Blume Beacon: Secrets of enterprise SaaS GTM, inside view on fintech IPOs, building sales pipelines that convert and more
Blume Beacon is a carefully curated list of long reads from Blume's editorial desk that take you through the many facets of entrepreneurship in India.
Welcome to the new edition of Blume Beacon that wraps up everything we wrote in October. Here’s a glimpse of what to expect in this issue:
Scaling Enterprise SaaS Business in India: A masterclass by Sachin Bhatia of Exotel
The Inside View on "Fintechs and IPOs": Takeaways from the Blume Fintech Summit
Building a sales pipeline that converts with Shruti Kapoor of Clari and Ex-Wingman
How Did You Get Here: Creating A Great Place To Work at a VC Fund
Sometimes, people confuse PMF with scaling: Prashant Singh, Head of Product, Jar
What else can we say except “Happy reading!”
Scaling Enterprise SaaS Business in India: A masterclass by Sachin Bhatia of Exotel
It is hard for SaaS founders from India to know where to begin their sales while starting up, “Should I start from SMB, go to mid-market and then enterprise?’, or ‘Just go all in on enterprise?’. It is quite a hard nut to crack.
Sachin Bhatia, co-founder of Exotel, a leading connected customer conversations platform and Blume Fund I company, has seen it all. He says it as he sees it, “To make money in SaaS in emerging markets, there is no alternative to tapping into enterprises. Scaling a business purely from SMB in emerging geographies is a myth.”
Sachin has practical advice to give to entrepreneurs. He believes that they need to start engaging with enterprises early on instead of trying to straddle two boats simultaneously. It is prudent to adopt a ‘Fail fast, learn fast’ approach.
“Losing an enterprise deal is not a problem; it’s a learning experience. The deal not being on the table is the real problem,” he says.
Blume Ventures’ Rohit Kaul sat down with Sachin to double-click on scaling enterprise sales, covering topics like how to qualify customers, evolving sales organization structure and incentives, strategic account management vs. opportunistic account management, two-in-a-box model for Customer Success and Sales, and aligning your sales teams to verticals rather than geos.
We’ll leave you with a gem of advice before we let you dive into the article, “SaaS startups dealing with large enterprises should think of their accounts in perpetuity. At Exotel, we believe all accounts are always underpenetrated. In such cases, CX and Sales co-owning an account is a good way to grow revenue. If you have to navigate the account and say somebody is a blocker in an account or we need to map new stakeholders in an account. That’s on the sales side. If our use case is under threat or we are facing challenges around the efficiency of a use case, these discussions are led by CX.”
Read on to learn how you can build a world-class enterprise sales motion.
The Inside View on "Fintechs and IPOs": Takeaways from the Blume Fintech Summit
India’s fintech adoption story is one for the history books. With a staggering fintech adoption rate of 87%, towering above the global average of 64%, India is a trendsetter.
Additionally, it is projected to hit $100+ billion by 2025, and with the right regulatory reforms, fintech promises to be huge.
However, the big question is-- What does it take for a fintech company to transition from being a market disruptor to becoming IPO-ready?
Kunal Bajaj of Blume Ventures sat down with Dhirendra Mayavanshi, Co-Founder & CEO at Turtlemint (Blume Fund I company), Abhishek Bhagat, Managing Director at JM Financial, and Sreevathsa Prabhakar, Founder and CEO at Servify (Blume Fund I Company) to discuss exactly this at the Blume Fintech Summit 2023.
The panel dug into the nuts and bolts of what it takes to build an IPO-able company, right from profitability, tracking metrics, internal communications, operations, and the need to have the right technology.
Watch the panel discussion to learn what it takes to build a winning fintech company.
Building a sales pipeline that converts with Shruti Kapoor of Clari and Ex-Wingman
Blume Ventures’ Rohit Kaul sat down with Shruti Kapoor, founder of Wingman (acquired by Clari) and currently the head of International Business at Clari, to ask the tough question - how should early-stage SaaS founders build a sales pipeline?
Shruti believes that at an early stage, building a pipeline is all about finding ways to signal trust. It could be anything, reaching out to ex-colleagues, friends of a friend, anything and everything that can help signal ‘maybe we should give this product a shot.’
“...at an early stage, you need someone willing to stake their reputation to collaborate with you. Often, people overlook that it's not about whether you charge them $100, $1,000, or $10,000. The real cost for them is not the money, but rather, risking their reputation and potentially their career for your product.”
Shruti digs deeper into topics like when inbound is a good GTM channel and when it is not, the BANT framework (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) to qualify prospects, when to hire your first VP of Sales, and also on the evergreen sales and marketing friction.
Shruti’s expertise comes through when she shares practical tips like the one below:
“At the end of that first call with your POC, spend time mapping out who the stakeholders are. And then getting connected. And what I’ve seen is, if you’re trying to get connects early on, you would actually ask your champion, or your initial POC, to connect you with the Executive Assistants (EAs) of those people. Then you do all the scheduling with those EAs and get time on their calendars. And build your case with each of them separately.”
Read on for actionable advice on building the sales pipeline the right way.
How Did You Get Here: Creating A Great Place To Work at a VC Fund
Hiring and building the culture at a VC firm is a unique challenge, and that’s the charter of Ria Shroff Desai, the people and culture lead at Blume Ventures.
Ria has had a very ‘off-the-beaten-path’ journey into the HR world and the VC industry. From picking, harvesting, and giving coffee tours in the Dominican Republic to working closely with the leadership at Sula to chancing her way into HR, Ria is an explorer at heart.
Ria talks about her journey and sheds light on what the people role entails in a VC firm, from culture to finding the right folks to everything in between.
“I would like to believe that people feel that we've created that space where you have a voice, and it is heard,” says Ria. “And I think that approach has helped us because we've made people feel appreciated for the strengths they bring, recognize them for those, and allow them to participate in discussions, even knowing that a decision made may be in a different direction.”
It is a must-read if you want to know how VC firms tick.
Sometimes, people confuse PMF with scaling: Prashant Singh, Head of Product, Jar
In the 8th episode of the PMF Convo series, Sajith Pai chats about PMF with Prashant Singh. Prashant has experienced PMF from close quarters. He co-founded Shifu, a context-aware predictive personal assistant, which Paytm acquired. He was Vice president of Management at Paytm and now heads Product at Jar. So, when Prashant talks about PMF, it comes from a unique vantage point.
“Scaling is a function of TAM and everything else but product-market fit – it is a solution made for unserved needs. When you apply it to the startup context, it means that a need is being served, and it is also being served in a somewhat profitable way,” says Prashant. “I don’t necessarily mean it has to be revenue-generating, I mean that some cost decreases as you do more of the same.”
If you are an early-stage startup founder, Prashant’s interview will give you a lot of practical and, in some ways, contrarian takes on PMF.
Take this for an example, “I’ll first ask what activity metrics you are tracking and people will always tell you that certain metrics are very important. For example, if you are launching Evernote or Dropbox, the first question people will ask is how many paid customers you have, but I don’t think that’s a good PMF sign. That is an optimization problem. The PMF sign is how many people still retain your app on their phones.”
Blume Podcast: Peyush Bansal on building with clarity, absolute customer obsession, and compounding company culture.
Peyush Bansal is a maverick founder. Anyone in the startup world would agree. From being one of the earliest to truly crack ‘omnichannel’ to building large factories when make in India wasn’t cool, he’s done it all. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that he’s changed retail in many ways.
The key to his success lies in a rather simple but not commonly understood phrase --customer obsession.
Lenskart wasn’t the first eyewear player in the Indian market. It was already flooded with mom-and-pop shops. But Lenskart had an unrelenting obsession with the customer.
It was all about making things work for the customer.
You can’t come to the store, we’ll come home. Do you want to come to our store, try your spectacles, and get them delivered home? Alrighty! If you want to buy your specs online, great!
Lenskart was everywhere the customer wanted it to be.
“We started opening stores, and a lot of people today ask me, you were the first person to start ‘omnichannel.’ You know, I never started omnichannel. I didn't even know the word omni. All we knew was that there were customers I was talking to, and they were not buying from my website. And while everybody was trying to figure out how to get more people on their website, I wanted to understand why people who are coming to our website are not buying,” said Piyush.
Read our key takeaways from his conversation with Blume’s Karthik Reddy to know why Peyush is inspired by brands like Maruti, Uniqlo, and Asian Paints, 3As of company building, his take on compounding culture, and a lot more!
Vinati Saraf Mutreja on making chemistry cool again, leading with tenacity, and creating a multi-generational organization.
It is hard to find homegrown success stories in chemical and organics manufacturing. Vinati Saraf Mutreja of Vinati Organics is certainly a rarity. Observing her father, Vinod Saraf, who had built the company since 1989 and engaging with customers during her studies, she elected to join the business in 2006.
When Vinati joined the company, the revenues were around Rs 60 crore, and its sales were largely in the domestic market. Cut to FY2023, the company revenues are more than Rs 2000 crore, and more than 65 percent of its sales come from exports.
Vinati, in conversation with Blume’s Karthik Reddy, talks about her inspiring journey of growth, innovation, the importance of backward integration in a heavily commoditized business like chemicals, and why equity is an important source of capital, and also shares insights around India’s misunderstood manufacturing industry.
On compounding, Vinati says, “We've had a very simple metric that we want to grow every year 15 to 20 percent. That's it. Now, if you compound that over five years, maybe it doubles in four years, five years. And growth is not linear. There will be years where you may grow 25, 30%, there will be flat years, there may be a negative, but you take it in your stride, accept it.”
Vinati also touches upon the changing landscape of women leadership in the corporate world and why staying healthy is more important than being successful.
Read our key takeaways from this episode of the Blume Podcast.