How many sales people does it take to have a Million dollar year in India selling to Indian customers?

That's the answer, up there. The rest of the blog post is going to be gyan from me with some links of our products interspersed hoping some of you click and visit our websites :)

Gyan Start:

Well each company will have a different number. But for our products which primarily concentrate on voice products and contact center solutions selling to businesses, this is the number which has worked.

For a long time, sales was a process which was alien to us. We first got Rajiv on our team. He has been phenomenal so far in setting up the sales process etc. He started off by hiring the right sales guys in different circles. We followed a top heavy approach. Get the best sales guys with good salaries. It was risky at the time for us as we were facing a cash crunch and it was tempting to go for low end sales guys and take in more numbers. But we wanted to showcase a professional outfit to our customers and we chose to get the best guys to represent us. After all, in many ways, the sales team is the face of your company on the field. Now slowly we have a pretty well defined sales process and a sales team slowly building.

Learning:
So hiring a dedicated sales team was the most important thing we did for this venture. It's always a tough call to make as you have to invest upfront in setting up the sales team. We spent around 40-50 lakhs before we started seeing sales trends from the sales team. But from our experience we would say it was well worth it.

What did we do differently?
Well actually, nothing special. We have just followed the time honored principle of doing direct sales. Identify an opportunity, assign a sales guy to make a visit, do a pre sales demo, follow up and close the deal. I guess, at least in our domain, India is still predominantly an offline market. Our customers are online, but they seem to compare the products online whereas most of our sales are happening offline. We do not track our website analytics diligently. We have also not done any AB Testing and I would be the first to say that there are 100 ways in which our websites can be optimized. We have just not concentrated on that. So far our emphasis has been on trying to reach customers directly and sell to them face to face. Lot of people say that will not scale. But its been working out fine for us so far. This year, we may look at all the new age growth hacking techniques. But for now, we are just happy to build a business the old fashioned way :)

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

Well, its been 11 years since Twilio launched their voice API in November 2008. I would say that was a major turning point in the cloud telephony industry. Before that, for people to build telephony applications, you either had to depend on proprietary platforms like Avaya dialog designer or build on arcane technologies like VXML which again was supported at varying degrees by the incumbents. Enter Twilio with their voice API and the industry changed for the better. Since it's been almost 11 years now I thought now might be a good time to do a comprehensive review of the cloud telephony industry as a whole in general and in India in particular. The Beginning Twilio was undoubtedly the startup which ushered in the era of cloud telephony. They started in November 2008. At that time in India, we at Ozonetel had launched a hosted VXML platform. There were no takers. After all who coded in VXML :) So when Twilio launched and we saw them take off, we immediately realized tha...

Google business messages and chat agents-A match made in heaven

Google has launched Google business messages without much fanfare. It's just a small button that pops up when someone searches for your business on Google. But from the conversation industry perspective this is HUGE . Do you know that the small call button drives millions of calls i n a year for pizza joints and other retailers in the US. Businesses spend more than a trillion dollars supporting billions of customer service calls each year. Now imagine how many chat conversations the "Message" button can drive. Think of how customers interact with business. 1. Search on Google. 2. Click on web site link. 3. Web site shows chat pop up and tries to force the user to chat.(Annoying. I know :)) 4. User clicks on chat and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. This flow can now be completely changed. The new flow can be: 1. Search on Google. 2. User clicks on Message and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. What if you could design a customer experience that helps...

Telugu ASR speech data collection

Image Source: IIIT-H Developing an indigenous ASR for Indian languages has been a goal for us since a long time. In that regard we have been experimenting a lot, trying out various neural network architectures. While doing these experiments we found that there was no good dataset for Indian languages. While discussing with IIIT professors we got to know that the government of India was also exploring options to generate a good dataset. We immediately offered our help and our platform for this endeavor. So, as a starting step we have come up with a few campaigns to encourage users to donate speech data. We wanted to make it fun, so our first few campaigns are along the lines of JAMs(Just a Minute speech topics) etc. A topic will be provided and you need to speak for a minute on that topic. We have started this campaign for college students to start with. Of course anyone can participate and contribute their data. The more the merrier :) We will adding a lot more innovative ways ut...

Cloud Telephony Experiments

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