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

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

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

Acquiring your first customers

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hiring and Motivating Salespeople

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early Product Management

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

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

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

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

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

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

SME mindset

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

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

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

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

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

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

Channel Partners

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Pricing

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

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

Some Tips and Reference Material mentioned in the round table 

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

Tweetable Tweets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After some deliberation the participants were divided into two groups:

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

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

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

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

GTM:

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

Market Discovery

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

Customer Discovery

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

Building Credibility

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

Product Management Process:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am looking forward to more such sessions.

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

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

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

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

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

Validating the product need

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

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

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

Priortizing from the Features Wish list

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

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

Role of a Product Manager (PM)

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

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

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

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

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

Eagerly looking forward to the follow-up session soon!

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

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Product RoundTable Bangalore @ Vizury Office

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some interesting takeaways from this session :

TEAM:

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

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

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

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

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

Experiences of those present:

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

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

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

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

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

PREPARED TO TAKE THE FLIGHT ?

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

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

Key considerations:

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

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

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

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

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

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

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

The practical Product Manager:

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

–       Communicate back to sales what problems engineering is facing.

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

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

–       Priorities should be clearly published in writing.

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

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

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

MARKETING

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

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

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

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

–       Use a professional UX design shop if you need to

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

SALES

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

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

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

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

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

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Announcing the First Playbook Roundtable: Positioning and messaging for Product Entrepreneurs

We are pleased to announce the first Playbook RoundTable for Product Entrepreneurs around Messaging & Positioning. A strong, differentiated & memorable product messaging is essential in creating traction for your product. Effective product messaging speaks directly in the langauage of your target audience. This Playbook Roundtable is brought to you by iSPIRT. One of the initiatives of iSPIRT is to convert conversations into playbooks for product entrepreneurs.

This Playbook Roundtable is led by Shankar Maruwada and is intended for companies that have a software product (consumer or enterprise), have initial customers and are trying to scale to the next level. They are keen to make more crisp their value proposition to the target audience and more clearly articulate their position relative to competitors.

This Playbook RoundTable will be interactive and will help your team step into the role of your target audience, map your features to benefits, organize those benefits into message themes, and summarize the product in a positioning statement.

To apply for this workshop please send a PDF document(one pager) to avinash(at)ispirt.in with the following information by 23rd March ‘2013:

  • Name of the company
  • Name and title of the intended attendee
  • Mobile phone of attendee
  • Email ID of attendee
  • The top two practical problems your company faces in messaging, communicating, positioning your product, that you would like help with. 
  • Top 2 desired outcomes from the workshopPlease share, as briefly as possible, your current resources and efforts in this area
  • Write (max 150 words) on the ‘What’ and the ‘Why’ of your product, in simple language. You may accompany this with a single visual (optional).
Find more details about the playbook roundtable here.