I spoke yesterday at Startup Saturday Pune on Go to market (GTM) for Hitech products. Sandeep and Vishwa are two fantastic people who run this forum. Sandeep is a passionate and articulate entrepreneur who runs Acton Biotech while Vishwa is the quiet and meticulous entrepreneur who runs eventNu.com. Both of them keep coming up with ideas that I find exciting. This time, they started off several weeks ahead of the event by creating a question bank on an email thread and then on eventnu.com. Thus, all the speakers knew exactly what was needed from us and we came prepared. In the end, Vishwa did a rapidfire section where he asked some of the questions that we had not covered. Thus, it was a session where specific problems were addressed. However, given the format and time constraint, I think we didn’t cover as much ground as we could have.

In the blog posts to follow, I’ll attempt to answer some of the questions from the question bank. The idea is to expand on what I said at the event and also to reach a larger audience. I’ll post these to the Headstart Blog as well and will also invite other folks to answer these questions. The questions I’m looking to answer in the next few posts are:

1. I am a technical person and CTO of my startup. I have no experience in sales and marketing. Where should I begin from ?
2. How do I get contacts for selling software? I know that in the beginning, I have to go and sell my product, but how do I get contacts? Cold calls?
3. When shall I decide to go for PR? How much spend is optimal on PR?
4. My services are not very differentiated (I am typical web services company). How do I get mindshare from my potential customers?
5. I am a six (twelve?) month old startup and I have been doing mostly been doing things pro bono for large companies/clients. How do I ask them to write a cheque?
6. Building a client list through personal contacts / references is fine. But this is not a scalable model. This would require your personal expertise all the time. How do you build a sales team then?
7. Sales Tactics

• How do you get past the receptionist / gatekeeper?
• How do you find out who is the decision maker in the target company?
• You found a contact and wrote a mail to the individual. He/she does not respond back. What do you do?
• You give them a call. They respond by saying that they are busy this week. Please call after a week/month. What do you do in this case?

Look forward to comments, views and more questions.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 India License.

Honda recalled its Ciy sedans in India last week. From all I could make out, hardly any City owners had felt any problems. In fact, the first thing that Honda’s actions did was to make people aware of a problem that they were oblivious of. And all this at a significant cost to Honda.

Let us for a moment try to step into the shoes of the person who made the decision. On one hand is a defect that could probably lead to issues for some of the customers and on the other hand is a sure cost across the entire customer base. On one side is is the customer and on the other is the shareholder. One option is to do nothing for now and to prepare for a situation where the probable problem does become real. Do a recall at that time and be ready with a media offensive to contain any possible PR fallout. Thus the choice is postponed and exercised only if there is a problem. The other option is to do the recall right away and bear the enormous cost. Also minimise the PR battle. In any cash flow based analysis that B-Schools teach, option 1 is likely to win out. Yet option 2 was chosen. Why?

The difference lies in ordering of priorities. B-school education is full of tools appropriate for optimisation of profits which is what shareholders want. This is is usually right for most situations that MBA grads encounter – large running business. Most choices are for shareholder. But any person who has started any business knows well – optimisation for the customer comes first. If there is no customer, there is no business. A B-school education usually assumes that optimisation is already achieved for the customer and the task at hand is to optimise for the shareholder.  In the Honda situation, this assumption doesn’t hold true. Hence, there really is only option 2.

I think that truly stellar companies and leaders never forget that customer comes first and this is what distinguishes them from the good ones. Honda has demonstrated that it still stands committed to the customers. Kudos Honda!

Mark Suster has written an absolute gem of a post which highlights the differences between sales at a startup and a large company. Many startups try to “scale up” sales too quickly by making some of the mistakes that Mark points out.

The post reminded me of another gem of a book which talks a lot of the same things through the story of invention of the wheel and selling it.

While the approach to the customer changes as the product and the startup evolves, what does not change is the purchase process and the organisation at the customer’s end. Understanding these can mean the difference between success and failure. More on that in later post.

The most difficult challenge for a consumer focused product lies in its adoption. Even on the enterprise side, the biggest challenge post purchase is adoption. But exactly how difficult is it?

An answer is available if one rephrases the question to: how long does it take for a habit to form or in other words complete adoption to happen. A team of psychologists at University College of London have answered the question for simple tasks and it stands at a staggering 66 repetitions. This is an average across several kinds of activities and thus only an indicative number when it comes to a specific activity. Furthermore, its for complete adoption – most of us would settle for partial adoption to a level that repeat usage happens.

The most interesting bit is that we now have a number to look at whenever we look at a product or service that forces a change in the user’s routine. We need to ask ourselves – what should we do that the user would use our product 66 times. Most products and service wouldn’t be able to come up to this benchmark and that explains why products requiring deep changes in habits almost always fail.

Read the paper here or a more layman description here.

Image via Wikipedia

Indian internet entrepreneurs usually follow the US market and are usually very well acquainted with the key players. However, Chinese market is seldom followed and rarely understood. Its a pity given that it is the single largest market on Internet. Its also a market where the US majors have failed to make inroads and the indigenous companies dominate. Initially it had to do with language difficulties but now it seems more and more about understanding of the market. I am very interested in the Chinese market for two reasons. First, in terms of stage of evolution and historical background, China has similarities with the Indian market. Thus, there are perhaps lessons one can learn. Second, its a large market and therefore offers opportunities.

One of the greatest successful internet entrepreneurs from China is Jack Ma who founded Alibaba. Alibaba started out as a B2B exchange but today includes online retailer Taobao (190 Million users) and online payment service Alipay (300 million users compared to PayPal’s 223 million accounts) amongst other businesses. In spite of such success, very little is known about Alibaba or Jack Ma outside of China.

Here are some interesting quotes form Jack’s interview by Charlie Rose. I’ve selected the ones which show a marked difference in opinion. Do watch/read the whole interview. Quite instructive for Indian entrepreneurs.

(Our core competence is) culture.  It’s not the technology.  I think technology is a tool.

We believe customer number one, employee number two, shareholder three.

it still takes a long time for China to catch up (with US) — the technology is easy, but to catch up with the culture, the innovation, the system takes some time.

We have a couple of million, you’re a rich guy.  We have 10 to 20 million, it’s a capital.  We have over a hundred million, that’s the social resources.

Its also interesting that he characterizes the China opportunity as new solutions and not as just the sheer size of consumer class. I think the same holds true for the Indian opportunity too. Yet another remarkable aspect is that he wants to use his wealth to create 200 Million more jobs and “create hope”. This is quite different from the stance taken by people such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. Jack says that he can do a better job of it than the Chinese Govt. If an entrepreneur can say that in China, why not India!