SPOTLIGHT: Sudip Samaddar from Imaginesales on the ‘Next For CRM’ and everything in between.

June 3, 2020June 3, 2020 Arjun Veer Chadha

Customer is fundamentally changing and for all the customer segments whether B2B or B2C understanding of customers is gaining the highest priority. And at the center of customer-centricity stands Customer Relationship Management. CRM solutions provide impetus to the four key functional areas i.e. customer service and support, digital commerce, marketing, and sales and recently the solutions taking over the entire 360 degrees customer engagement and resource motivation. Social good for meaningful progress needs to make the act and innovation a profit center to sustainable, and the new paradigm of selling sustainable solutions at scale needs to bring in a very high level of efficiency.

In a chat with Impact[X] Media, Mr. Sudip discussed innovation in the process of lead generation, sales engagement, identifying the gap and filling it with right and just in time solutions, we also talked about the revolution that the overall industry has experienced and got his insights.

Excerpt from the interview:

Hello Mr. Sudip, welcome to the Impact[X] Media Studios, a pleasure to have you in our humble abode… let’s go ahead hear from you about latest venture ImagineSales Pvt. Ltd. and its vision…

Communicating and following up is a lifeline of the salesperson and is a never-ending process. After two and a half decades in this field, I feel that the essence of sales is communication and follow up. Most of the salespeople couldn’t speak to a process because there are numerous things that lead to them being distracted or de-focused. So, while using CRM systems like Zoho, Salesforce, etc which I have used at those times, I have seen a salesperson managing a hundred leads has to create around six hundred tasks, which is manually not possible. Through the use of technology, this can be brought down to 150. When we started three years ago, this technology was not in place at that time that is what led us to develop and come up with the idea of ImagineSales. We got our inspiration by following certain companies in California that were born 5 years ago. Currently, they are valued as billion-dollar unicorns like LinkedIn and Salesforce. There are two technical specifications that ImagineSales has on offer as compared to other CRMs. First, we have a Reply Detection (functionality) and second, we have a Cadence tool/model, which brings simplification in the process by reducing the tasks from 600 to 150. That’s what ImagineSales brings to the table. It saves time for salespeople, and at the same time, they can do 3 times more work.

The industries we serve are, Ed-tech like FlipLearn, Uptop. In the education field we are associated with institutions like United Business School, The Design Village, so these all are post graduate degree providers. We are also used by coaching institutes and academies. We also serve the real-estate sector including PropShop and a couple of others. Others are finance & credit providers and also we have E-commerce operators, where people receive and take follow-ups. Lastly, in Healthcare sector we have clients like Fitness, Health, Cipla for their nicotine commodities that help quit smoking), and so on. This sums up the industries we have been able to penetrate.

What is your current market size and potential target that you hold?

The current market size in India is around $500 million. So, this predominantly comprises of companies that are having inside sales teams or telesales people and as we go ahead and see that market, at present stage these companies have a market size around $500 million. As the product evolves, we grow and reach this with gradual expansion. Presently the target is B2C businesses – Ed-Tech, Real-Estate, Financial Services, Healthcare, Travel, Hospitality and Consumer Services. These are the target verticals and that is the market size in India.

What vision do you have about Healthcare and CRM solutions?

We are a ‘Sales Accelerator Platform’. To describe how current customers are using our platform, I will give two examples. First, we have to understand that in the medical space in India, there is a great dent by Marg (accounting software). They are the competitors of Tally accounting systems, so many of the medical companies use Marg as an Accounting System. Through ImagineSales we can prepare the proposals, quotations and we are integrated with Marg. Marg is only for the accounting system, but you can’t do the customer’s follow-up management and the channel follow-up management, and ImagineSales provides this support as well. These medical companies do sales through the same channel. There are a lot of channel partners (around 150), through Imagine Sales with the same channel they would have sent around 4-5 proposals. Managing all of this becomes cumbersome. With ImagineSales and its beautiful UI of drag and drop, they can manage those proposals to the channel partners and call from the same platform and keep a track. That is how one way we provide service they are using the service. The other way is, many of them are working from home. As an example, a healthcare organization in our portfolio, provides Kidney related treatment, and have 20-30 in-house doctors who attend calls of the customers and share the Xray reports and provide consulting with respect to their symptoms, previous reports. These people use ImagineSales Mobile App to work from home, and the manager can see the indulgence and activities of his team on the App, thus creating a log of activities. So, these are two distinct cases of how ImagineSales is operating in the field of Healthcare.

In what other potential verticals would you like to take the organization as in expansion or diversification of services?

We are expanding in B2B segment. All these domains that we have previously discussed are B2C engagements. By B2B, we look forward to companies like Software Development, the technology firms, and so on. And we have been picking pace during this COVID-19 silence to move in this direction. As we move, we would like to integrate with platforms like LinkedIn, which is predominantly used by B2B companies. Along with it, we are already integrated with GMAIL, Mailchimp, and so on. But LinkedIn is something to which we are looking very strategically for integration. In the next 7-8 days we will be integrated with Google Calendar (Google Meet).

What revolution have you observed in your sector with advancing technology?

Sales and Marketing have been greatly impacted by Digital Marketing. Earlier it was really hard to generate leads and in those times there were paper advertisements, wall posters and flyers through which people used to generate lead. And it was very expensive. Today, through Digital Marketing it has become less expensive to capture leads and can generate predictably a lot of leads. So, this has made marketing very predictable but the same is not yet true for Sales. Sales is still more of a subjective matter. Technology is enabling Sales to become very predictable where it can provide that much effort of hiring a salesperson, giving X money, when I will get Y money back in Z months. That is a milestone we will hit very soon. With AI and Business Intelligence, as well as voice recording, we will be enabled to monitor and guide the salespeople as to how and what message to write to influence the person on the other side. What has happened presently is there has been a lot of leads and there is also technology on Lead Management and on personalizing the messages because sales is always personalized. In future, it will be more about recommending the sales people how to speak and write (responses).

Motivation among the team members is one thing that helps to grow business. What is your vision on motivation as a software solution for team members?

We are of the belief that big spikes of motivation, energetically pursuing a task and doing something great is not sustainable. It happens in a very sporadic manner. So, you come across high spikes of energy and then it goes down. So, if you have a loved one in a life-threatening situation you have a high spike of energy to save them. When you start a new business then for the first one year, you have great energy to do something electrifying in life. But this is not sustainable. So, what we believe in is HABITS. Good Habits stay even without much motivation. So, whenever a new good habit is to be developed, we map it up with motivation to see what that habit, new behavior with a person is doing. Anything done around 25-30 times, becomes a habit. At this point and beyond you don’t need a motivation to keep up with the habit. Secondly, you take one habit at a time and not two or more simultaneously. Thirdly, when I am trying to push a new behavior and motivation to transform into habit, the appreciation should be real time based. Humanly people want that a new behavior is appreciated. And measurement of achievements should be kept in record over this period.

One quality that I feel is imperative in our field is ruggedness. I have seen a struggle-full journey myself to the point where I am now, so it influences my perspective. Can you ‘How soon you are able to break the ice with someone who doesn’t know you’. Can (one) create a discussion or strike a conversation with the person, spark a smile. Interpersonal skills, how well you are able to gain and retain the attention of the other person.

What is most challenging project you have worked so far on? Discuss your milestones achieved with ImagineSales?

It’s yet not right to say that I have come across the most challenging project yet as our journey still goes on. But otherwise, for me development of Imagine Sales has been challenging. I didn’t know software coding and Testing then I had to recruit and to manage the tech people was a big challenge I came across. Especially when you are a grown person at the age of 39 (around 2-3 years back) you are not very open to learning, you feel like you know it all, it becomes difficult to relearn something.

I had never done Google Adwords in my life. I myself have always been part of conventional sales & marketing, cold-calling and then I started learning Google Adwords. And now when I work on it and share my analytics with people on the web also, I am very well acclaimed for the amazing ROI I make from the Adwords.

Learning and Brushing Skills on these two things, one, I have never done before and I needed to master to make it to success. I didn’t succeed but also didn’t fail. Many Startups closed down, we didn’t close down with bootstrapping being our biggest achievement.

So, for a SAP company it is a product-market fit, a big milestone. This observes retention of clients each month. Dependency of customers on your product/ software without which there may be hassles in their service-providing, as a metric it is retention. So, you reduce your churn and have a high retention of customers. For assuring the same you need to do the marketing in the right manner, within the budget, ROI to be accessed, software should be such that its UI is good, not costly, solves for the customer, customer is habituated of using it and he is getting the commercial ROI he is expecting in all forms an important achievement of retention and that we have been able to achieve now. Presently we have customers with us who have been there for 18-19 months. They are still with us. Even during on-going pandemic, they have stuck with us. Our company is now around two and a half years old, having a 20-months period retention is a milestone we have achieved.

Share any one habit which you think makes you more resilient. Any personal Lessons you would like to share.

I believe there’s still a mile to go yet. People you are yet to reach the point where I can take insights from my story while I have much to learn from people who have achieved a higher destiny. From me, the suggestion is to try to be very mathematical in your problem (solving) analysis, and carry out a no. of experiments to find the best fit. Your continuous attempts are going to make you improve at your tasks and eventually success. Hence, Persistence is the key. Also, understand to check what results in you are validating. Documenting your failures will continue to be a learning for your future experiments, you do.

Create a habit of working for long hours. Success demands efforts. Maybe it may mean a smaller social circle and more time on the desk behind your PC. Take breaks, listen to music but try to elongate your time at work. Improving your sitting is important for later stages to be in position/ habitual to the commitment your work demands and be able to sit and manage people side by side.