Nuts and Bolts of selling to US customers from India for First Timers. #Chennai

This PlaybookRT will focus on Product startups who are keen to enter the US Market. The PlaybookRT is facilitated by Suresh Sambandam, CEO of KiSSFLOW / OrangeScape. Suresh will host a highly interactive Playbook Roundtable for Product Startups and share his journey of acquiring 9000 customers globally. Details of the last Playbook Roundtable can be accessed here – Nuts and Bolts of Marketing & selling SaaS products to US customers from India for First Timers

Some of the key topics that Suresh would be sharing insights are:

Getting the Basics Right
- B2B SaaS Customer Acquisition Model
- Role of Product
- Freemium vs Free Trial
- Positioning (3 types)
- Pricing
Marketing
- Junk In – Junk Out (Top of the funnel)
- Perpetual A/B
- Inbound vs Out Bound
- SEO
- Adwords
- Re-targeting and Re-marketing
- Channels to Ignore
- Signup Qualification
Engagement
- Drip Emails
- Engagement Tools & Tracking
- Fix the product
Sales (Hunting)
- Founding Team Commitments during early days
- Role Definitions
- Opening the Communication Channel
- Region Mapping, Sales Agent, Multiple Shifts, Time Zones, etc
- CRM Choices
- Unified view for Sales Team
- Support Driven Selling
Sales (Farming)
- Post Sales Customer interviews
Infrastructure and Others
- Recurring Billing, Payment Gateway choices
- Product Feedback Loop
- Continuous Content Marketing Loop
- Automation Engineering
- MIS Reports

To apply for this PlaybookRT please fill up the online application and we will get back to you. The session is open to the company’s Founding Team, CEOs and/or head of Sales. Applications are due by the 5th Sept 2016. The goal is to have at most 12 companies so as to make the interaction effective. If there are other interested attendees, we will arrange subsequent RoundTable. This PlaybookRT is FREE and there are no charges.

01/06/201601/06/2016

Why did I love this Saturday?

I usually start my weekends with an intense workout regimen. This one was also quite intense but in a very different way. I attended the 71^st edition of ‘Playbook Roundtable’ on Saturday the 28^th of May, 2016. Incidentally, this was my first time at any Playbook event. From the time I received the invite, I just had one question: how should I prepare to give it my very best? Little did I know that rather I would get the very best from this infectiously energetic tribe of people we call entrepreneurs on earth.

The event began at 11 A.M. with the first sip of cappuccinos and a brief introduction by everyone. We had 12 entrepreneurs (plus their co-founders), who had come to spend this Saturday to learn from one another. Besides passion, everyone was running high on desire to solve meaningful problems by using technology and change our world forever. While few of them had already (successfully) launched a product and were now facing next level growth challenges, many were still somewhere in MVP stage, figuring out product-market fit.

I was amazed to see an eclectic mix of problems these start-ups wanted to solve – beyond many industries and businesses. We had a renowned Fintech company making peer-to-peer banking easier with its latest product, a B2B engagement platform that helps convert one’s clients to promoters, a knowledge management product that makes life easier for customer support staff, a marketplace for those who want custom-tailored clothing minus hassles, an employee engagement platform that makes it easier to share ideas and innovate bottom-up, a mobile push notifications platform which has a unique ‘do it from your notification itself’ feature, an AI-based data cleaning & organizing tool, a personalized curated video platform which helps discover ‘still hard to find videos’ at YouTube, a collaboration platform which seamlessly works over Gmail, an education portal that aims to make multiple forms & cumbersome application process around admissions redundant, an open source ERP for small businesses with an enviable community across the globe, and a managed marketplace for getting super-affordable flash presentations. Phew, that was a lot… But that’s how best Saturdays are made!

The format of the event – with a handful of participants and an intimate setting over a roundtable, literally – allowed for an easy interaction for everyone. After hearing elevator pitches by everyone, we all were kicked to get into the next phase of our day – the demo!

Every entrepreneur had a total of 30 minutes to give a brief demo and then get into question-answer session, which was a unique opportunity for everyone. While a lot of questions satisfied curiosity of the audience, many entrepreneurs actually took on the audience by asking difficult questions that were giving them sleepless nights. “Almost everyone giggled when this young gentleman innocently asked – how do I reduce my cost of sales? And one response came – don’t ever sell to this segment!”

While everyone learned a thing or two, I noticed recurring themes in advice and insights that most of us agreed with. I call those timeless pieces and they are:

Articulate the problem you’re solving really well (for whom, how, and why)
Keep it super simple during MVP stage
Speak to users, don’t assume
Your product is super cool, but maybe for some other segment!
Solve one problem really well for just a handful of users before conquering the world.

We concluded the session with everyone summarising their one or two key takeaways from these awesome 6 hours spent together (damn, nobody mentioned expanded LinkedIn network!) For me, more than anything, it was a humbling experience to be with these ultra-human beings for I’d like to be like them, some Saturday!

25/02/201625/02/2016

How culture is the fevicol of a startup

I recently attended a Playbook Roundtable organised by iSPIRT on “Culture Design” discussing how to preserve culture of a company that it started with? Reading so much strife because of culture conflict globally or in India or how MNCs should imbibe the “Transparency Culture” & “Accountability Culture” has made me wonder Isn’t “Culture” a confusing word?

Each time we use the word culture we incline toward one or another of its aspects: toward the “culture” that’s imbibed through osmosis or the “culture” that’s learned at museums, toward the “culture” that makes you a better a person or the “culture” that just inducts you into a group.

As per Wikipedia, Culture is, in the words of E.B. Tylor, “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

Tirthankar Dash articulated culture that can be depicted in a pyramid. At the base is the Philosophy – what are the belief systems underlying the culture.

On that base is built the Mythology or folklore. This would mean Stories – what are the stories that make your philosophy real and personal. And at the top would be Rituals – what can you do that will bring it all alive.

One truth we have seen over the centuries – whether it’s a team of 3 or a country or a civilization, culture exists in every community. So the choice is between letting an unconscious culture crop up like weeds or consciously creating a culture we truly love.

A lot has been said about “Corporate Culture” of late especially about “Startup Culture”. One can have big vision and goals, smart people, super pay, great products and more, but the undercurrents of culture many a times determine whether the company crosses the chasm from good to great.

So, the key question is what kind of culture we want to propagate, as a company, community and the country? How do we provide an environment where one can respond (said and unsaid) to people and situations to bring out the best in each of us?

How does one ensure that we preserve and pass the culture of company from the 10th employee to the 100th to the 1000th?

While each startup or a big company should identify its own values, rituals, celebration and mythologies, there are three critical aspects that each culture should have for it to sustain, have its employees be “in the zone”, an experience when your concentration and focus peak and you are able to scale uncharted territory.

Trust: Every culture should command and demand trust among its community. If there is trust deficit, it leads to fear which creates processes and policies. Leaders of many organizations are afraid of the 2 per cent employees who may break their trust. The reality is, whether you create restrictive processes or not only 2 per cent of the people break your trust.

You end up penalizing the 98 per cent of the employees with restrictive policies (attendance tracking, detailed travel policies, time-tracking etc.) Any driven employee cannot ever be in the zone if they feel restricted, monitored and trapped.

Progress: Growth, movement , opportunities whatever you call it progress is like oxygen for any company or culture. Driven people constantly look for avenues where they can satiate their hunger for learning. Hence the culture should foster open communication and collaboration coupled with professional & personal growth.

The Indian culture, often labelled as an amalgamation of several sub-cultures is a prime example of this progress over several millennia.

Purpose: As a leader, if you had to choose to do only one thing to get your team to be in the zone, it should be to continuously, shamelessly and loudly remind them of the larger purpose of the team and the organisation they are a part of.

Remember, there are a bunch of operational tasks and distractions vying for your team’s time and attention. It is your job to take out time and remind them of the larger purpose of the organisation. It is your job to get them back on track when they are distracted and to give them the feedback and support they require.

At InMobi we believe in nurturing a culture that enables people to become more of who they truly are. YaWiO which is the foundation of our culture is like the wind – it’s the presence that can’t be directly seen, but it can be felt very strongly. It is our glue that holds the organization together and can guide how to behave & act!

Guest Post by Ankit Rawal, Proud Veteran InMobian

Nuts and Bolts of selling to US customers from India for First Timers in Pune

Some of the key topics that Suresh would be sharing insights are:

Getting the Basics Right
- B2B SaaS Customer Acquisition Model
- Role of Product
- Freemium vs Free Trial
- Positioning (3 types)
- Pricing
Marketing
- Junk In – Junk Out (Top of the funnel)
- Perpetual A/B
- Inbound vs Out Bound
- SEO
- Adwords
- Re-targeting and Re-marketing
- Channels to Ignore
- Signup Qualification
Engagement
- Drip Emails
- Engagement Tools & Tracking
- Fix the product
Sales (Hunting)
- Founding Team Commitments during early days
- Role Definitions
- Opening the Communication Channel
- Region Mapping, Sales Agent, Multiple Shifts, Time Zones, etc
- CRM Choices
- Unified view for Sales Team
- Support Driven Selling
Sales (Farming)
- Post Sales Customer interviews
Infrastructure and Others
- Recurring Billing, Payment Gateway choices
- Product Feedback Loop
- Continuous Content Marketing Loop
- Automation Engineering
- MIS Reports

To apply for this PlaybookRT please fill up the online application and we will get back to you. The session is open to the company’s Founding Team, CEOs and/or head of Sales. Applications are due by the 22nd May 2015. The goal is to have at most 12 companies so as to make the interaction effective. If there are other interested attendees, we will arrange subsequent RoundTable. This PlaybookRT is FREE and there are no charges.

Brief profile of Suresh is:

Suresh Sambandam is the Founder and CEO of OrangeScape, that specializes in building technology platform software. OrangeScape offers two platforms – Visual PaaS – a cloud application development platform for Large Enterprises and KiSSFLOW a workflow-as-a-Service platform for SMBs. OrangeScape has marque enterprise customers include the likes of Unilever, Citibank, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and its KiSSFLOW is #1 in the workflow / SaaS BPM space with 9000+ customers across 108 countries with a truly global footprint.

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03/04/201503/04/2015

Understanding Software Sales from the Tally Experience

It is safe to say that Tally is the grand daddy of all Indian Software Products, the only company to have discovered the holy grail of selling software to Indian small businesses at scale. So when one of the key architects of the Tally sales network, Deepak Prakash (Tally employee #3) came down to Mumbai to do a iSPIRT Roundtable, there was little chance I would miss this. And Deepak Prakash did not disappoint. In typical Delhi banter, Deepak walked us inside the mind of a top performing sales executive and how the goals of an entrepreneur and sales person, while contradicting from the outside can be wonderfully complementary if managed right.

2015-03-14 14.29.14 HDR In the era of online marketing and social media, old world sales seems like a relic of a bygone era. But not in India. In a country full of contradictions, traditional sales still has its charm and companies that want to sell in India, must understand the nuances.

Empathy

The most recurring theme Deepak’s talk was Empathy. The ability to listen and ask good questions. This applies to both, the relationship between the customer and the sales person and the sales person and the entrepreneur.

Deepak talked about the importance of knowing the sales person and making sure their aspirations are aligned with the company’s aspirations. If the aspiration of the sales person is to buy a car or buy a house, then the person must be able to see that this job will be able to fulfil these aspirations. Aspirations of changing the world have to be translated to the sales person.

Being in sales is a crushing job. Most of us a wary of sales people and feel they are intruders. Hence it is very important for someone who is managing a sales team to constantly boost the ego of the sales person, It helps to keep up the “shabash” and back slapping. If the sales have not been good, its not a good idea to bring it up the first thing in the morning. Mornings should be positive. Its best to have an evening call and close the day’s issues.

Productising Sales

Once the sales process is stable and repeatable, it is important to standardize it. Deepak calls it productising the sales. Getting the words right is very important. It is necessary to always talk in the language of the customer. While calling the customer to renew, saying that “their account is going to ‘expire’” can send wrong signals. Avoiding use of jargon, having a clear pitch and script was at the heart of the sales process. A good sales person is always well prepared should never be in doubt of what to say in any given situation.

Strategy

One of the key learnings for most of the fellow startups was market segmentation. Deepak shared to attack a new market. For example if you were targeting automobile dealers,you would first have have your own sales people break into 10% of the market and once the network effects started, i.e., you will have enough references and word of mouth going, then you start handing it over to a reseller or partner network.

In Deepak’s words “you should eat the elephant, but piece by piece”

Channel Building

A point will come when it will be impossible to keep growing the sales network. Not only will it be expensive, it will also difficult to manage large sales teams. Hence it imperative for you to start building a partner network. On being asked, when was the best time to start a partner network, Deepak answered, when there was a repeatable (productised) sales process.

International Expansion

There were many other topics Deepak touched upon like hiring (good sales people are great listeners), Tally’s approach to piracy (don’t inconvenience the customer), managing targets, bringing in influencers (charted accountants in case of Tally) and being clear of what you want (Tally was clear they did not want to go for enterprise customers).

Some of Deepak’s stories reminded me of the Jagdeep Sahni scripted “Rocket Singh, Salesman of the year”, which I think is a brilliant, highly underrated Indian movie for startups.

The Key to selling software to SMEs in India

One of the things Deepak wanted to share with the startups, something that Bharat Goenka, the founder of Tally has also spoken elsewhere, is that the buying patterns of small businesses in India are like enterprises in mature markets. They are used to being sold things rather than they pro actively going and buying stuff. Deepak wants to warn software companies (and their VCs) that they need to plan for scale (more than 10,000 customers). This is not a market for half measures.

My Take

While the session was delightful and insightful, I don’t think startups should try and emulate what worked for Tally. Tally was a product of an era where there was no internet and software adoption was in its infancy. They succeeded because they had the right strategy, risk apatite and execution for the market they wanted to succeed. Also once they hit critical mass, the role of the sales person was only to ensure availability, because the customer already knew they they wanted Tally.

11063806_10152785041892794_1847266351215314437_n There is a reason the roles of travel agents or insurance agents is shrinking every day. The internet is a wonderful for discovery, learning and distribution of software and startups should go on this path. While sales may be necessary for enterprise, it is too expensive small businesses.

We understand that today, the Indian small business may not be ready to buy without being sold to, but this is changing fast. We are happy to wait and perfect the online game, so that when the markets open up, we have to most compelling offering ready.

Content marketing your way to multi-million dollars in revenue – iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable

Playbook-RoundTable is one of the most sought after community events of iSPIRT. It’s a gathering of 12 like-minded product startups who are beyond the early stage. RoundTables are facilitated by an iSPIRT maven who is an accomplished practitioner of that Round-Table theme.

The Playbook Roundtable (#PlaybookRT) on content marketing is a brainstorming session on how to acquire users at scale and confer them to customers without paying a dime through content marketing.The playbook roundtable is facilitated by Paras Chopra, founder and CEO of Wingify (the makers of VWO). Paras founded Wingify in 2009 and the company today has 3700 customers across the globe including the likes of Microsoft, AMD and Groupon, and is known as one of the SaaS poster boys of the country.- How to generate initial traction for your product with content marketing?
– How to target your content to the right audience using personas?
– How to get top marketing experts in the world your biggest influencers?
– How to measure RoI on your content marketing?
– How to scale up the team?
– How to get covered on TechCrunch, trend on HackerNews and write for the likes of Moz and Smashing Magazine?

If you are interested, please fill the below mentioned form. If shortlisted, we will confirm by 31st March 2015

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25/02/201525/02/2015

The best things are simple. Is your messaging there yet? : from #PlaybookRT

The most crucial lessons come from looking at the mistakes: those that we make and those that we spot others making. A thought might get triggered by listening to great dreamers like Steve Jobs. But the termination, in terms of realization, implementation and imbibing the essence comes only when you have walked through that journey and declared a new start.

Shankar, who imagined and steered the 43rd round table in Delhi, created amazing examples to drive across the points, we had often read heard and hoped to understand. I will try and share what were my takeaways.

This session, thanks to Rajat Harlalka and the amazing iSPIRT movement, started off with an unforgettable lesson, on what is the Curse of Knowledge.

You need to attend one round table to experience it. For now I can only re-iterate one of the ways it is often represented.

“The moment you know how to speak a language, you forget what it is like, to not know it.”

The same thing happens with you and your product. You know it too well to imagine what it looks like to those who don’t know it. What should the message be, so that the potential customers want to have it?

Who?

So if you are looking at spotting your messaging, spot the Who of your customer.

Who is your Bob (What Bob?)
What does he look like
Where does he go
What does he do

Why?

Once you have figured out the Who, move on to answer the Why

Why should Bob need your product
What’s in it for him
How does it make him better

Only after figuring these questions would it make sense to move on to ‘What’ your product does and ‘How’ does it do it.

I want you to read that again. Give it some time to sink it. Let it challenge what you think you know.

It’s only after spotting “Who is your Bob” and “Why should he bother” that you product and it’s features and functionality come in.

First response of one of my fellow entrepreneur to this statement was: I know all that.

‘I am the best ecommerce setup for finding XYZ. That’s why he should care’, he went. Really?

It’s like saying, “I am the best writer. You better read my books”. Does that work?

If you have both the answers, feel confident. You are amongst the top 5% companies who have their basics right.

Now what do you do with this knowledge?

Let your Bob know!

This was where I would say, the workshop’s original aim hovered.

If you have your answers, incorporate them in your messaging. Share a story that people can relate to. Share with your Bob that you are going to make him better. Let your messaging help Bob, feel this sentiment.

If you look at the steps we went through and reinforced during our Bob journey, there were just 2. Make yourself :

Meaningful, and,
Differentiated, to your Bob.

One other takeaway that stuck with me was this: The best things are simple. Is your messaging there?

Guest Blog post by Kritika Prashant, VoiceTree Technologies

30/01/201530/01/2015

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

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

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

Overview

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

Building an effective sales team

Understand the sales psyche

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

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

Hiring A Sales Team

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

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

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

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

Sales Team Training and Measuring Success

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

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

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

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

Digital vs. Feet on Street

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

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

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

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

Building a Channels Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

Bundling Your Products

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

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

Referrals

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

Right Business Model

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

Reaching out to different stakeholders

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

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

Monopolistic Market

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

Going International

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Effective Product Mgmt & Delivery: Benefits and Applications in Startup, #PlaybookRT in Pune

Product management is one of the most common sensical and yet least understood areas in the Indian technology industry. What is product management? When do you need it? Is it important only once you have reached product/market fit and are ready to scale? What are the metrics that every product manager should care about? How should you hire PMs?

Amit Somani & Rahul Kulkarni will host a highly interactive Product Management Roundtable for Startups to address these questions and more. While most of the examples will be from from B2C products but the discussion should be broadly applicable to other areas as well. Apply for the PlaybookRT here.

Brief Profile of Amit Somani

Amit comes with over 19 years of experience in the technology and internet industry. Currently, Amit is an Entrepreneur in his residence and also actively investing in, and mentoring startups. Earlier, he was the Chief Products Officer for MakeMyTrip. Prior, Amit has headed various search, mobile and ads products at Google and was the Director for the Enterprise Search and Discovery business at IBM based out of San Jose, California.

Amit holds a Bachelor’s in Technology degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology – Banaras Hindu University, India (Gold Medalist) and an M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published several papers and holds seven US patents. More about Amit on Twitter, LinkedIn.

Brief Profile of Rahul Kulkarni

Rahul Kulkarni is the Chief Product Officer at Sokrati, a digital marketing and analytics startup thats driving the convergence of big data analytics, consumer psychology and ad technology. Before jumping into the startup world, Rahul spent close to six years at Google – starting out as Google’s first product manager in India and managing various products such as Google Maps and Local, cloud computing, Orkut and Google Finance. Prior to Google, Rahul was the Product Manager for LabVIEW at National Instruments Corp in Austin, TX where for five years he led new product development of high speed control systems used in diverse applications – from offshore drilling to space exploration. Rahul holds 8 patents, Masters degree in Engineering from Georgia Tech Atlanta and Bachelors in Engineering from VJTI Mumbai.

14/10/201415/10/2014

Innovate on the Product, Not on the Business Model

Entrepreneurs from Bangalore had no problem driving into Chennai amid a tense political situation in Tamil Nadu. There was an air of expectation and enthusiasm on the part of more than 15 entrepreneurs who had come in from Bangalore and Mumbai, apart from Chennai itself, to listen to Girish Mathrubootham, Freshdesk CEO and founder, for the Playbook Roundtable on Scaling a SaaS business. Colourful wall graffiti greeted visitors at the Freshdesk’s vibrant office, which itself exuded energy.

A condensed version of the discussion is given in form of a Q&A.

Girish from Freshdesk

What should I focus on in a SaaS business?

The No. 1 success for your business is your product and it is key to your sustenance in business. You should know what matters to your business. Innovate on the product but don’t change your business model. Look at businesses that are in the same domain as you are or businesses that sell to the same kind of customers like yours. Adopt their business model. Copying business models is not a sin. Tweaking the business model may not be good in the long run. 37Signals started charging credit card subscription only when the merchant bank refused them monthly subscriptions as the bank felt the business is new and could fold up in any time. Such business model changes happen by compulsion and not by design.

How should I go about marketing the SaaS business?

Forget affiliate marketing. It works only for impulse buys and in an e-commerce environment. Success, if any, is not scalable. Only Constant Contact has achieved success with affiliate marketing.

Guest blogs with linkbacks to your product site is a good idea.

Positioning and lead generation are key to marketing. Trigger e-mails is just a drip marketing tool and not scalable. Killing welcome e-mails increases response rates. Getting your e-mail to land in the target’s inbox is crucial and it shouldn’t get into Promotion box in Gmail.

Text-only e-mail with no images and links works best. Attention-grabbing subject line and shortening the length to four to five lines assure greater response rates. Remember, mails are read on mobiles. So keep it short.

Instead of a uniform pitch to customers, talk to them to understand their problems. Then your demo should provide a solution to their problems. Customers at times get confused if you run through your presentation and may not connect with how the product or the features will solve their problems. Be specific.

Make your demo educational for the customer. Say something new and which the customer doesn’t know. It will earn you respect and might convert to sales.

Freemium has two groups. In one, after a trial period, you charge for the product right from the beginning. In the other, there are a free version and a paid version of the product. Nail down which works best for your business. Any number of free trials is not going to hurt your business. Leaving money on the table is a good idea. Because the customer might buy after a long time. Patience is a good trait.

Track the customer from their first visit to your website and determine the pattern of how customers find you. This is called visitor fingerprinting. Then you know where to focus upon.

Trade shows. Do they help? For small companies, they may bring some branding and don’t expect too much ROI from events. What works best is a personalized presentation to your target customer. Do your homework and create customized presentations. This might convert to sales.

Generally, personalize across presales, sales, and marketing. The response rates are 25%.

[Read Marc Benioff’s Behind the Cloud.]

[Watch Gail Goodman of Customer Contact’s video “How to negotiate a long slow SaaS ramp of death”]

Webinars? Webinars are good. All the more good if there is an expert on the topic speaking and it offers something new. Make the webinar having some educational value for the audience.

PR – Be in the news constantly. Hire a good PR agency and avoid scamsters promising hell a lot of things (say, one-page content on you in a magazine that has access to thousands of targets in a domain). They wouldn’t be suitable for your business. Churn out good stories often. Reach the people who don’t need you now. Seed them for the future.

Segregate your marketing function into a campaign team and a content marketing/product marketing team.

How To Set Up And Create A Winning Effective Sales Team #PlaybookRT

This Roundtable will be facilitated by Dhiraj Kacker, CEO of Canvera, who has built a feet on street sales team of 425 people spread across 200+ cities covering nearly every non-tribal district in the country.

It is well known that selling software and solution to small business is tough proposition across the world. However selling to the Indian small business makes it an order of magnitude more difficult as the Indian small business expect and demand enterprise software kind of engagement at consumer level price points.
There are several other issues that have to be addressed such as education of the buyers, overcoming trust issue, identification of right channel for scaling and so on. Solving some of these issues takes the fight to the streets to win the small business customer.

Share and learn together in a round table discussion on this topic on 24 Sep 2014(Wednesday), 5 pm at Canvera office in Bangalore.

Roundtable is an initiative by iSPIRT under the Playbooks pillar where small group of practitioners come together to discuss and resolve their business challenge. This is peer discussion anchored and facilitated by an leading practitioner whose further ahead and solved some of the issues.

Roundtable is curated list of practitioners, please share your name to be invited for the roundtable. Mention what problems would you like to discuss and how you would contribute to the roundtable discussion, that will allow us to send the invitation at earliest. Apply here for the PlaybookRT

20/03/201419/03/2014

Product Management mantras from the 26th Playbook Roundtable

The 26^th playbook roundtable was held last week (8^th March 2014) at Delhi NCR and brought together over 15 startup and product practitioners to discuss and gain insights on some of the challenging aspects of growth and monetization in product companies. This roundtable was hosted at Eko India Financial Services office in Gurgaon, and was led by Amit Ranjan, Cofounder of Slideshare, and Amit Somani, CPO of MakeMyTrip. In a span of over 5 hours, a diverse set of topics were discussed. Prominent takeaways from the roundtable were insights on approaches to pricing, virality, growth decisions, pivoting, user experience etc. The following paragraphs detail the key learning from each of these above aspects.

Pivoting in a Business

Creating a successful company is essentially a search for the repeatable and scalable business model. To succeed in this search, companies should frequently make and test predictions about what will work in their business models. Businesses, no matter, which stage they are in are always pivoting. As a business, while you do focus on your revenues, but you also need to constantly keep thinking what will drive the revenue in 3 years from now and ensure that you slowly move in that direction. Of the so many internet companies, perhaps only a handful will survive 10 years. Amit Somani mentioned how MakeMyTrip is constantly looking at the next big thing. It started from a flight booking venture for NRIs to become the largest flight booking portal for the Indian market and is already evolving to cater to hotels and holiday packages. The next challenge for the company is mobile and ensuring that the company is successful in an increasingly mobile world.

Amit Ranjan talked about how often ventures have to 3-4 side projects or “distractions” that help you understand what will work in a fast changing industry and ensure you evolve to address these changes.

Moving from early adopters to 10x Growth

One of the best ways to achieve 10x growth after successfully validating your product and without spending too much or no money is virality. By definition, virality is designing and engineering your product such that it markets itself. A viral product derives much of its growth from its current users recruiting new users. A user could recruit another through a simple invitation (“Check out this product, it’s cool/useful/entertaining!”), or directly through using the product (“I want to send you money on PayPal!”). Virality is not an accident. It is engineered. Virality is more about width and depth. Amit Ranjan shared interesting insights on how the homepage of Slideshare during the initial days was designed for virality (with several banners and stickers to attract audience) during the initial days and when the portal was able to achieve significant growth, the homepage was redesigned for user experience.

Prioritizing Customer Inputs in a B2B Product

If you manage a product or service in the business-to-business (B2B) market, customer requests for features will be a regular part of your work. Requests come in through the sales team, service reps, and senior management, as well as directly from customers themselves. This makes it difficult for companies to decide which feature to include in the product or not. A good thumb of rule to decide whether to include the feature or not is that if 3 customers want it or a pushy a customer wants it and you can sell it to 2 more customers, then you should go ahead and include that feature. A key issue is to how do you know multiple customers have the same request? A common way is to utilize software which allows customers to post ideas, suggestions and requests. There are idea management providers that are good for this. Or you can user customer feedback sites. These asynchronous, always-on, open-to-all sites are well-suited for capturing suggestions.

In addition, you may need to check other areas. Your email often contains customer suggestions. Or you have a service ticket database you can check. Relevant knowledge will be in people’s heads, those who directly work with customers.

Also, it is very important to validate this feature. This can be done by rolling out first to your employees and then to few customers. This will help validate your thoughts.

Documentation and User Training

Generating user training manuals and videos can be a tedious job, especially for ERP kind of solutions, especially when the product is frequently undergoing changes. Also, the general trend seems to be that users have stopped reading trend. Even if people did decide to read the instructions, showing too many at once increases users cognitive load. Because users cannot read the hint overlay and use the app at the same time, they are forced to memorize the instructions and then apply them. Thus, it is more effective to focus on a single interaction rather than attempting to explain every possible area of the user interface.

Rather than generating documents and videos which will very soon become redundant, a better approach will be to have built in CTAs in the product to help/guide the users. This includes things such as built in FAQs (built using services such as Zendesk), using coachmarks etc. Presenting hints one-by-one, at the right moment, makes it a lot easier for users to understand and learn instructions. This interaction pattern has the added benefit of teaching the user at which point in the workflow these interactions or functions become applicable.

Making Sense of Data

As a product usage grows, enormous amount of data gets collected and sometimes making sense of the data becomes a challenge for Product Managers. It is no wonder that big players such as LinkedIn, Facebook etc. have large teams comprising of data scientists. Data crunching from this team of scientists even help the companies to validate the probability that a particular feature will be liked by their audience.

Product Managers are knee deep in the product and data can help take an unbiased look at the product, often yielding amazing insights and learnings. Data Analytics are important for one major reason: What you don’t measure, you can’t improve. Without knowing what the state of the system is, it is very hard, if not impossible, to do much to change or affect the system. You can, of course, make changes blind, but without analytics you will never know whether the system was changed or whether nothing happened. It allows you to see what is currently happening, make a change and see what effect the change has.

A good way to make sense of data is to have an hypothesis and then look for local maximas. Apart from that, product managers can apply operations such as segmentation, funnels and cohorts to make more sense of data. Over time, as the system changes and improves, the KPIs (and consequently the metrics) will change, which in turn leads changes in what needs to be measured. It is likely that new flows and metrics will be discovered that prove crucial to the system so whatever the analytics used, they will need to be continuously adapted to meet this change and keep you on top of what’s happening in your product.

Encouraging Users to Sign Up

For a consumer product, completely logged in experience versus a logout experience is a choice between distribution and engagement. Slideshare and Youtube offer a complete logout experience as users do not need to login to access the portal. Linkedin devised an interesting way to incentivize users to sign up. They show a glimpse of profile to users who then need to sign up to view the full profile. It is also imperative that the process to get users through the front door of an application and engaging with content needs to be as simple and seamless as possible if an organization wants to win and keep mindshare.

Increasingly a lot of companies are using gamification, but it is more geared towards engagement rather than acquisition.

10/03/201410/03/2014

Key Takeaways from the 25th #PlaybookRT at Bangalore – Sales for Startups

The 25th playbook roundtable held last week (01 March 2014) brought together about 14 startup practitioners to discuss and gain insights on some of the challenging aspects of Sales in product companies. This roundtable was hosted at Accel Partners office in Bangalore, and was led by Aneesh Reddy, from Capillary Technologies. In a span of about 5 hours, a diverse set of topics were discussed. Prominent takeaways from the roundtable were insights on approaches to pricing, decision making during sales cycles, dealing with resellers and partners, setting up a sales team for the first time, how to plan for your Sales team when you are scaling up and dealing with Sales in new geographies. The following paragraphs detail the key learning from each of these above aspects.

When to setup your first sales team?

Entrepreneurs should be selling themselves till they achieve repeatable revenue streams, irrespective of the sector and nature of the offering. One should start looking at a dedicated sales team only when the founding team cannot anymore respond to leads / queries in a time bound manner.

If the founding team does not have deep skills in selling, it may be useful to involve a consultant to setup the team and the processes and learn on the way. Firms such as Gosonix have helped setup the sales processes for startups as they began to address increasing customer interest.

There are also organizations that provide inside sales services to startups. A few startups such as Freshdesk have benefited by use of such extended inside sales teams.

Inside Sales Operations and Management

Based on the target geography that you are working on, one should use the qualification criteria to build a sales pipeline. Macro parameters such as number of employees or revenue of the enterprise in the segment and country that you are targeting to sell provide good starting points to develop the qualification criterion.

Inside sales activities have yielded good results in English speaking countries such as US and Europe, however, has been very difficult and non-efficient in UAE, South Asia and non English speaking parts of Africa.

Accent training is a must if you are reaching out to customers outside India. Training partners are available to help you with accent training needs of your sales team.

For markets such as South Asia, cold calling does not work – since language barriers and culture is not very assimilative. Field business development operations are cheaper than inside sales operations if the target market of focus is on South Asian countries.

Sales Best Practices

A 30 second script consisting of factoids describing who you are, what you do, which customers have you dealt with, how has it helped them is a must for any startup Sales – irrespective of whether you set shop just today, or if you are scaling your startup.
Have a clear separation of duties amongst your lead generators and deal closers. Usual practice is to hire a deal closing guy for about 5 lead generators.

Ensure efficiency in your Sales operation by tracking the conversion of calls to meetings to actual leads and finally to conversions or drop-outs. Expect about 1 lead to come for qualification from about 10 calls on an average.

Once you have a lead, qualify the lead using the B.A.N.T or the more comprehensive S.C.O.T.S.M.A.N technique to ensure you spend the optimal time on that lead.

Differentiate and track marketing generated leads and inside sales generated leads. Provide visibility to the Field Sales personnel on the source of the lead to ensure they have the right context to qualify and initiate a discussion with the prospect.

Indian customers – especially in the SMB segment take a lot of time to decide to buy. Keep them engaged continuously with good marketing content after initial contact. They will get in touch with you and buy when they decide to go ahead.

Pricing

Pricing is the trickiest aspect in Selling. For offerings where the value added by your offering / solution can be calculated directly or indirectly, pricing conversations is a lot easier – since you have data to back your discussion. However, in other cases, one has to use all available information and work on a range to begin with.

For startups that are in their early stages, back calculate based on your expenses to decide on pricing. Another approach for SaaS based early stage startups is to price based on the CAC (Customer Acquisition Costs). General agreement is that a CAC of about 5-6 months is ideal, and a CAC of upto 1 year is tolerable for early stage startups.

A barebones calculation of pricing should be based on the product of revenues, gross margin you want to derive and customer lifespan for your offering. David Skok has good articles on these topics.

Complement your Sales efforts by your Marketing efforts

Use marketing as complementary aspect to sales – apart from leveraging it for various aspects of building your brand and communication etc. Nurture your customers by segmenting them based on the previous interaction by your company and send relevant content that could be of use to them.

For startups targeting global customers, ensure that you generate adequate content by means of customer acquisition stories, case studies, announcement of new customer wins, participation in events etc. This will help build the initial set of opportunities from the marketing side.

Use the rental lists of magazines that are widely read in the field of your offerings to increase mindshare. Blog or write regularly on Industry trends in some of these magazines to offer a good discount. Engaging with a PR agency based on the geography in the early stages of market entry also can pay off.

iSPIRT ProductNation Playbook RoundTable on Sales(Bangalore)

In line with iSPIRT ProductNation Playbook objectives to support the emerging software product development industry in India, we are conducting a Round Table (#PlaybookRT) to share, discuss and learn from experiences for sales challenges and growth for the product companies.

What can you take out from participating in #PlaybookRT

1. Understanding of Go to market choices and exploring the right kind of sales channel for your Organization (Direct, Channel, Inside Sales, Online sales)

2. Measuring sales productivity / metrics – Importance of a pipeline and effective lead generation

3. Leading practices followed by effective sales team, Sales structure and process alternatives in industries / companies

4. Reviewing alignment between organization strategy and sales structure

Who can attend?

The session is open to the company’s CEO, Founders or head of strategy/Sales. Applications are due by the date – 25th Feb. The goal is to have at most 12 companies so as to make the interaction effective. If there are other interested attendees, we will arrange subsequent roundtables. We will confirm the short-listed companies by date

This PlaybookRT is FREE and there are no charges.

To apply for this PlaybookRT please fill up the online application and we will get back to you by 26th Feb ’13. The Playbook Roundtable will be led by Aneesh Reddy, Capillary Technologies

08/11/201309/11/2013

Everything is an experiment

A few days back, Sameer, Avinash and I chatted about my learnings from doing the Product Nation Playbook Roundtables as part of iSPIRT. If you’re curious what they are, here’s how iSPIRT describes this program.

We convert conversations into playbooks for product entrepreneurs. Product companies need a different mindset than IT services businesses. They need to anticipate customer needs rather than just react to them. They need to brand themselves in very different ways and create IP that will disrupt the marketplace. They need deep technologists rather than fungible engineers. And so on. pn.ispirt.in will be the platform for enabling crucial conversations around these issues amongst practitioners. It will use an evidence based methodology to shine light on successful playbooks.

From iSpirt website.

I believe building products is a continuous and highly impactful experiment that one can do. More so in today’s digital day and age. Here’s a short video put together by Sameer that captures my thoughts.

Sridhar Ranganathan(CrediBase) sharing his views on “Building a Product is Experiment” from ProductNation on Vimeo.

The key aspect of every experiment is that there’s definitely an OUTCOME! Whether that is good or bad, is something left to the hypothesis one frames, before the experiment.

Meanwhile, a bunch of folks who’re very interested in seeing the product ecosystem evolve in India, have come together to create #PNCamp, a 2-Day Boot Camp for product entrepreneurs. You can learn more about it here, and if you’re a product entrepreneur, I’ll strongly recommend getting an invite for this – you’ll learn a bunch from it. Even this is an experiment, to learn from how to evolve the ecosystem. Do you agree with me? Share your thoughts in the comments section.