% in a year but, we were still burning money like crazy.

It was really bugging me that we were growing so fast, adding so much more revenue, but still had to depend on external sources for growth capital. This is not how truly strong businesses are built, at least not in B2B SaaS.

We had two options — give up on trying to get profitable and raise more money. Or, do the logical thing, get cash-flow positive.

I needed to break the news

On a Friday, I brought the entire team in for a meeting and told them what had to be told. We were not going to be raising money any time soon, not because we couldn’t, because it wasn’t the right thing to do.

We needed to be cash-flow positive, otherwise, we’re yet another struggling startup dependent on handouts for survival.

I needed to take responsibility

Being unprofitable is really a founder responsibility. More so, the CEO’s responsibility. I have the title; now, I needed to play the part.

I told my team that I wouldn’t take a salary, even though I had practically zero savings and would tough it out until we got to a point where the company could afford to pay me.

Call this a moral high, taking responsibility or cliched, but this needed to be done.

There needed to be a physical reminder

It wasn’t enough to just make an announcement. There needed to be a physical reminder that drove the point into everyone’s head that we were still not where we needed to be. It had to be something that people couldn’t miss.

So, I offered not to shave. At least until we reached the point of breakeven.

It was so friggin hard

Everyone had to make sacrifices, work 2x harder and we had to cut costs. But, we did it.

We could no longer afford “breathing room”; we had to be shipping, selling and busting balls everyday. This wasn’t the kiddie pool anymore, it was the real deal. I’m sure everyone who worked with me had to push themselves to the limit, but they still did, because they believed in what we’re doing and for that I will be forever indebted.

On a personal front, I realized that I couldn’t grow much of a beard and had to bum food off my employees. Nothing, I repeat, nothing can be as bad as not shaving when you obviously can’t grow a proper beard.

There were times when I just wanted to give up and take the money

There were still people willing to give us money, not a lot, but enough to make the pain stop. The entire startup ecosystem in our country, unfortunately, encourages you to take as much money as frequently as possible. It’s almost like we’ve become a society that actually celebrates raising more venture capital.

But, I resisted. I knew in my heart that taking more money when were so close to getting there wasn’t the right thing to do. Nothing can really be accomplished in life without a little pain.

We became cash-flow positive this month and doubled revenue

It was the greatest feeling in the world. To have a goal, something that drove everyone in the organization, something that seemed impossible; and, actually make it happen. We had actually grown 100% in two months to make this happen.

We are now in control of our own destiny, in a small way. We don’t need external capital to pay the bills. Any capital we take will be from the right people and for the right reasons.

My advise to fellow entrepreneurs

Try getting profitable. Even if you don’t have to or need to, just try doing it once. It’s one of the best feelings in the world. Do it as an exercise in restrain and a test of your grit.

You will realize that nothing brings your team together as much as this will. I never thought we could do this as quickly as we did, but I underestimated how much more motivated everyone gets when there’s a common cause.

Guest Post by Ashwin Ramesh, A (s)crappy entrepreneur who runs http://synup.com and tweets @ashwin_ramesh

26/02/201618/03/2016

How the UPI Platform will transform the Payment System in India? #FinIndia

UPI Platform is Cheap, Secure, Reliable mobile first, inter operable/ open source, instantaneous settlement, both pull and push.

One major disadvantage of pre paid wallets is in a given month they can’t do more then 10,000 worth of transaction with out KYC, while UPI enabled platform bank accounts can do a transfer upto Rs 1 lakh instantaneously.

Since Money sits in your bank account, you are earning your savings bank interest which is upto 4% per annum.
My points in elaborate:

Cheap: Cost of each transaction is going to be less then Rs 0.45, think of all the savings from and to bank accounts.

Virtual address: Now one can use virtual/ disposable accounts to do transactions generated right from your bank app. By this the merchant or the payee willn’t know your details and even if he is hacked you needn’t worry about losing money.

Pull & Push: Amount can be requested from a certain account or paid into some other account.

Instantaneous: The transfer is instant, yet to come across any other system over the world which works for the banks.

Mobile First: Its one of the few systems in the world designed for new mobile age, helping with easy integration across various platforms.

Inter operable: OTP generated on one bank app can be used across another for transaction authentication. Also, multiple level of identifiers can be used ( Bank account, Aadhaar number, virtual identifier, mobile number.., etc) to send or receive money.

Bio-metric integration gives a 2nd factor authentication securing your account like none other in market.

Recurring Payments: Even though, directly not supported, but Payment Support Providers can provide an add on for easy to do recurring payments on top of UPI.

Open APIs: Most importantly i see open APIs are going to be game changer as before one with Cash & Contacts can’t control the ecosystem. Its a level play ground, by which even a small start up can do what a gaint MNC can do.

Hence, i feel UPI platform is going to be a game changer and going to give stiff competition to Mobile Wallets and would be enabler of payments.

Source of the image: mpf.org

Guest Post by Sainath Gupta, AnythingAI

23/02/201615/03/2017

The six key pillars of software that enables Innovation-led growth

Ever wondered if a Software could help business chart the next growth curve?.

The marketplace is changing and the competition is catching up. Organisations need a new concept to break out to create the next growth curve and they depend on functions like Strategy, NPD ( New product development ), R&D Teams internally. Some of these organizations also use external consulting firms, crowdsource, outsource, merge, acquire and do many things more.

In order to bring in rigor and predictability, organisations need sound processes, but the paradox in Innovation-led growth, unlike other variants, is the need to have the right balance between creative freedom and execution discipline. Most organisations are designed for execution discipline while some are designed to be creative. But, today’s organisations need both in the right mix to win in the long run.

We need to manage Innovation-led growth like any other process and to institutionalize this, a structured approach which would balance creative freedom and execution discipline would be more effective.

Well, can a Software help with this?

If yes, what should be the pillars of such an Innovation-led growth Software?

Business would need 6 Es to Innovate.

Empower:
Organisation needs to draw the creativity and drive to make things happen.Often the best source for innovation is the team within the business. A great leader turns them into entrepreneurs who are hungrily looking for new opportunities. The key is empowerment. An Innovation-led growth software should empower teams to achieve their goals through their own ideas and efforts.

The leader sets the destination, but the team chooses the route to get there.

Enabler:
Enable employees to adopt an “entrepreneurial mindset” to showcase their ideas and ideals. Allowing them to propel innovation and show initiative is the key to a successful workplace revival and an opportunity to re-energize individual and organic organisational growth.
Innovation and workplace transformation represent two-sides of the same coin.
An Innovation-led growth software should help business in tossing the coin instead of taking sides.

Effective:
Effectiveness isn’t just a property of the idea but, more importantly, a property of the execution, and that’s where an Innovation-led growth software comes in. It should help business with it right from the word go & ensure effectiveness on all sides by having an innate ability to look at your problem from multiple viewpoints thereby ensuring a holistic overview.

Engage:
The most important part of any business idea is to maintain traction, and that requires engagement: the kind which can grab the right audience. An Innovation-led growth software should help business create a meaningful engagement with and within the audience, be it internal or external. Software should help organizations get perspectives from people who matter and thereby helping it to improve its offerings.

Evaluate:
Evaluating Innovation-led growth initiatives is something that very few organizations have understood. Most of them use the traditional criterion which works against the constructive collaboration that is required. Software should have a new set of evaluation tools that supports such a collaboration and help business in making the decision.

Efficiency:
Efficiency is the result of all the other Es coherently and cohesively coming together to function in a synchronous manner. Software should have proven techniques that shall improve the efficiency of generating new business concepts at a faster rate and continuously.

Edge:
There are few companies, which have few of the above 6 Es.Not any single company possess all 6 Es at the right proportion for the right yield. Experts who are proficient in the field of innovation vouch that iEnabler Software has these 6 pillars at right proportion for companies embarking their Growth journey. For your reference (www.ienabler.co)

Guest Post by Sridhar D.P, iEnabler

18/02/201610/03/2016

An Entrepreneur At 40? This Is What Not To Do…

I have often heard people say that most men hit their mid-life crisis at 40. That’s when they run a marathon, try to reinvent their personal image or quit their job. Though, as a general rule, I do not believe in such lores, I must admit that it might have been true in my case.

I experienced my ‘Eureka’ moment when I was merrily ambling towards my 4^th decade. Sainergie was thus, borne.

I am one of those entrepreneurs who believes that age is just a number. Because, my success is directly co-related to my idea, passion and commitment. I have learned hard lessons along the way and have developed a nice blueprint on ‘what not to do’ things for first generation entrepreneurs like me who might or might not have hit the ‘mid-life crisis’.

Not keeping an intent to learn

Irrespective of your long standing experience working to your advantage, you are still taking baby steps in entrepreneurship. You are as good and as bad as your fellow entrepreneur. Learning should be a continuous process. If you meet an entrepreneur younger than you, but with more ‘startup’ experience than you, there is no reason to feel conscious or disappointed. Rather, try to draw inspiration from people around you.Also, it doesn’t matter if you face an adverse situation. A smart entrepreneur learns a valuable lesson from a bad mistake.

Stop evolving and adapting to the changes

Right from technology to consumer behaviour, everything is dynamic and changing at a swift pace. You should be ready to embrace these changes in your product or strategy. Until you adapt to what customers are demanding, you wouldn’t be able to take the right course of action to achieve your vision. The bright side of things is that the smaller or newer your startup is, the easier it is to evolve.

Making a rush for seed funding

When I launched my startup, people would ask me, “How will run you the show?“. Well, my thought process was very clear that my startup will remain a bootstrapped company as long as I can manage. Of course, given my age, my risk appetite was comparatively lower than an entrepreneur in 20s or early 30s. I had my children’s education and other family expenses to take care of. But, I had a decent corpus accumulated from my corporate earnings and I had invested wisely to manage my personal expenses even if I wouldn’t be earning. So, I didn’t hesitate to invest my money as the ‘first capital’ in my startup.

When the initial risk has subsided and your startup starts doing well, you can bring investors on board.

Trying to grow too fast

I have observed that most new entrepreneurs prioritize on increasing the sales volume and the company size or diversifying the business. But, all these exhaust resources in terms of people, processes, time and efforts. Rather, you should focus on building a good company that creates value, even if it means being a tortoise in the startup race for the first few years.

Encourage the culture of innovation in your startup and groom your team for multi-tasking roles. This way, you can remain a lean company for many years and still drive your business in the right direction. Investors don’t look at how big you are, they see what potential you have to earn profits.

Making things complicated

“It was always very simple; I just made it complicated.” No matter how great your idea or product is, if it takes more than a few minutes for you to explain or for the customers to understand it, perhaps you have complicated things. It’s all about the basics, use all your career experience to plug the gaps and eliminate the barriers. You should keep things simple, smart and transparent so that your winning becomes simpler.

When deciding to become an entrepreneur at 40, remember that you have experience, network and maturity to back your vision and passion. All you need is to roll up your sleeves and take a plunge!

Your thoughts?

08/02/201608/02/2016

Awesome By Design – Going Broad to Narrow

Creating intuitive products used to be enough but not any more. Now customers demand awesome product experiences…the ones that they tell others about. ‘Design awesome’ – we use these words a lot, but what does it mean? And how do you go about it?

It’s not about delivering awesome products; it’s about delivering awesome experiences that deliver unexpected delight. Design for Delight is grounded in deep customer empathy, going broad with ideas then narrowing with possible solutions and finally, rapid experimentation with customers. In my earlier article on creating awesome by design, I wrote about the first of three important principles.

Know your customer
Go broad to go narrow
Iterate with customers, frequently

In this post, I’ll focus on the second principle: go broad to narrow

The first step in design thinking is to understand your customers, identify their pain points and being really specific about the pain point. It’s when you fall in love with the problem and not the solution that a new sense of objectivity comes in.

Start with all the pain points you see your customers face. Don’t stop with the first one you see, observe all the pain points. Go broad and identify them all. Then, you narrow down to the pain point that you feel customers really struggle with. The one that you know you can solve well and in a way that you can build durable competitive advantage… one that others will not be able to copy easily.

Try this… Give your teams 2-5 minutes to write down their ideas for the problem identified, one idea per post-it. Ask them to read it all out and group them on the board. After you go through them all, throw away all the ideas on the board. You will see everyone’s surprise. If it took a team of folks 2 minutes to come up with the idea, don’t you think others outside your company will do it just as easily? Now, ask them to build on earlier ideas or come up with new ones by combining the earlier ideas.

Go Broad

Our first solutions are often our most obvious ones. In fact most brainstorming techniques I use involve throwing away the initial ideas to get to the good ones that will come later. The ones that come later build on earlier ones and tend to be more thoughtful. It is as if we need to flush out the basic solutions before we get to the better and significant ones.

As human beings we are genetically predisposed to solving problems. We often jump into the first solution we get and then, fall in love with it. You will be far more successful in delivering awesome if you fall in love with the problem and not the solution.

Often, you will have to help teams suspend their judgment and think beyond what is accepted as possible. We call this fodder. Give your teams ideas and analogies they can draw from and discover truly disruptive solutions for solving the customer pain point on hand. For example, when we were thinking about mediums of communication for our product to engage the customers, we thought of Morse codes, pigeons, personal messages, and even telepathy!

One good tip would be to ask yourself “what else did we/I look at”, every time you review a solution. Most teams I have worked with only detail out one idea. My magic number is three. I think it is important to explore 3 great solutions (at the very least) and then narrow down to the winning solution. My only rule is that these 3 solutions need to be distinctively different and not just small deviations of each other. If you are having difficulty going broad use this simple 7-to-1 tool.

“To have a good idea, you must first have lots of ideas.” – Linus Pauling

Narrow

Once you have a number of ideas on the board, the next step is to evaluate them and narrow the focus. Narrow down to the handful of ideas that you think you can really solve well with durable competitive advantage.

When you brainstorm, you come up with unique and bizarre ideas from a variety of perspectives, each of them with its own spin and inspiration for the solution. It is easy to discard those but wait, those are probably your most disruptive ideas!

There are several ways to narrow; I will share two ways that I tend to use:

2×2 Narrowing Technique: Use this method when trying to narrow across several dimensions that are important to you and your customers

Label the axis with criteria that lead to some tension and/or criteria that you would like your ideas to have. Place your ideas written on post-its into the relevant quadrant. The ones that you are interested are often in the top, right quadrant. You can decide that you want to look at multiple criteria and go through several rounds of these 2X2s. You may also decide that you don’t have enough ideas that are say, innovative and look to build on existing ideas so that it will be innovative.

Target exercise: Put all your ideas on the target. The idea that solves the pain point best (with your individual or teams’ judgment) in the middle. This is a great exercise for you to involve your (potential) customers and ask them what idea they would think solves their pain point best i.e. what they would use. The discussion to have needs to be around how you can build on many ideas and combine them into one so you can bring it into the center circle.

A great example from my awesome journey at Intuit is Fasal. The pain-point that farmers in India faced was not knowing how to get the best price for their produce, nor what markets to go to and when. We conducted several experiments on providing the right information at the right time to the farmers, ranging from eBay-like market places to voice-based systems and text messages for providing market information. The magic number is 3… I always try at least 3 different solutions. Interestingly the solution we then built out is not 1 of the 3 but a new concept that had a few attributes of the 3 ideas we shared with customers. Simplicity and accessibility were very important criteria, and these narrowed our solution to an SMS based platform that provides farmers with reliable and real time wholesale market price.

Use go broad to narrow throughout your innovation process, starting with the pain point and ending in the actual building of the solution and support.

I hope this article was insightful to you on how to design awesome using the principle of going broad to narrow. Please feel free to share your thoughts and I would love to answer any questions on this topic.

04/02/201605/02/2016

2016 iSPIRT Annual Letter

AnHRA0C0tF4mI0qO-9WAwf-AXl383SqEDMGC9He_wzNo Seven years ago a band of volunteers came together to move the Indian software product ecosystem into the next orbit. Three years ago this movement became a think tank, iSPIRT. We pioneered the idea of building public goods without public money in India. Today, India has many software product Unicorns and many more are in the making. We are doing one M&A a month. India Stack is reshaping many sectors especially the financial sector. And, the Government of India recognizes the power of startups and have started changing their systems to enable us. This has been a long and a fun journey for us all. This letter captures what we have been up to, our learnings and our dreams.

Bharat Goenka, Jay Pullur, Naveen Tewari, Sharad Sharma, Vishnu Dusad

Governing Council, iSPIRT Foundation, 4th Feb 2016

2016 iSPIRT Annual letter from ProductNation.in

01/02/201615/03/2017

Startup India: What Can You Do?

At the Startup India event, our honourable PM shared that government’s impact is highest when it decides, intentionally, to stay away, and I agree with him. But we, as the citizens of India, can play a huge role. And we must.

But as a co-founder of NowFloats, a startup, here are some of my asks to you, my fellow citizens, and you may fall under multiple categories:

To Consumers: Sincerely, kindly adjust.

Like most of you, I have cursed Ola/Uber as much when the driver cannot read the GPS. Many of NowFloats’ over 200,000 customers escalate to me directly. All this is a part of the startup journey. We learn from this and hopefully act fast enough on it. So, please crib to us (speaking for all startups here), act obnoxious, throw a fit, expect the best-in-the-world quality, but don’t give up on us! Because we will fix things, once we get that next round of capital or find more efficient ways to train the drivers or the sales people.

To Enterprises: Startups are a feature, not a bug.

When a startup comes calling, please keep aside your desire to be an entrepreneur. That is a parallel process and highly encouraged, because it will make you adopt the new technology or product. If you are unable to do this, you may be unable to do that startup either (#harsh), where you are required to be a new person every single day (#think). So when a startup approaches you, it’s an opportunity to understand the latest technology, perhaps even get feedback on your own business plan. It’s not the time to feel left-out or ask questions that make you go ‘I could have done this so much better’. BTW, almost all startups are happy to discount their product (or even make it free), if you just agree to adopt (#hint).

To Investors: Stay true to your investment thesis and stage.

An angel investor is (and should be) very different from an institutional seed, and this should be very different from a Series A and so on. Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches, and therefore only the stage-walla investor knows what the entrepreneur needs. Angels will typically give money based on trust and that’s all they should be bothered about. Blume Ventures (for example) is a seed stage investor and they understand their thesis and stage well. They don’t ask for monthly, 10-page reports from all companies but watch out for the ones who are sending these pro-actively. Their support and help is different for each and they will spend significant resources to deliver ‘personalized’ mentoring to each startup. This will not be the case at Series B, when the startup has its resources (now) to find (read pay) for external support. Our Series A investors, Omidyar Network, puts the next stage of pressure on us, helping us with higher growth and velocity.

To Government: Stay hungry, stay away.

In my opinion, the government has already done something that even they don’t realize it, yet! While some of the policy changes expected by startups remain open (refer my pre-event opinion in Mint & iSPIRT’s 34 point asks), but many were awesome starts. And by doing what the government did, they have unleashed a (wonderful) monster. They made the world (to borrow from them), stand-up and take note. This aircraft has taken off and it’s not landing anytime soon, supported by mid-air refuelling of new and relevant policies in future. Things will just have to happen given the velocity on the numbers and stuff we see every single day (see Digital Desh) (#no #choice).

To Family: Stay.

The real entrepreneurs are the families of entrepreneurs’, even though this was forced on them. To them I have to say only two things: Thank you and please stay the course. Pass or fail, this experience is going to change your family for generations. Just take my word, send your partner that home-made food (to save money and health) and… Stay! (#rockstars)

About Me

I am Jasminder Singh Gulati (@GulatiSinghJ), worked at global corporates for over 18 years, including 12 years at Microsoft before co-founding NowFloats in 2012 with Ronak Kumar Samantray, Nitin Jain, and Neeraj Sabharwal. NowFloats helps local businesses get a meaningful digital presence that connects the business with local consumers, resulting in higher revenue & profits. Over the past 3 years, NowFloats has over acquired over 200,000 customers (90% of them in India) and drives over 6M consumers to them every month. NowFloats has 6 patents, all ‘Made in India’.

15/01/201614/01/2016

The Dark Secret of India’s Start-up Boom

The Modi Government has made bold moves on the world stage. Its now time to make one at home!

By Mohandas Pai & Sharad Sharma

New-age startups are making waves. Flipkart has redefined retail. Ola is changing how we travel by taxis. PayTm is at the threshold of disrupting banks. Forus Health is attacking blindness with gusto. Eko is bringing financial inclusion to millions. Team Indus is on its way to land a rover on the moon. Nowfloats is bringing lakhs of businesses online. Pick any sector, even agriculture, and you’ll find a new-age startup gamely trying to bring about change.

These new-age startups are not like our traditional small businesses. They are peculiar in many respects. For one, they don’t play safe. They take on incumbents that are many times their size. They seek out David versus Goliath battles. They have a ‘panga’ mindset where our traditional small businessman was all about ‘dhanda’. This craziness in their DNA makes them wonderful change agents. No wonder, these new startups are transforming India from within.

We are blessed to have these new-age startups. It turns out that this new species of small businesses thrives only in a few places in the world. The most famous locale is, of course, Silicon Valley. Europe, unfortunately, is a veritable desert. South America has only Chile as a small oasis. Asia, however, looks really promising. Israel became a startup hub first, then China and now India. We are now the third largest startup ecosystem in the world.

But there is something dark about India’s startup boom. Six of the eight Unicorns have domiciled themselves outside India-in Singapore or US. In 2014, 54% of all new-age startups raising money chose to domicile outside India. Last year this number grew. It is estimated to have crossed 75%! This points to a big problem.

You might wonder why it matters where Flipkart is domiciled. For starters, when Flipkart has its IPO, Indian citizens won’t get a chance to participate in it. Worse, the intellectual property of these redomiciled companies moves to their new home. But the worst is that the money that the founders and investors make at the time of an IPO or an M&A goes to their foreign bank accounts and tends to stay there. It stymies the creation of Rupee risk-capital system in India. It makes are startups almost fully dependent on foreign capital leaving most of them starved and under-capitalized in their early years.

Startup India is an opportunity to stop the exodus. It turns out that only 34 issues, across Ministry of Finance, RBI, Ministry of Corporate Affairs and Ministry of Commerce, need to be tackled. Work has been underway on them since 23rd Oct and 60% of the issues seem to be on their way to a resolution. But this 60% fix is a recipe for failure. Unless all the 34 items are resolved, exodus will not abate. Just one friction point is enough to send the startup to Singapore, where, a welcome band awaits.

Anything that we do in Startup India without addressing the issues on the Stay-in-India Checklist is a gift to Singapore. The Modi Government has made bold moves on the world stage. Its now time to make one at home!

Mohandas Pai was the CFO and then the head of HR at Infosys. He is now Chairman, Aarin Capital Partners.

Sharad Sharma was the CEO of Yahoo India R&D. He is a co-founder of iSPIRT, a non-profit think tank that wants India to be a product nation.

15/01/201615/01/2016

Start-ups and think tanks are game-changers

It is time for us to embrace new-age start-ups and local think tanks for India to prosper.

Human development indicators improve rapidly when countries learn to provide health, education and financial inclusion more effectively. Incremental increases in expenditure on welfare schemes and subsidies do not bring about this change. Plugging the leakages in government distribution helps, but it is not a panacea. What we need are game-changing innovations that can tackle India-scale challenges.

In the past 30 years, it has become clear that game-changing solutions do not follow a prescribed path to discovery. Instead, they are born out of hundreds of experiments. These experiments can’t be limited to the labs of a few resource-rich incumbents.

We need to widen the funnel to include the new-age entrepreneurs and innovators. To do this, the government needs to adopt and evangelize pro-challenger tools and policies that reduce barriers to experimentation, create level playing fields and encourage innovating around national issues.

There is some good news on this front. In the past few years, a collaborative effort between several government agencies and the Indian Software Products Industry Round Table (iSPIRT), a non-profit think tank, have helped create key enablers for hundreds of experiments.

A digital infrastructure for cashless, paperless and presence-less (on smartphone) service delivery is now in place. It is colloquially called the India Stack. It offers all the building blocks that are needed as public goods. And the rapid adoption of Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and mobile numbers (JAM) has created a ready pool of citizens to try out these services.

This enables new-age start-ups to do more complex things than they could do before, making them transformation agents for real India.

These new-age start-ups will deliver 10x gains that we need in health, education and financial inclusion to make India successful.

But we must think beyond start-ups. The Indian state must evolve too. It must learn faster, change faster and implement faster.

A 2013 paper by Luke Jordan of the World Bank and Sebastien Turban and Laurence Wilse-Samson of Columbia University shows that the Indian state performs poorly on these dimensions compared to the Chinese state. They identify many factors for this.

For instance, China has undertaken reform once every five years since 1978, while India has only attempted it twice in 65 years. Therefore, China has been continuously tuning up its capacity to learn and deliver.

In India, substantial administrative reforms are overdue. (The reforms recommended by the Second Administrative Reforms Commission still remain unimplemented.)

It turns out that think tanks have an important role to play too. A dense network of think tanks is necessary to conduct and spread research.

Indian think tanks are mostly central or foreign, with only a few having strong links into the policy system. China has think tanks observing and explaining change. This is a structural gap.

Because of this, the Indian state is conspicuously lacking in its capacity to generate new knowledge, transmit it across the system and act on that.

It is time for us to embrace the two new players—new-age start-ups and local think tanks—for India to prosper. Only then will we able to break free from our current trajectory to meet the aspirations of our young citizens.

Jay Pullur is founder and CEO of Pramati Technologies. He is also a co-founder and governing council member of iSPIRT.

Shashank N.D. is founder and CEO of Practo Technologies. He is part of iSPIRT’s Founder Circle.

11/01/2016

Netneutrality & the fairness for innovation by OTTs

Here is a great rendition of what the evolution of #netneutrality” needs to be and fairness to OTTs with protections against monopoly. Applies equally to the Internet here in the US!
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/theres-a-fog-over-net-neutrality/article8089254.ece
Courtesy: Drs. Rohit Prasad & V.Sridhar, IIIT Bangalore

05/01/201605/01/2016

Scaling Revenue Roundtable

Enterprise Sales, Marketing & Inside Sales Team Build Out, First International Customers Acquisition, Enterprise Pricing etc. I understand, we have heard these topics in multiple events & conferences, so why this round table be different? The difference is gyan vs hearing from real person with real experience which sometimes exactly what you want to hear, even reading 10 books will not help compared to one line coming from a CEO who has done it over and over again and seen the success.

AiAfOYoopNK2-JpnERWxOZdUFD5vPYd5ajC8OOkJg_tP In this Round table, Aneesh was leading and moderating the discussion. He leveraged the experience of other founders which made the most out of few hrs of interaction. The participants are founders of mid-stage startups, who have good-size customers and have decent ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue), growing and scaling.

This blog narrates the learning in the form of Q&A.

How to establish a meaningful and sustaining Partnership for your B2B enterprise business and grow your business?

Partner are those who have done similar product sales in medium/large scale before, so ask them for their sales targets (region wise) and their profile of B2B partnership in their existing set up. That is a good validation point for partnership. {It is like validating by their current and past experience in partnership}
Partners could be the companies who are into services (in your industry vertical like healthcare or retail etc) and likes to have monthly revenues.
If your product sit on top of other product and integrates then go for a partnership program to the base product. For instance, if your product complements or built on top of Salesforce, then you can enroll in Salesforce has AppExchange program wherein you can list your product and generate good visibility and leads. Partners, could be the product that your software compliments or built upon it.
Partners could be the implementation companies of the product that your product built on or compliment. Say your software built on Salesforce, then the service companies who are implementing Salesforce solution could be your partners.
You could also go for two-way partnership, like I push your product and you push mine, sometimes one partner performs a lot better than the other, in that case, be open and refine the terms as you go in the journey.
If you are enrolling in partnership programs from large companies like IBM, Salesforce etc and see if you can use their promotion events and brand your product, many gives a free offer for promotion. You might end up in getting leads worth a lot that might seems impossible to generate by the solo marketing you do on your own. These large companies also have paid outreach which has high outreach and see if it is worth investing.
Incubator and Accelerator, if you are part of any incubation center or accelerator that helps a lot in getting the right partnership e.g Microsoft accelerator
How to bring transparency in partnership? You might also want to try “Lead Protection Program” which creates 100% transparency in the leads generated, let your partners enter the leads in your CRM & both of you can track the status and you can also make sure that right analytics are coming out.
If the partners are asking for exclusivity, ask for minimum guarantee e.g 30 qualified leads per quarter per area
Partnership takes time to achieve, so keep experimenting, be conservative and go slow, do a some sort of pilot before you sign larger partnership contract. And ready to fail as it takes time to get into right partnership.

AtT1H_5g3UkqxqIvC6jRlOknnwXUZPnMjQ0GkhyzAymF How to acquire customers in new international market?

You can go with the existing customers and if they have business overseas then you can approach them for the initial open door to international market.
Another suggestion is to participate in events and have a booth or something so your product gets exposure and you might end-up in getting partners or customers
LinkedIn is a great source to find first few pilot customers in that region.
Overseas partnership also you can explore using LinkedIn or Quora, but it is not that easy to find viable partnership
And also cold calling for opening doors also worked for few startups.
If your product is like B2C then publishing in appstore, Appstore marketing, google adwords would be a good start, but if you are in B2B and enterprise sales, then the steps mentioned in the beginning are the way to go.
Once you have handful of customers internationally, select a country where you could open a small sales team may be start with one or two guys and these guys need not be very senior like VP level, 2 yrs to 5 yrs exp and they have to work with India Sales team parallaly. You might need to travel and stay there for a while for initial years to establish a sales pattern oversees.

Ar3dOzl_O6w-FGfJzAg_J7VarpANJbdP-uJ4bFiora6F How is to do pricing for your product?

See your competitor price and product features and how much it solves the customer problem, how your product makes them dependable, this combination will help you to arrive at pricing.
If your product a lot better than your competitor, do not lower your price to compete, you need to stay at a price tag for the right product.
If your product does not have India based competitor, see the US pricing and create some kind of benchmark value to arrive your pricing.
You can have different packaging but not too many, max 3 to 4.
You kind of have to experiment with pricing, for e.g one of the enterprise product was priced it 5k for the first few customer during pilot (initial years) and when they need to sell the product in the second year to a bigger organization, they tried quoting 1L and end up in selling at 60k. So you need to try and see how market is reacting for your new pricing, first few year keep experimenting, you will be able to arrive at pricing between 1 to 3 yrs if not before.
When you sell enterprise product, make the price attractive in the pilot stage and after showing the desired results, you can go for high price and the customers would not mind paying it as they have seen the results which impacted their top line.
The pricing could be geography based and can be different. And again, find the right pricing by seeing your competitor and demand in that market.
If you want to give freemium version, give it free but let the customer give you some kind of asset that you can use for your business like marketing or brand building. For e.g refer 2 friends to get the free version or share in your facebook page to get the access. Some kind of exchange of benefits for freemium version.

What is the most painful growth in the entire journey of the startup?

1M to 5M growth is the most painful where you are likely to make mistakes
While growing fast, you need to be careful when reaching to new markets, not all regions works great for your product. US need not be the best market for all products. If you have invested in one region and seems like it is not working, then shutdown and alternate your sales strategy in overseas.
Please refer “acquiring customers in new international market” for more details.

How to upsell and cross-sell to your existing customers?

There are two ways, first upsell more apps/ additional features to the same customer
Second is find out other departments or other sister organization and do a cross sell
An customer account is usually handled by an account manager, the upsell/cross sell need be done by different person say group account manager.
Every group account manager handles multiple accounts, like 5 to 10 accounts, is responsible for upselling. The account manager finds opportunities for upsell. Do not mix up the account manager dealing with customer on day-to-day basis to do upsell as the negotiation will become very tricky otherwise.

How to give discounts to the customers in SaaS product?

The discounts needs to be distributed, do not give them at one go.
For instance, do a yearly subscription with 2 months off. Those two months are going to be 11th and 12th month. So incase they leave in 6 months, these discounts does not qualify.
Another way you could spread across 3 years like 3rd month, 6^th month off, 22th month off for discounts.

How much is the typical yearly renewal increase in ARR for the Enterprise Product?

8 to 10%
We need to say 10% increase is very common and if the customer creeps, bring down to 8%

How to get testimonials and referrals?

Usually testimonials are done after building a strong relationship with a customer. Usually after 1 or 2 years. Make sure that the account managers and CXO’s of the company has a good relation built with customers to ask for testimonials. Once you establish those soft links, whenever the customer delightness go very high and initiate the process. e.g Release of product feature which solves one of their pain point which the customer demanded for a while.
Another idea is to mention this in the subscription or contract time itself. Suppose if the customer is asking for discounts then you can tell him that you can enroll in the “Loyalty Program” in which you might have to give testimonial & also give 2 referrals and participate in the case study within the first 2 years and you are eligible for this much discounts. This way the customer is well aware of the expectation and also enjoys discounts. Do not give discounts for free, make him have some benefits offered to us.

Does awards and recognizing important for startup?

This comes directly into credibility building so it is good to get some recognition
The important point is apply for recognition that are credible and genuine with a selection process like boot up awards by ispirit
Have some sort of recognition award or have an article or mention in international news & media like Techcrunch, Harvard Business Review, Gartner, Marketing Magazine, Forbes, Wall Street Journal etc.This will help both India & international brand building.
You can use a PR agency to reach out these media and appear for the competition or for the product review

Name some books good for Inside Sales and for Complete Sales?

Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
Sales Acceleration formula by Mark Roberge

Is there any online tests used as a first-cut of sales roles?

Yes, you can use https://mettl.com/test/sales-personality-test-assessment
Second rounds onwards read the inside sales interview in the below questions

AkKzIBAt4w99IJ_Uj2_8mQGs0EyU9dnA03l9hY6xQA1q How to provide incentives for your IS(Inside sales) team?

Incentive are always a motivating factor for the Inside Sales team. We have laid out some numbers as a sample for you to see below.
- 2% to 3% of Annual Recurring Revenue(ARR) for new customer acquisition.
- 2% to 2.5% of annual revenue for UpSell/Cross Sell or have a fixed amount like 10k for all revenue of 3L to 5L per year, 5K for 2L to 3L etc.
- You can also say, if you get a referral from a customer then the account manager gets 5% of revenue.
- You can also include testimonial incentives for e.g Video testimonials 10k, Text testimonial 5k, Case Study like 10% of ARR
Even you can add some incentive for first go-live means successful deployment and this is applicable for enterprise products
Make sure these numbers are published and you make sure the check is given to him as soon as you receive them from the customer.

We would be writing another blog on a related & demanding topic “How to set up a Inside Sales Team from scratch & generates Leads?” in the upcoming week.Stay Tuned and Happy Reading!

Contributed by Asha Satapathy, DocEngage