Established in 2012 with over 10,000 registered customers throughout India, South East Asia, Middle East, and South Asia, Unicommerce is a leading e-commerce and supply chain management technology platform that will now be handling the complete warehouse operations of UrbanClap. 

Post the sign-up, Abhiraj Bhal, CEO UrbanClap, stated, “As we scale up our operations, it is important to invest in the right technology partners. With a robust and scalable solution like Unicommerce as our warehouse management solution, we are confident our supply chain operations will become more seamless.”

UrbanClap has been in the home services marketplace for over 5 years now and allows consumers to hire trained professionals for various services for their day to day needs ranging from fitness trainers, cleaners, beauticians, etc. The collaboration with Unicommerce will not only contoure the whole process of warehouse management but also allow UrbanClap to manage logistics, and track returns. Unicommerce will be handling the warehouse operations for UrbanClap for 12 city stores and a network of 4 warehouses.

UrbanClap made the announcement via a blog post, following which the alliance was covered by various media houses. Sharing his thoughts on the partnership, Kapil Makhija, CEO Unicommerce said “We are now seeing increased e-commerce penetration across not only products but also services, and thus we are ensuring that our solutions are robust and flexible to adapt to new use cases. We already have a very scalable platform that is used to process more than 120 million shipments every year, and thus we want to ensure that such a scalable platform can be seamlessly deployed across new industries and paradigms.” 

The post Unicommerce Signed Up by Urbanclap to Achieve Faster Service Operations appeared first on unicommerce.com.

Hi everyone, I am Satya Singh from Satya Shoes. I am selling online from last two years. And it’s been one year I am doing with Unicommerce. And I would say that it’s a wonderful stuff to increase your business multiples.

I am a seller from Agra and I am doing footwear business from last 20 years. I used have a manufacturing house, but from last 3 years I am doing it online. And the best way to get online is through Unicommerce. You can start your business with no inventory.

Earlier I used to sell around 60-100 pairs of shoes on an average. But after Unicommerce, the best part is that of inventory management. I don’t have to block the inventories for different different channels.

So I can even sell a single pair of shoes across all two or three or four or five market places without blocking my money or inventory. So the best part is the inventory only that I can manage inventory without any hassle and also the order management of Unicommerce is perfect.

It’s been year now, and my business has been increased 5 times. My average selling been has reached to around 500 pairs. And I would say that it’s only due to Unicommerce due to which I am able to manage the orders and each and everything.

Thanks to Unicommerce. Specially, the team is very much dedicated. You can call the support team any time, they ready to help us out at any stage, at any issue. I got training to my staff and to me also, which was easy and hassle free.

The post Seller Success Story 2 #SellmorewithUnicommerce appeared first on unicommerce.com.

My name is Md. Adil. I am a shoe seller from Agra. I have been into online selling for past 3 years. And I am associated Unicommerce from last 1 year. We have family business of shoes and hence, I thought online selling would be better as we can see -these days, sellers are using online platform for their business. And also because Unicommerce is an excellent solution in online multichannel inventory management, better than the other available options in the market.

The advantage that I got from Unicommerce is their customer service, which I liked very much. Whenever, there is any issue whether technical or other, you can immediately reach them through email or call them directly for help.

Besides, through Unicommerce I am able to sell on multiple channels- as it got almost all the major channels integrated, like –Paytm, Flipkart, Amazon, eBay, obviously Snapdeal and so on. At least on the channels I am selling at are available in Unicommerce. That’s why Unicommerce is a better option for me to sell on multiple channels, for multi-management.

Another advantage of Unicommerce – it is very economic (cost effective). Spending 2-3 rupees per order, even if your product is low priced, range between of Rs.500 to Rs.600 then also it’s very economic, very much cost effective.

I don’t think, one should think twice to use Unicommerce.

The post Seller Success Story 1 #SellmorewithUnicommerce appeared first on unicommerce.com.

They were struggling. Not because their products were Bad, But because their products were too Good.

The Vanca is a Woman’s apparel brand which has quickly established itself in a fairly new e-commerce industry of India. It has become quite popular among young fashion conscious women with its fresh range every season of well designed, value for money apparels. It now sells on most of the top marketplaces of India.

But the story was different 18 months ago. They were struggling. Not because their products were bad, but because their products were too good. The demand from customers and portals was higher than they had expected. They had tasted success, response was encouraging and they wanted to build on that. They wanted to transition themselves from ‘testing the waters’ phase to ‘scaling up’ phase.
Never give a Machine’s job to a person Or the other way round.
During Transition – That’s exactly when they understood the problems of managing growing business using Excel sheets.

“Our operations were too person-dependent and thus unreliable. The whole set up was good for small operations. Not for the growth that we were foreseeing”, says Rajeev Sinha, the founder of The Vanca.”And since I had worked globally as SAP consultant before, I knew that we needed a good software solution to our problems”

Coming from a Tech background, Rajeev inherently understood that – never give a machine’s job to a person or the other way round. We believe in that too and that’s why Unicommerce automates almost every aspect of order fulfilment process. “Perfect Solution. I had very clear requirements and Unicommerce fitted perfectly” as how Rajeev puts it.

Unicommerce changed the way they were running their business operations. By allowing them to manage and automate end to end flow of orders, it minimized the uncertainty at operations level. Features like one click returns management, payment reconciliations, channel mapping took the pain out of running an e-commerce venture. Work habits of everyone involved in running The Vanca, are now centred around Processes. The systematic approach that Unicommerce bring in acts as an anchor for other processes in the company. It has really enabled us to be process driven organization, Rajeev agrees.

“While discussing with my business colleagues, I always tell them – Because of Unicommerce, We can spend more time on our Core Business Functions”, – this is how he articulates the value Unicommerce brings in to The Vanca.

The Vanca confidently relies on us because they know, they have experienced the robustness of Unicommerce solution. The product, Uniware, not just blurs away the complexity by its easy to use, useful features but the certainty it brings in delivering results, makes it dependable.

Scale Changes Things.

Not just your work habits, processes but most importantly – Scale changes How you take business decisions. Because Scale does not come alone. It brings with it the Risk. Wrong decisions can literally put you back to square one. At such time, ‘Guts’ are not enough. You need information. Lots of it. Relevant one. The one you are looking for. In a format which is effective. That’s one crucial area, Unicommerce scores big time with its customers. The Vanca loves the fact that Unicommerce captures every piece of data which they can curate later. Whether its reports on each customer or Item master report or any such useful report. Everything is possible. That’s how Unicommerce turns ‘Scale’ into an advantage.

“Perfect Solution. I had very clear requirements and Unicommerce fitted perfectly” – Rajeev, MD, The Vanca (He worked globally as a SAP consultant before creating The Vanca)

The post Today we spend More time on our Core Business Functions” – The Vanca Founder appeared first on unicommerce.com.

When you are selling ‘Experiences’, every little thing counts.

Jazzmyride is India’s largest online seller of Car and Bike accessories. Though it started barely 3 years ago, it has been on an amazing ride since then. Not only did they go from 0 to 7000 in terms products range on their website very quickly, they have bagged exclusive online selling rights of some of the most reputed global brands like Turtle Wax (USA), ABRO (USA), Xenos.

For Jazzmyride, accessories were never just accessories. For them, accessories were about ease and style. They were about giving a newer experience, a better experience to their customers. They were selling ‘Experiences’ to people, neither products, nor service. And when you are into such business, every little thing counts. Products being available (in stock) and timely deliveries – such things or the absence of such things definitely contribute to making of that experience.

While scaling up their operations, one of the biggest challenges for Mr Sunil Dhingra, the founder, was to retain that great experience, retain their brand, their positioning. But this had to be achieved in a cost efficient manner. They wanted to do it with as less hands as possible. That was possible only if they could automate tedious man hours consuming activities. Technology was the answer.

“Cloud based Unicommerce allows us to think beyond boundaries and build a business not bound by any location constraints”

Indian E-Commerce industry is toughest to be in.
Only the most Comprehensive and the Best E-Commerce Product can survive in this industry. 

Unfortunately, Jazzmyride, could not find the Tech solution which could solve their problems. They explored many products, even tried one American Software product. But it failed the scalability test after they crossed 1 lakh orders. They realized that every e-commerce industry in the world is not the same. In fact, Indian e-commerce industry is very tough to be in. India competes with US in geography, competes with China in population, and competes with Europe in diversity – that’s exactly why Indian e-commerce is toughest to be in. Any product for Indian e-commerce has to be very comprehensive in terms of depth and breadth of scope and features. Product which worked in India can work anywhere else in the world. But the same is not true for product made outside India.
That’s why Sunil started looking for a product with global standards of quality, tailored for Indian e-commerce industry and made by guys who understand technology and e-commerce like the back of their hand. And he found all these three things with Uniware, the product by Unicommerce team.

During the Demo of Unicommerce, Jazzmyride was delighted to see Unicommerce automatically fetching orders from Multiple marketplaces and updating inventories on all those channels. They found this feature so valuable that they were ready to pay us the full amount just for that. That’s why they were pleasantly surprised that they got the ‘rest of the features’ without any additional cost. Of course, there were many sophisticated and useful features in the ‘rest’, which they later found out once they started using Unicommerce!Predictably, their adoption of Unicommerce had an immediate impact on their dispatch SLAs adherence. With Uniware they were touching 97%, a figure they did not think was possible at the scale they were operating at. Not just that, but even while growing rapidly, they could cut down manpower cost by a whopping 30% ensuring better profitability numbers.

“The performance of Unicommerce has gone from Good to Great since we started using it.”

Better Numbers is Just Half the Story!

Apart from these quantifiable effects, Sunil vouches for some unquantifiable but immensely important results of Unicommerce adoption. Sunil feels that Unicommerce has enabled Jazzmyride to be

Agile – even at this scale
Flexible – even while using a process driven system
Light – even with increasing work load
Focused – even while geographically scattered

The two way auto syncing with multiple channels brings motion, pace to the work. It keeps things moving instead of getting stuck at any place waiting for human intervention. That keeps the organization agile. The depth of control that Uniware allows its users while using any features makes them feel empowered rather than feeling restricted by systemic approach. The numerous custom fields allows every company to bend some rules thereby giving them the flexibility required in handling off the track cases.

Anything that can be automated has been automated in Uniware. That’s why you can get so much done with very less manpower, keeping your team light. And Being on Cloud, all you need is a browser to manage your business, from anywhere, any time of the day. This factor becomes increasingly important when, like for Jazzmyride, when you are dealing with multiple warehouses, vendors, dealers all scattered geographically, on everyday basis. You will never feel over whelmed or lost by the geographical spread of your business. Uniware enables you to be focused, not get side-tracked, lose sight of priorities, what’s important. In fact, Sunil has been quite impressed by the fact that Uniware allows them to work so closely with vendors, partners and dealers. And he credits Unicommerce for helping him implement newer, out of the box business models successfully. In his own words,

“Any e-retailer worth his salt, who is selling on multiple e-commerce websites, NEEDS Unicommerce. Period.”

The post Despite growing, this is how Jazzmyride stays Agile, Focussed, Flexible and Light appeared first on unicommerce.com.

“Would you recommend Unicommerce to other businesses ?”

Rajesh replied, “No. Honestly speaking, I would not want my competitors to know about Unicommerce! :-)”

Read on to find out why Rajesh of Rajrang feels that Unicommerce is their secret weapon against the competitors.

From Chaos of Frustration to Silence of Growth
“It was chaos. It really was. Before we started using Unicommerce”, says Rajesh, who handles entire operations of Rajrang. When everything and everybody from the team sits at the same place, chaos was bound to happen. But they had no other option. To ensure, each one is on the same page when it comes to status of every order, Rajesh had to resort to this.
Because, in absence of any working system, miscommunication and bad information flow were major problems. When new order would come, they would be clueless if they have the product in their warehouse or not, where exactly it is. Orders would come but often get stuck somewhere.
Reason ? They would be forgotten or get lost in the chaos. Inventory levels were not optimized. So often they would find themselves trying to procure from vendors on fire fighting basis after getting orders Or Sometimes inventory would go bad because it was stored for too long without any demand in the market. Syncing of orders and inventory on multiple marketplaces was manual – making it a tedious activity, very much prone to human error.

To solve this, Rajesh brought everybody and everything at one place, physically. Even tried to use a custom built software. But things just got worse instead of improving. End result – Not just the customer but even the ones running the company were quite frustrated. But today, the picture is completely different.
With adoption of Unicommerce, first of all, they could have different teams sitting at different places and accessing the same set of information easily. Cloud based Uniware does not need to be installed. That’s why all you need is a browser to use it. Different teams can access it from different machines. Since Unicommerce does not charge per license, cost was not a factor at all. As they say “Unicommerce gave us the breathing space which was very much needed!”. Today, they have shifted the warehouse away from their office. There is no chaos of frustration to be heard in Rajrang office; all you hear is the Silence of growth.

Visibility, Control, Confidence and Growth
Visibility gives you Control. And Control gives you Confidence to Grow.
Visibility into Inventory
The moment new inventory comes in after QC, it immediately reflects in the system. The moment an order comes, the inventory gets blocked automatically. “So even if I see some inventory in the warehouse, I know that it is blocked.” The visibility into inventory becomes quite crucial in a business like that of Rajrang. In fashion business, apparels tend to get ruined on storing for long time. So you have to sell them out before they expire. Otherwise, you don’t just lose market opportunity but also lose the money invested in those goods. Today, Uniware allows Rajrang a clear visibility into inventory preventing bad inventory problems. They get a snapshot of quick moving items and can easily adjust the procurement levels to match that pace.
Backward Visibility into Vendor’s Inventory
Now that their house is in order, Rajrang is keen to streamline the information flow into backward channels. And Uniware is helping them do it. With visibility into vendor’s inventory, they can confidently predict the time to fulfil for even those orders whose stock they don’t have with them. Even customers prefer slightly late delivery than not being able to buy a particular product.

Visibility into Procurement
When you are dealing with large number of vendors, the way Rajrang does, visibility into procurement can bring lots of dividends. Information like how much of what product do we order from which vendor at what time is just a click away. The quality team knows beforehand which products are going to come the next day for checking. Manager gets to evaluate vendors better and make right procurement decisions. This improved visibility has given the confidence to Rajrang to expand their vendor base as well as product range.
Visibility into your Warehouse
When you have large warehouses and when you have to take goods out frequently for photography purpose, it’s very easy to get warehouses messed up. This is exactly what happened with Rajrang. The sophisticated warehouse management feature in Uniware came to their rescue. Sitting 5 KMs away from their warehouse, Rajesh now knows exactly which product is on what shelf, thanks to the easy to use pick up lists, put away lists and other such features.
Visibility into Shipping
Your job is not over when you dispatch something from your side. Only when it reaches the customer in time, you can claim a happy customer. Earlier they used to have a team to keep track of this using excel sheets, but still all this efforts would fall short because of unavoidable human errors. Now that team just closes manifests and prints reports of tracking thanks to Uniware. With automation in shipping, today they are able to even claim the benefits of early dispatches from marketplaces.

What “Growth” looks like ?
More Marketplaces, More Geographies, More products categories, More Vendors and Ultimately More Orders!
“Even if I get hundreds of orders in a day, I can easily handle them”, says Rajesh. More importantly, we no longer let market opportunities slip away. They have started selling on many more marketplaces, many more geographies including international markets like UK, Germany and other European countries. In fact, the built in integrated marketplaces displayed in Uniware, which are available with just a click, kind of encourage the seller to sell more. The only complaint Rajesh has about Uniware is – there are so many features, new ones get added so frequently – that they have a lot of catching up to do even after using it for a year. They feel that they are yet to tap the full potential of Uniware. We could not agree more!

“Expansion into International Markets, where standards are pretty high, would not have been possible without Uniware” – Rajesh Singh, Operations Head (Rajrang)

The post Our Customers Don’t want to Recommend us to Others….and We like that! appeared first on unicommerce.com.

“Now, I would like to take you through the journey of Unicommerce of 26 months. We have learnt a lot. But I have ‘Cherry Picked Six Key’ learnings to share with you from products’ perspective, from sales perspective, selling to enterprise, selling to SMEs.” – Ankit Pruthi at Unpluggd

The speech by Ankit Pruthi of Unicommerce at Unpluggd, the prestigious start up event hosted by NextBigWhat at Bangalore in June 2014. For those who prefer to read rather than listen, the text is here –

“It’s good to see that there are a lot of people here who have just started up or have a startup baby of a year or two old. And before I begin I really want to ask a couple of questions – how many people here are thinking that whether they should startup or not? How many of them? Ok. There are a few of them. And how many of you thinking whether you should do or thinking of doing a tech product company? Anyone doing a tech product company? Ok, that’s quite a few.

So we are actually a tech product company. Let me start by introducing Unicommerce to you. So Unicommerce is a tech product company. We are essentially offering a tech platform to ecommerce companies and to sellers, who are selling on multiple market places- enabling them to manage their order, inventory and warehouses to a centralized place. Yes it’s a cloud based product.

We are founded in 2012, about 2 years back, 26 months to be exact. And we have more than 250 clients right now – enterprises plus SMEs. And collectively they would be processing close to 30,000 to 35,000 orders a day through our system. And that would essentially means around a million orders flow through our system every month. Now, I am not sure about the entire ecommerce industry numbers, but this would essentially mean 8% to 10% of total Indian ecommerce industry – that’s what we have been doing.

The company was co-founded by 3 co-founders from IIT Delhi. We were from the same batch, same hostel. We have known each other for about 12 years before starting this. So we really had great chemistry, spent hours together within college and after college.

And it was October sometime- October 2011 when we decided to do this. Now, I would like to take you through the journey of Unicommerce of 26 months. We have learnt a lot. But I have ‘Cherry Picked Six Key’ learnings to share with you from products’ perspective, from sales perspective, selling to enterprise, selling to SMEs. And these six learnings I really want you – I want to take you guys through these six learnings.

And one of it actually happened before we started. So it was 3 months before we started our company and we realized that all three of us, ever since 7 -8 years wanted to start a company. And we just could not start it because of one reason or other reason.

Because we were not in the same city, because Karun was getting married, then I had to do an MBA, then Vibhu was getting married. We could not do this any of these years. And eventually it happened when probably we were at the peak of our personal responsibilities.

All of us were married, all of us had a kid and I had to pay back my education loan. Then we thought if we could it now, we could have done it any time in the past. That’s the point – that with growing age your responsibilities keep on increasing. And there will be never a point that you will think – now is the right time it would really happen, I don’t think it would happen. So my point here is that, many times people don’t do what they want to do for the fear of worst. And what is the worst that could happen?

I think the worst is already happening when your life is just passing by and you are not living your dream. So my point here is Just Do It. Do It Right Now. I won’t say just blindly jump into it …like I knew I had a loan to pay but even if I don’t pay the loan for like 15 months, I know that bank people are not coming after me. So the ground rule can be set here is probably if you have a place to live and you have 12 to 15 months of survival money – you can start now. That’s what we did in October 2011.

We left our jobs and while serving our notice period, we were thinking what idea to implement. And it took us good 3 months time to come up with an idea of inventory and warehouse management, which is probably a 100 year old idea. And I think we all set to prove what – to prove this famous quote- “Success is 1% idea and 99% execution”.  Now we strongly believe in this quote and did believe in it then.

See, basically we evaluated many number of systems and nitty-gritties and subtleties in world, in processes, in technologies, in representation of the product to understand what execution is. And essentially what differentiates successful product versus an unsuccessful product.

We are not saying we are an established company. We are very far from where we want to be. But having achieved what we have achieved in last two years, we consider it as success in its own term.  And I would like to believe that we testify this statement to a good extent.

Now so the phase 1, the step one for our startup was ready.  We had an idea in mind, but the next step was productifying it.  So, none of us have ever been in operations or supply chain or ever worked in this domain. None of us ever visited a warehouse in our entire life. So, how will we go for building this product? That’s when we decided let us read some.

We bought a book on warehouse management. It’s a book by Karen Richard. You will be laughing that this would be the first book after schooling all three of us put together. And you would be laughing that these guys were developing software by reading a book. But it didn’t do it.

See book was- the intent of the book was to understand what the procedures are, what are the terms and what are the jargons. So if I go and meet up these industry experts they won’t laugh at me, it won’t embarrass me. So that’s what happened. We read the book and many other books, when going to meet many people. And then there is this kind gentleman Mr. Ankush Mehra who comes with 25 years of warehousing experience in retail with Reliance and many other companies and is right now co-founder the Limeroad.com. He really helped us get the product right in first go. He gave us good domain knowledge.

Apart from this, we also watched Yourtube videos for hours, videos of Amazon Fulfillment, Videos of other big ecommerce warehouses across the world. We visited a lot of warehouses, not once several times within the country- retail warehouses, ecommerce warehouses. We spent close to 30 to 45 days before writing a single line of code. Ok. This happened during mid December to January 2012.

And then for next three months we locked ourselves in a room- in a basement room, wrote the code for it and got the product ready in a next 3 months. And by the end of the 4^th month to our startup, we had a very good nice beautiful product Uniware, which we decided to launch and get a feedback from the market. And the feedback was tremendous. I mean within 3 months of its launch, we signed up 8 enterprise clients. Of which we signed up companies like- Bluestone, Snapdeal, Jabong; and by the end of 7 months of startups we were close to 8000 orders a day through our system. And this is like two and a half lakh orders a month.

We had statistics of cash flows flowing to the system. We were cash flow positive within 7 months that is when we decided to do a PR with Next Big What. And it really helped us because we got good investor interest flowing into the company. That’s when we met Nexus and within 2 to 3 months from PR, we closed a round with them.

We were really in a comfortable position 10 months down the line of starting our company. We were VC funded and we were cash flow positive. That’s a good comfortable position to be in. But during the same time we got a very good interesting learning that will be applicable to all the tech product companies in the industry who are dealing with enterprise clients specially.

I won’t call it learning because it was more of a decision at our end. We decided not to customize our product specific for clients and do configuration of the product. I will explain a bit, so 3 to 4 months into handling enterprise clients. There was a steady stream of customized requirements flowing from all directions- from all enterprise clients. Now these customized requirements could be as lame as- my warehouse manager is a left hander, so why don’t you put this submit button left hand side on the screen, it will be easier for him. Or it could be highly specific, highly genuine.

I am not saying you should not listen to your customer but should not blindly follow him. That’s very important because if you decide to use these tools right, these tools here are developers, product managers. If you decide to pick up these tools for every client, then your product is not a product anymore. It’s a project. And with 5 to 7 clients or 5 to 7 such projects running in your company – it will just kill the nimbleness of your startup. It will just kill the much needed nimbleness of your startup. And you will just procrastinate your end result which is shutting down. So I would strongly recommend against it. I would say this is a deadly no and if you decide to do it, declare yourself as a service company. Declare your product as project and probably charge – most importantly 5 to 6 to 7 times more than what you charge for a product. Then only it’s a scalable service model.

We decide to remain a product company and we said- decided to handle customization in two ways. One would be we will build every customization as a configuration in the system. So if the client wants, he can configure it at his own end and if he doesn’t want it, he doesn’t configure it. So basically it ended up as a feature in the product rather than customized development which is specific to a client. That’s how we handled specific customization in one way.

And the second or better way could be – say politely– this is not the best practice and you should not do it. The best practice which we already have in the product. You should implement it in this way. So these are the two things saying no and putting it as a configuration really helped and work for us. And these thoughts and new VC money coming in, we were all set to ramp up to add more clients.

In the next 12 to 13 months we reached out to every mid size, large size company in the country and signed up quite a few different vertical office suppliers- jewelry, furniture, apparels; signed quite a few company. And end of 20 months that was December 2013, there were around 50 enterprise clients doing 20,000 orders a day through our system. And during this period itself, we started working on another product which was targeted towards SMEs. Now these SMEs are the sellers who are selling on multiple market places like Amazon, eBay, Flipkart or Snapdeal. Now these sellers are typically SMEs, distributors, small manufacturers, boutique stores- it could be anything.

And working with them is really different experience than working with these enterprise companies which we have been working with. And we launched 20 months milestone I have put here because we have launched our SMEs product during this time.

You can see this payback during the last 6 months we have added quite a few brands and big ecommerce companies into our client portfolio. Apart from that we have added 200 SME clients. That’s why you can see the payback from 50 clients to 250 clients and our order volume per day has gone from 20,000 to 35,000.

Now, I… last six months working with these SMEs were really… we got to learn a lot during last six months. Because SMEs are very different from enterprise clients as I said in terms of sales, in terms of support, in terms of product.

The most important learnings are- I would like to share here next would be from sales perspective -when we reach out to these clients, there were some unsaid truths about SMEs industry in India that SMEs are the customers who know what they want but they don’t want to pay for it. They want it free. This is something- it’s very earlier on to say we don’t certify and we consider it as a myth.

Because, if you go to a customer, you demonstrate a value proposition in customer’s own language, in his own terms – the value proposition could be that you are saving him money; you are reducing his cost, increasing sales or improving efficiency or accuracy in his system and delivering xyz. Believe me he would be the first to come up with the objective value of your product, associate a value with it. Because these are the people who have a very good business acumen in business sense. Because many of them have grown 50-100 Crore business in a few years while people like us were preparing for IIT or fighting for may be 15% to 20% hike in their respective jobs. These are the people who come up with those 100-500 Crore businesses. So they, within flick of seconds, within a few minutes associate the value with your product. Ok…this product is worth Rs. 1 Lakh rupee a value a month or 50,000 a month to me.

And like any logical person, they won’t mind paying for it. I am quite sure they would bargain it to their last breathe but they will buy. So the lesson we have learnt here is that don’t flex your muscle when it comes to pricing. Don’t flex your muscle, wait for it. Even if you have to leave the offer on the table, wait for it. That client might come to you two weeks down the line or two months down the line. That’s the approach we have taken. It has been working good so far. Let’s see how it goes.

The second learning which we had was again to sell to business owners since they have to pay for the product. If they are convinced you are done. There is no need to sell to the end users. This pretty much holds true in the case of enterprise sales.

If I go to and sell to Jabong, Snapdeal; I don’t have to go and meet their warehouse people and convince them – this is good product, use it. But when it comes to selling to SMEs, we take the case of Tally. I am a business owner and we use Tally. I am not a great fan and still we are using it as my CEO is the end user and is accustomed to it.

So when it comes to SMEs, always and always sell to the end users. Even I will go to the extent of saying that if you have to choose to sell to anyone – sell to the end user. If he is not satisfied- pre-sales / post-sales, he will creep about the product to the boss and I really doubt you will get the second check for your product.

Since we are into cloud, we have to get checks regularly. So I would go to the extent to say that to having more and more trained people on your product eventually is like growing your own customer base or knowledge base.

In the last learning which I would like to share is around ramping up. In the last six months since we have added 100 to 200 plus clients, there were a lot of things going on in terms of sales, product, support. And one thing that I would emphasize here is you should build strong support team before really ramping up the sales. Whenever I talk on all these, one instance come to my mind.

When a seller with his mom walked into our office and they said they wanted to meet the CEO, which was me. And I was unaware of the agenda, had no clue what’s about to happen. And we stepped into the meeting room and the first sentence which I heard was “Do you want us to shut down our business, because your support guys are not picking up the phone.”  I was totally clueless. That monologue of criticizing went on probably for 10 minutes. And I was on the hearing end and probably apologized 10 times within those 10 minutes. It was really like mom scolding me for not doing my science project right. It was not good. It was a bad experience. But it was a very good learning.

Right after the meeting we put strong processes around, for support we hired bigger team, we implemented a good ticketing system. We had a system; we implemented more reporting around it. So we were using desk.com. We enforced SLA, so we right now work with the service level of 30 minutes of non automated system support. And that seller is actually one of the happiest clients we have right now. And we do have his testimonials and his picture on our website too.

So basically when dealing with the SMEs, they are very critical about these two things. They are supper critical about non delivery of committed stuff and they are critical about support services. So whatever may happen, don’t fudge on these two things. So simple things we did to avoid this was like – whenever we commit something – we have a sales team around 20 people, going and meeting 1000 sellers every month and committing different things to them.

But whenever we sign up a proposal, we make sure that we get a sign from a seller on what we have committed. This is a practice we have imposed to make sure that there is nothing non committed stuff going from our side. Similarly, we worked on our support side and I am sure there is no bad name about our product in the market. Because these SMEs work in clusters right and it’s very easy to spread a bad name around the industry and we really worked on avoiding that.

So I would like to end here with the summary of all these six learnings.  I am quite sure that we have just crashed the tip of SME ice-burg. There is a lot to learn which we will learn in the coming years. So these are the six learnings I would like to share now. Any questions? ”

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