The Journey: Every company is a sales company!
Ravi Sharma and Utkarsh Singh are two Co-founders of SalesBook and this article is written to give you a brief introduction to our story at SalesBook so far.
Last year has been very different due to covid and lockdowns. Ravi and I also spent a significant time at home after a long time. While at home, Ravi got intrigued by how his Dad’s timber shop does business. Many business tasks still used to happen using book & pen or segmented apps. He got his dad to adapt to many of the solutions in the market including making use of Pagarbook for payroll management of his 4 staff and Khatabook for management of cash flows. Softwares helped a lot to make business smooth, especially in testing times. But he noticed a significant gap in a business function which is the backbone of every business — Sales.
Sales management still widely happens on books or segmented apps like notes, alarms, and sometimes excel too. Usually, people write down the contacts and all others follow on task, reminders, or related notes across pages. This leads to inefficiency as most of the things need to be remembered in mind and information gets misplaced many times leading to higher sales conversion cycles & missed leads having a negative impact on the revenue of a business.
The Problem
In November we did an analysis of how big the problem could be:
- A big chunk of SMEs need this solution in India, approx 40 Million+ (There are 14M+ retail outlets in India and 63M+ SME, retailers are more involved in B2C relationship and would require marketing-oriented solution while others sales)
- Another group is of agents which we believe is 10 Million+ would require this solution (Insurance agents, resellers, real estate agents, Direct Selling Agents)
- The ability to work in the sales of business also gives exposure in working capital management and the ability to bridge the $360 Billion financing gap in this segment in India
- UPI has seen a huge penetration in India in the retail segment but B2B transactions are much higher in value which is beyond the limit of UPI and cheques are still common in use in this segment
- The global outlook of the problem makes us think that product could find huge value in SEA, Latin America, and related geographies where CRM penetration is limited in SMBs compared to developed markets (Infusionsoft is a company that targets SMBs in developed markets, Zoho is another example)
- We want to target 150M+ SMBs and agents globally and target the $5.2 Trillion financing deficit in this segment
The Approach
We believe that there are few core things that would be important in increasing adoption:
- Distribution: Product driven growth of using communications through SalesBook App to increase reach amongst new users and using digital channels with communication in local language and directly targeting the consumer pain points.
- Onboarding: Traditional CRM companies take hours to onboard, a Salesforce representative took a 30 min session with us to explain the product and another 1 hr session for $200 is to be purchased before being able to use the software. We believe these SMBs won’t be able to put this much time and effort into onboarding so our aim is to design a very quick onboarding within 1 minute.
- Product: Simple mobile-first approach by designing in native languages is the key to making usability easy for the product as many SMBs would be transitioning from traditional methods of book & pen and basic mobile apps and a complex desktop driven approach followed by current CRMs would make it tough.
Is this the right time?
We believe the JIO effect was important in kicking off the digitization and smartphone revolution in this nation. Another notable effect was from players like KhataBook and OkCredit in 2018–19 which started the SaaS penetration for this sector and then 2020 was the year for penetration of other SaaS segments whether it be Dukaan making Shopify or PagarBook making workday for this segment through stellar product-driven growth.
November Pilot
In November first week we connected with Ravi’s father and around 40 of his father’s friends in the timber and leather business in Kanpur and Lucknow. Also connected with agents of RSPL group, LIC agents, and 2nd hand car sellers to get more feedback.
We spent around more than 50 hours talking to all the users. People were very welcoming and explained their business problems deeply on what features they wanted. People even showed us how they wanted features to be like, and how simple they wanted the experience to be.
The important functionalities that we realized were
- Ease for the person to store leads/customers and directly WhatsApp them
- Add related activities to it whether it is classifying them as hot/cold or adding tasks and reminders to it
- Having a calendar to keep track of everything together
- Making proposal creation easier on mobile
- Track value of sales currently in the pipeline and closed for both accounting and motivation
After a few weeks of product research and surveying people, we two built our v1.0.0 in 4 days and released our app in the second half of November. Our v1.0.0 was downloaded by 200+ people to whom we reached out for a survey in our product research and their friends. They helped us with really valuable feedback which we incorporated over next week.
December Update
The first stable version of the App was live in December. We could see people adding their leads and customers daily and performing activities. We made a SalesBook WhatsApp account and linked to help in the app so people could directly message us without the hassle of mail or play store comment. Two of us had daily sales targets of reaching out to a minimum of 5 people in the morning and 5 in the evening each, we would add the customer profiles and add reminders for them in the night itself all in the SalesBook App. We were gaining 40–60 customers every day in December driven by user referrals, product-driven growth, play store searches, and us reaching out to few trade associations in Kanpur. By December end we had grown from more than 100 users in November to 2000+ users in December.
January Motivation
In January we reached 10k+ users, 5x growth but our real motivation came from two interactions:
- Ravi’s father and his friend circle with whom we started this journey, they observed 20%-30% more customer interactions driven by the app and much fewer sales hassle
- A user reached out to us with demand for collaboration with his father for their car shop as he was seeing 25 sales in January up from his monthly number of 15, almost a 40% growth
We regularly receive queries from users asking us about:
- Collaboration feature in the app
- Ability to even have a desktop view
- Analytics features
- Many people ask if we have a paid version too
We have a few interesting cases to share of the diverse use case of our product:
- A dental clinic using SalesBook to manage its customers
- A tuition teacher using SalesBook to manage his students
- 12-year-old teaching his parent how to use SalesBook
- Distributors like FMCG, Pharma
- Timber, textiles, paper, manufacturing, logistics industry
- Agents like real estate, banks, insurance, DSA
What’s in for February?
Currently, our active users have added more than 3 leads and customers on average. We have had transactions worth more than Rs 10 Cr recorded by these users (not all users add sales value).
How do we plan to monetize SalesBook:
- SaaS Fees: We plan to launch a Pro version of the App with unlimited leads and customers, 24*7 support, personalized proposals, and collaboration support. We will launch a paid desktop version too.
- Financial Services: We want to work towards working capital management and lending. India’s SME financing deficit is $360 Billion and this is $5.2 Trillion globally. Other avenues include building insurance, savings, and payments products for this segment.
- Affiliate Platform: One thing common about all our users is they are salespeople by profession. Giving them avenues of increasing their income through an affiliate selling marketplace and taking a percentage commission of each sale.
Thanks for reading this article. Do reach out to us if you have any suggestions or feedback at utkarsh/ravi @mysalesbook.in
