Startup Saturday Pune in March was on Sales and Marketing, an exciting theme that always brings a lot of insight and learning to everyone who attends.
This time we had Mr. Bipin Deshpande from Feet On Street, Mr. Mandar Shinde from Versatilecs.com and Mr. Aditya Mishra, founder of HeadStart, who all have extensive experience and exposure in sales and marketing.
Bipin started the presentation, sharing his experience with Xerox. His area of expertise is selling to enterprise customers. He talked about challenges faced by startups, 100-10-1 rule, importance of marquee customers, costing of products/ services, discounts, generating leads and several other topics.
He pointed out important things like follow the money, find out shared resources, what all to consider when planning a product price, etc.
Next was Aditya, one of the founders of Headstart, who shared his experience at TCS where last year he crossed revenue of INR 50 cr. and the next year target is INR 200 cr.
Last but not least was Mandar who opted to directly get into Q&A.
The speakers were all invited by me to come on stage and answer queries on Sales and Marketing. Participants asked questions on channel partners, problems, services, etc. We also had a rapid-fire questions picking up session with questions that have been collected over the past few days.
At the end people interacted one-on-one over cold-drinks & namkeen, an excellent way to end a fantastic Startup Saturday.
The overall learning was:
# Find out the decision maker
# Build a relationship with the customer (or prospective customer for that matter)
# Follow money (If you see that your prospective customer doesn’t make money then may be you need to think again)
# Keep calling. Make a habit of calling your (prospective) customers.
# Hire a sales guy who is more interested in commission and do not put a cap on his commission. He will work hard to get more n more commission.
# Work hard for sure but try to find out smarter ways of finding out point of sales
# Collaborate with other who are targeting same customers but may be not directly competing with your product
# Build channel partners/ resellers
I would like to thank Mr. Nikhil Karkare of Millenium School, Pune who video- recorded the overall event.
Next event is on Social Media, and we’re looking forward to even more active participation from everyone!
Contributed by Vishwa Vivek Garg