The session was supposed to be about “how to scale the revenue to $100k” and was organised by TIE Delhi with Arvind Jha moderating it, and Mohit Bhakuni and Ankit Jain as the speakers. However, we had a lot of founders present who had already crossed these milestones. Regardless, the challenges were still similar – leads generation, qualification process, conversion, setting up sales, marketing processes, and scaling up.
The session was about the journey of 2 companies – Contify and MyOperator.
Contify’s Story :
Contify is an AI-driven market and competitive intelligence platform, a category which didn’t even exist 5 years back. In Mohit’s words, they were ahead of their time and cursed with no competition. They had the burden of creating a market for their product.
Before starting Contify, Mohit worked in companies like Hindustan Times, Deloitte, and The Indian Express. To minimise the risk of failure, he sought commitments from initial prospects, figured out the technical challenges and then jumped into the startup full-time. At the time, he didn’t go down the route of MVP, prototype and launch. Instead, they developed the complete product because they had validation from his initial clients. However, Mohit agrees that he wouldn’t do it the same way again.
Fast forward now, after a lot of missteps and cautious growth, Contify is scaling up successfully. The validation for him is that the company’s sales and execution processes don’t require his active involvement. Defining processes isn’t difficult, however, implementing them and ensuring that they become a part of the organisation’s muscle memory is real hard work. After several iterations, Mohit is confident that Contify has finally cracked the code, which is contextual and differs for different organisations.
MyOperator’s Story :
MyOperator is a cloud telephony provider across the globe and offers advanced call management. Their story felt like a startup’s ideal story. They have bootstrapped their company to 9 digits revenue over the last 10 years and Ankit feels no pressure to raise funding anytime soon. MyOperator focussed on SMBs when they started and have now started moving to enterprises as well.
Before developing the product, they prepared a deck and started email marketing to find initial customers. Non-spammy emails did the trick for them. Ankit focussed on finding the problem that the businesses faced. According to him, selling to businesses is simple if you know their problem. Since their product was adding a lot of value to the businesses, they got paying customers. Since then, there has been no stopping them.
There were some common problems across businesses in marketing and sales. Mohit and Ankit shared their ways of solving them :
Generating leads – How do we generate leads when our company is young and we don’t have a lot of resources ?
Ankit had a simple answer for this – Scrape directories, find emails and send good emails. They were able to get initial leads through this and still use email marketing. As they have grown, they use paid ads on different platforms as well as channel partners.
Mohit found initial success through events. However, acceleration in sales leads generation was through content marketing. Contify focuses on high-value long-form content. In addition, Contify participates in relevant discussion forums and Q&A platforms. Gotta participate in relevant conversations and hang out where the prospects hang out.
Initial Hiring and Incentive structures – Hiring is a pain but both Ankit and Mohit found success through referrals and references.
Mohit has had a bitter-sweet experience in his sales and marketing hiring. Initially, he thought that hiring a senior sales leader would help him in scaling up the sales. However, they quickly realised that it wasn’t working. Mohit now feels that it wasn’t the failure of his sales hire, but his failure in hiring correctly. A lot of people feel that sales is about smooth talking. Mohit will tell you differently – it is all about understanding customers’ problems, speaking the same language, and earning their trust.
On the other hand, Ankit had a good experience with his sales hire and has been able to scale the sales team with him.
Incentive structures vary from industry to industry but it is very important to have one. There is no simple answer here. Both the companies have a fixed + commission structure and offer healthy bonuses to the best performing employees with a transparent model.
Scaling up and processes – This is arguably the most important part if the company has to grow. Delegation doesn’t work without processes and accountability.
At MyOperator, they have set-up different assembly teams for different parts of the business. Each one has their own internal process. To make sure that the customer gets an amazing experience, they make sure that the messaging going out from teams to customers is the same throughout teams.
At Contify, Mohit had put strong processes in place but it took several iterations to get it right. Measurement, reporting and accountability helped him solve it.
Sales Levers – Mature companies can judge which prospect will convert and which won’t. They know where to invest their resources.
Mohit shared an anecdote where a friend of his wanted to measure the maturity of his company. His way to measure it was asking each team in the company 2 questions – What are you selling ? Whom are you selling to ?
At Contify, they have a well-defined process of asking questions to qualify a prospect. One of the important levers is if the prospect is already solving the problem in another way. Mohit also gives a lot of value to the ideal customer profiles they have made at Contify. They compare the prospect’s profile to the ICPs and value the leads accordingly.
Ankit utilises ICPs and has very detailed customer’s profiles as well. Along-with that, they measure all the prospect’s activities and score leads respectively. Punctuality for scheduled demo is one of the levers Ankit swears by.
My takeaways from the discussion :
Compiling this whole discussion has been messy as there were lot of topics we discussed in detail, and some which were skimmed through.
- Companies are of 2 types – Product Led Growth companies or Sales Led Growth companies. According to Arvind, a product needs to have a 10x better hook/feature if the product led company wants to succeed. Otherwise, they need to buy their customers.
- Conversion on ads – 1% – 2% conversion of leads from paid ads is not a bad result. Paid ads take time and are most useful in awareness building. People see ads, remember the name and then search on Google when they want to visit the website. The aggregate results should be compared when evaluating the success of paid ads. MyOperator runs close to 50 – 60 different ads each month.
- Pricing – It is very relative. Ankit believes in charging a premium and providing a quality service to justify it. Mohit prices relative to the savings he provides to the customers. He feels that a good pricing should have the following structure – 25% of the leads should find it very expensive. 25% should find it cheap.
- Channel partners – Arvind advises not to think about channel partners unless you have already crossed $100k in revenue. Both MyOperator and Contify have close to 30% of revenue coming through channel partners.
- Building a brand – We tend to ignore it but it is very important to have a presence. It has a direct effect on all the different processes – hiring, sales, marketing. It can reduce the cost of acquiring customers, as well has hiring/retaining good talent.
I didn’t intend to make this article this long. It was supposed to be a short summary. However, there were so many insights shared openly and I didn’t want to miss them. We also talked about the incentive structures that Contify and MyOperator have at their company, the quotas they have for their sales teams, how they manage the teams and how to avoid a lot of the problems they faced. They are way out of the scope of this article.
I wish to thank Arvind Jha for moderating the discussion, and Mohit and Ankit for being generous with the time and sharing their journey without censor. If you read this far, you should follow them. They are extremely open to collaboration and helping others.