Working with 2 start-ups Exotel and Practo - both initially focussing on Indian businesses, the learning and combination of both Marketing & Sales from both these companies has been immense, and shared some of these learning's at a Start-up Leadership Program session at Mumbai.

1. Marketing & Sales in India for
SaaS Products
Small learning’s from working with
&

2. First it is only Sales – there is NO
Marketing
There is only CODE & SELL
• Go meet customers, get your initial set of
100+ paying customers and make them your
product managers & evangelists.
• Go through this and Sell.

3. Product-Market fit found?

4. Make it DIY (Do-it-yourself)
did anyone teach you how to
facebook?

5. Segment Customers

6. Measure Sales with Tools

7. Make Sales very-very easy: Automate!
So that even Garfield can sell your
product

8. SaaS Metrics – Take sometime off and
understand, read, breathe
• The Bible -
http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas/
• LTV > 3xCAC for any successful SaaS business
• Months to recover CAC < 1 year
• Once you build this after selling to 50+
customers, you will know your business on an
excel sheet

9. Then, you have my permission to
Market

10. Content-Content-Content (Useful)
• Build great content that helps a potential buyer
make an easier decision
• Build great unique case-studies
• Be consistent and disciplined
• There is no SEO anymore, it’s all content
• Content can’t be automated, it is pure hard-work.
• Kissmetrics has written 5500 blogs in 2 years!
(That is hard-work)

11. Work & Experiment on everything

12. Measure with Tools again, and again,
and again

13. *If you decide to do Feet on the Street
for India
• Once you have sales & DIY, measurement in
place
- Typical stuff from a JustDial, Naukri sales
model, a sales rep should do 3-4x of his/her
current salary
- Region-wise Sales teams split helps
- Combination of tele-feet-on-street works best
if you are going down this route

14. A Quote to remember
• In a conversation with @shashanknd
“If you are B2B in India, and
not SaaS, you will die”
Connect with me @vijaysw
Or on email – vijay@exotel.in