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Building Modern Tools For Sales | Abhijeet Vijayvergiya @ Nektar.ai
156 Plays3 years ago
Any technology aims to make it easier for its users and bring the best out of them. But in the case of sales professionals, it’s the other way round.
In this edition of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt talks with Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, Co-founder and CEO, Nektar.ai. He is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and a seasoned SaaS leader with more than a decade of experience in this field.
It is well-known that organizing information about prospects is a challenging task for sales teams across the globe. These professionals painstakingly work towards maintaining CRM databases which in turn hampers their productivity. Tending to this gap, Abhijeet founded Nektar.ai in 2020, with Aravind RS. Nektar.ai is a first-of-its-kind AI-driven sales productivity solution that helps sales teams by reducing the amount of time they spend on CRM database management and providing analytics that can increase their revenue.
Tune in to this episode to hear Abhijeet speak about how Nektar.ai is taking sales into the era of intelligent systems and empowering them to deliver superior outcomes.
What you must not miss!
- How does Nektar.ai manage information across channels?
- Sales strategies for B2B companies
- Fundraise journey
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Purpose
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Abhijeetu Jaivargheer. I'm the co-founder and CEO at Nectar.ai. Take me to the dead end. Hello. This could be a great intro. Hi, I'm Akshay. Hi, this is Aurob. And you are listening to the Founder Thesis Podcast. We meet some of the most celebrated sort of founders in the country.
Challenges in Sales Documentation
00:00:26
Speaker
And we want to learn how to build a unicorn.
00:00:33
Speaker
One of my favorite shows on Netflix is this show called Suits, which is about a group of lawyers. But you know, I was just thinking that there are so many shows on lawyers, on doctors, on even software geeks, but you would hardly come across a show around salespeople.
00:00:52
Speaker
I think the reason for that and anybody who's worked in sales in a large organization will agree with this is that those shows would probably spend a lot of time showing salespeople documenting stuff. Every time you have a meeting, you exchange an email, you have a call with a client, any kind of an interaction needs to be documented in some sort of a sales CRM.
Nectar.ai's Solution and Founding Story
00:01:15
Speaker
Now we are in an era where it doesn't make sense to spend so much time documenting because everything that you're doing is digital. It's not like you're meeting people in person now. Everything is happening through digital media and all of that information is on the cloud. It's just a question of building a smart software to capture all of that information and get rid of all the time that salespeople spend on documentation.
00:01:42
Speaker
Once you have all of this information and properly structured and organized, then you can actually start creating a virtual coach for a salesperson where you can give him advice that, okay, this client is due for a call, it's been a while since you caught up with him, or this is something that you should send to this person, or there is a response pending here, or stuff like that, and even preparation for an upcoming meeting because your calendar would have all your upcoming meetings on it.
00:02:10
Speaker
And this is the insight which Avijit, the founder of nectar.ai, had. Avijit has got a decade and a half of experience in global sales for software solutions, leading large teams. And like any good salesperson, he saw this gap in the market and decided to fix the gap himself. Here's Avijit talking about his journey into entrepreneurship.
00:02:43
Speaker
If you like to hear stories of founders then we have tons of great stories from entrepreneurs who have built billion dollar businesses. Just search for the founder thesis podcast on any audio streaming app like Spotify, Ghana, Apple Podcasts and subscribe to the show.
Overcoming Sales Training Challenges
00:03:04
Speaker
We did a bunch of things, so I would have looked at 100 plus sales tools out there. I mean, they're like, I mean, the sales and marketing space is crowded. By sales too, do you mean like Salesforce, Pybrile? So those are CRM systems, but beyond CRM systems also, you have like forecasting tools, you have like sales training tools, you would have a conversation intelligence tools or like sales engagement tools. So they're like different coming categories, civilian marketing, your marketing automation, and all of that. So look at a bunch of tools, 100 plus tools to be precise there.
00:03:33
Speaker
Try to see how they can be implemented integrated and operationalize and adopted by sales teams both as a user as a buyer i looked at invested into sales training as well got the best of the consultants to train the team.
00:03:47
Speaker
I always figured out that this whole training and workshops, that knowledge is ephemeral. It's this classroom. When we go into the classroom, it stays with us. But within a few days, we forget it. It doesn't get actioned out in practical life or in the field. And that is the case with fails as well. So I just filled out that there has to be something more retentive.
00:04:04
Speaker
which basically stays with the person or like when the person needs that.
AI Integration in Sales
00:04:08
Speaker
So that's where I've started thinking more from a guided selling standpoint. I mean, just like you have a GPS system which guides you to go from a point A to point B or if you open your app and you look for places to visit for like your vegetarian food and like Google recommends you like what you should do or it talks about like today's weather, Siri will tell you like how your day could be and wakes you up in the morning. So there's AI is basically playing so much part in like
00:04:32
Speaker
Are some of the other areas of work i just feel that it can be applied to be to be sales as well in a very holistic manner to look at what exists across the different data sets are scattered tools best practices process it together.
00:04:48
Speaker
and learn from the scale of data to deploy machine learning at scale and then use that to guide the user. In this case, it's the salesperson to take that next best action to be a better version of themselves. So that was my fundamental thought that can there be a system that can do this? I looked for a system actually. I looked for the system and didn't find anything satisfactory out there.
00:05:10
Speaker
Decided to build one. I just felt that I'm like motivated enough. I lived with a pain point I had to fire a few sales reps like I hated that and just felt that as an organization when every orientation can do a better job at like helping their sales people and in 2019, there was a Article which was published in Forbes which which read like this that 57% of account executives account executives are the co-tech adding sales reps and
00:05:35
Speaker
in the technology industries, they miss numbers, they miss their numbers. And another start that came in front of me was that in the last seven years, the spending sales tools have gone up by five times, whereas the year-on-year quota treatment rates have fallen by 40%. So it was like an industry-wide problem and I was just trying to understand it why it is happening. I mean, it should break up better, but it's just that
00:05:59
Speaker
Yesterday's process is not relevant today. I mean, the world is strange. We all live in a digital distributed world. And technology in most areas have moved forward. But I think in the B2B sales space, I just felt that I think there's a big opportunity as well. So yeah, some of these thoughts led on and I decided to quit.
00:06:19
Speaker
put down my papers at Capillary. I was supported by everybody at the company. Anish was one of the angel investors and two of my other board members also invested in Nectar, supported me early on. I completed my notice period, found my replacement and then February 2020 I started Nectar. Did you have a clear product idea in mind or did you have the problem in mind and then you thought you'll figure out what is the right product to make for that problem?
00:06:48
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely had the problem in mind that fast growing tech companies face a lot of challenge in moving from a founder-led sales to a predictable revenue engine. Predictable revenue is a holy grail. I mean, you talk to any investors, even like stock market, everybody likes the predictability of the forecast and market goes up and down if companies miss their forecast. So, I knew the problem well, okay, this is the problem, lived through it and then it associated with like enabling the salespeople
00:07:14
Speaker
justifying the sales capacity, running a tight process and systems. So that was there like even solution also there, but the solution was not being I mean, it's it cannot be democratized, because it is very people specific company specific. So large organizations have big teams, right? They have revenue operation and sales operations team sales and development team.
00:07:31
Speaker
They invest a lot in getting to that level, right? Whereas the fast-growing mid-market companies globally don't have access to that know-how or time to even figure this out. I just want that. Let me look at the mid-market companies for growing and there's a huge number of companies worth, the mid-market companies. And see if you can build a product for them which is like out of the box, best practices product which
00:07:51
Speaker
starts and you plug and play and it reads all your data processes your playbooks starts guiding your team to be better version of themselves so you don't need to worry about whether you have a good sales manager in place you know that nectar is there in place which is like helping your team to do their best
00:08:05
Speaker
So that's what my vision was. And then I looked at Google, I looked at Apple, looked at how they have looked at AI. Siri is for Apple, Google Assistant is Google's way of doing it. Alexa was there for Amazon. I just felt that Nectar could be there for B2B salespeople.
00:08:22
Speaker
That's how I looked at it.
Nectar's Innovation in CRM Efficiency
00:08:24
Speaker
Let's build a guided selling platform. And if I were like, I mean, one of my early customers told me that, okay, what you're building is nothing but CD for sales. I said, yes. So that's how like, things happen. Yeah. So it was an interesting journey. So idea was clear, problem space was clear. We did not have a product when I quit. I mean, obviously I was very busy with Capri and also it was more an idea stage and I knew that what I have to broadly do. But yeah, then I started looking for a co-founder and then about 2020 I started.
00:08:50
Speaker
Okay, let's take this idea into fruition. Okay, so you envisioned like a product for people who are not necessarily very tech-savvy. Like, you know, the CV for B2B sales means it's a product for people who are not tech-savvy, who are not expected to understand how to navigate through a complex ERP or something like that, but something which is intuitive and clean interface and it just gives them stuff like feeds themselves. That was what you wanted to build.
00:09:19
Speaker
I mean, I just wanted to build for like every B2B sales professional out there in a broader scheme of things that any B2B sales professional who uses a CRM should use a system of productivity like Nectar. That was my thought. So that's why our addressable market is massive.
00:09:33
Speaker
But what we wanted to do was make it simple, make it easy, give it back to the rep, right gear to a salesperson, give them what they need to sell more, meet their quota, close more deals, save more, save time, have a good work life balance by like accessing technology and staying efficient. That's what my vision was and is and we're further building onto it.
00:09:55
Speaker
And in order for that to happen, the technology should work for human rather than human working for the technology, which unfortunately happens in the conventional products. I mean, I mean, I've used CRM system so as like everybody who's doing sales has used it and there'll be no salesperson out there I can give you in writing will say that they love PRM.
00:10:12
Speaker
And their best of companies were doing CRM and all of them have done a great job in all the businesses. But unfortunately, the users don't love it. They have a constant cribbing about it that CRM takes away so much time from me. Should I sell or should I update data? These are the conversations that could happen in a sales forecasting call, walking to any sales forecasting call in any company out there on a Monday morning. They'll talk about some of these things.
00:10:37
Speaker
So I just felt that why there is so much friction, right? Organization needs data. Organization wants like all the visibility and data and they want that safeguard in place that if this sales person leaves, I don't lose my data or pipeline. The next person can work on it.
00:10:50
Speaker
When the sales person says that I'm here to close business, I have to close deals, I have to meet my customer, or I have to update data, which is not helping me sell. So this friction is there fundamentally built in the way the whole CRM system record is structured. So I just felt that let's come as a system which eases out everything, which does the heavy lifting, brings in data from CRM, brings in data from email, calendar, and all the other communication sources that exist out there.
00:11:12
Speaker
connects with two organizations playbook, which is basically the best practices that organization uses to sell and then process it together and then use that to guide the salesperson, right? On what action you can take today to win that business. Don't worry about your data entry that Nectar takes care of or takes care for you. You don't need to figure out like what sales training I need to learn and how much to retain. Nectar will tell you what to be done at this step.
00:11:37
Speaker
So if you're preparing for a pharma company in US, which is having 1000 employees, this is precisely what you can go and do in that meeting and if this is a negotiation meeting.
00:11:47
Speaker
But just like it's a first call you're making to a customer in Australia from financial services, right? So it will be able to like guide you there and your your CRM data entry part is already taken care by nectar It just like process because it's the connecting tissue. It's connecting to all the systems So it has all the knowledge to guide the user as well as process the work the user
00:12:08
Speaker
How do you take care of data entry? How do you remove that pain point of data entry? Yeah, so now we're coming to the solution, right? So once we decided to build this, I mean, the solution was to look at why the problem exists, right? I mean, you look at CRM, CRM is incomplete. I mean, because people don't update it on time. And half of the data doesn't make its way into CRM.
00:12:30
Speaker
Second, the data in CRM is stale. So people change, people move on, contact changes, like your relationship with the buyer changes, forecasting will change, close date will move, new notes will come in, which need to be entered on what happened in the conversation. So the data decays very fast in CRM. So it's incomplete and the data decays and then it's like cumbersome for users to update that. So there's a big resistance. So adoption is very low from users. So as a result of it, you can't rely on the CRM data.
00:12:57
Speaker
That was the first learning we had. So what we decided to do was that, okay, let's look at CRM, bring that data into Nectar, we'll think about it, then look at where the data actually lives. So data is there into email communications between buyer and seller. The data is in some of these conversations we are having on a Zoom call, on a Google Meet, where people are interacting. The data is on WhatsApp conversation. People are sending WhatsApp to each other to close the business out.
00:13:18
Speaker
Data is happening on Slack, where people are collaborating internally, right? And then it lies in various other business systems out there, depending on the role of the person. So, and then coming to playbooks, which are basically never documented, it's all in the mind, right? I mean, how to close a deal or what to do when a person asks this question, that you'll have to go and talk to somebody in the organization who has done this before, and they will tell you, okay, this is the answer you can give for that objection.
00:13:46
Speaker
It's not documented, it's not available when you need it, or it's there in a content management system somewhere where nobody logs in, right? I mean, or it's on a Google Drive, not accessible. So just felt that, okay, connect all of these, right? Make it easy for the user. So connect with all these business communications, connect with CRM and connect and get them to document their playbooks and bring it into like a very easy manner accessible to the user.
00:14:08
Speaker
As a combination of these three, now you have a very potent platform which is able to tell you what is the next best action you can take in this scenario. So that's how we're able to accomplish it. So at the heart of it, we have built a go-to-market data platform which connects with all of these data sources, brings it in one place. We've got a playbook engine which basically can be configured or you can use an out-of-the-box playbook if you're a young company, you don't know what your playbook is going to be.
Guided Selling with AI and Playbooks
00:14:32
Speaker
You can use the best practices and playbooks that exist in the market.
00:14:35
Speaker
And then we got this orchestration layer of the platform which guides the user to the next best action with a combination of the data that we have collected. I want to dig a little deeper. How do you get data from a Google Meet or a Zoom conversation?
00:14:49
Speaker
Yeah, so interestingly, what's also happened? I mean, this basically answered the question why now, right? And why Nectar is able to do it compared to like some of the big companies which have existed in the market for like decades. So most of the API infrastructure is open in the last five years. If you look at like companies like Postman and all, they're like really boom, right? I mean, the whole API economy is very hot. So most platform, most tools have become platform and platforms have opened up their APIs. It's a lot easier to integrate with systems compared to what it was like five years, seven years back.
00:15:19
Speaker
So we at CoreApp, our platform is like deep integrations with some of these core business systems. We spent nearly 15 months to do a bidirectional native integration with Salesforce across all their standard objects that we spent a lot of time. We did a similar integration with Google. We did a similar integration with Google Calendar, Microsoft Teams, and things like Zoom. So we did all of those integrations in the first 15 months of the company's existence.
00:15:44
Speaker
You have like a voice recognition kind of a tool which transcribes the conversation in a Zoom call and then you're able to parse data from that text. Is that how you do it? No, no. So that's how completely gone does it do it, which is like a very common tool these days. So that's conversational intelligence, which is limited to like call recording, call coaching, transcription. I think that voice to text is beaten to death in terms of a use case because you got
00:16:11
Speaker
Google has opened up its API and all of these technology platforms have built it on top of Google. So it's like Google or AWS, Amazon Web, the tech, and you basically use that voice to text transcription. So we can do that as well, but it's not the approach that we take. This is just a subset of our use case, right? What we do is we integrate with all sorts of unstructured communications, right? I mean, it would be an email as such rich information. Calendar has so much information about who you're meeting,
00:16:38
Speaker
where you're meeting them, how long you're meeting them, stuff like that. And there's an agenda also in the calendar where some people update a few things. Then there is so much of information out there going on, obviously, between Zoom conversations or Google Meets or anything. And most of it nowadays gets transcribed. So I think the call recording and transcription happens. So we don't want to build another call transcription tool.
00:16:57
Speaker
which is what Gong is. What we want to do is connect with tools like Gong, connect with tools like Zoom, connect with tools like Google Mail. They become a data input. If you go to a website and see the landing page, you'll see all of these are data input connectors. It's a master go-to-market data platform, which basically connects with CRM, connects with email, connects with calendar, connects with Gong, connects with outreach, which is a sales engagement tool, connects with sales development, content management systems. We bring data from all the distributed go-to-market stack,
00:17:25
Speaker
distributed communication systems and the core system like a CRM. Process it together. Our own USB is the playbook engine where you basically configure your playbooks and then we, as a result of these two, we have this unique position to be able to guide the user. So that's where the guided selling experience comes for the user. User doesn't care about how we are doing it. That's what I'm explaining it to you. Users care about what I get from it, right? I mean, the most complex and we believe in building a product where
00:17:53
Speaker
The back-ended platform could be as complex as it can be, but for user life should be very simple. For users, it should be like, okay, if X do this, if Y do that, and they get their job done, that's it. We believe in the power of insights, which is come through robust analytics, the power of automation, and the power of an amazing user experience in terms of interaction. That's what we build it. That's the fundamental aspect of our user design and user experience.
00:18:22
Speaker
I guess one part of your USD would also be to curate and link the data because if you're collecting so much data, maybe 90% would be irrelevant, right?
00:18:31
Speaker
No, the good thing is our data is first party data. So it's very relevant. Obviously, I mean, there are a lot of these newsletter emails or other conversations that come in which are not relevant. So there is junk definitely. So we build a lot of heuristics on top of our core platform to identify what is sales data, what is non sales data. And within sales data, whether it's an opportunity data or an account data or a contact data or a lead data, we have that intelligence built in.
00:18:58
Speaker
We are the very few company in the world who have that kind of intelligence so we have like really built a core IP around it where we have these integrations which allow us to be able to process them and then connect it to guide the user right i mean that's where we obviously i mean that you mentioned that back end is an important part of the company but again that's internal to us.
00:19:17
Speaker
To the user, it doesn't matter. To the user, it should be that, OK, I mean, tell me what to do from point A to point B, period. That's it. I mean, I use an app, a running app, where it guides me on how fast I should run or how many kilometers to run today, et cetera, in order to meet a goal to run a half marathon. And I follow that. So some of those things have been also very fundamental for me to get inspiration from on how you can deliver a great user experience, make it simple, get in the back end, it's a very complex problem to solve.
00:19:46
Speaker
If, for example, there is an email with somebody about a possible business deal, but there is no entry about that. Like say that email ID is not there in the CRM. Say there's no such entry about that on Salesforce. Then would your platform like figure out that, okay, this is a new lead and then create an entry for it. And would that happen? Or does that entry of a new lead needs to happen first before the platform kicks in?
00:20:11
Speaker
No, we are not dependent on CRM because we have those heuristics in place. We know that CRM would never be complete, right? So we'll be able to identify if there is something that exists in CRM, great. We match it, enhance it and use that information. If it is not, we are able to identify whether it's a potential sales related conversation or it's a non-sales conversation.
00:20:32
Speaker
We've scanned thousands of emails, thousands of data points to arrive at our models in terms of identifying what is sales related, what is non-sales related and within sales also, what is discovery related, what is the negotiation, what is solution related and also we are able to figure those things out and we are able to then attach it in CRM if you want or if you just want us to guide the user or next step, you'll be able to do it.
00:20:59
Speaker
So, it's a system which is a CRM++ in many ways and we don't need to replace CRM. CRM will exist in a system record. It's that next level of systems which is going to add value to the business and to the sales team. That's the system of productivity. So, the world has seen a system of record which is CRM and its success. Now, what we are looking at is the next decade and I believe the next decade is going to be the decade for sales tech.
00:21:24
Speaker
We will be seeing companies like Nectar and others will be creating a new system on top of a record management system and make the life of sales people better and then take business to new productivity heights. How did you create these playbooks? And what is a playbook? Help me understand that. Playbook is very fundamental to any go-to-market function or to any business. It's basically a collection of the right information, the right process,
00:21:53
Speaker
the right templates that really helps them successfully and sustainably scale their business. So what I mean by that, some examples of playbook would include a sales process at its core, right? I mean, there are different processes being used. So medic is a sales process or medic is a sales process, band. So band stands for budget authority, need and time.
00:22:15
Speaker
So it's like a typical process being used to like qualify a lead, whether the person when you're talking to they have a budget to spare, are they having authority or they know the authority will take a decision, do they have a need for your solution? What is that compelling need that can drive a decision? And what are the timeline for decision making? So there's just a very simple example of like band, which is a process like that there are like different processes.
00:22:36
Speaker
Now, every organization has a process which they decide upon to follow in a B2B sales motion, which helps them close their deals and they have successfully been able to get business out of their prospects. So that is process, which is sometimes implemented in CRM, sometimes it's not, sometimes it's like unwritten code, written code, which is getting followed by businesses.
00:22:58
Speaker
The process could be something like send a cold email, connect on LinkedIn, do a follow up, do a call after the call, send a thank you note, and then send a proposal, they will follow up, follow up. It could be a combination of checklist, including when and what to be done at which stage. So basically a set of best practices as well, right? So that's what I would say is more codified. So it's like I would say a convergence of like sales typically is considered to be an art, but it basically is the place where sales starts becoming science.
00:23:25
Speaker
And I truly believe sales is more science than art. Obviously, there are best sales people like artists, but a lot of sales success is into the science of selling. You can qualify, you can unlock credit table revenue and scale.
00:23:40
Speaker
So coming back to playbooks in general, there's a process component of it. Then you got examples of use cases that your business solves for. Examples of case studies or customer successes that you've delivered in the past that you can educate your prospect on. It would include, I would say, battle cards against name competitors as you run into any business will have competitors.
Sales Strategies and Workflow Integration
00:24:02
Speaker
So how do you handle
00:24:04
Speaker
What are the battle cards or I would say landmines or traps that you can create for a competitor in a deal to set yourself for success. The first time hearing these terms, battle cards, landmines, traps. I mean, the sense is very signed up again, very interesting. And then after that, there'll be, I would say, objections or frequently asked questions that you might encounter.
00:24:26
Speaker
data security related, scale related, your team, post-sales support, renewal terms, indemnity, a lot of those things are there, right? So they're like commonly asked questions. So these are all like a combination of things that are part of the playbook. So the earlier you handle these, educate your seller, educate your buyer in the sales process, the faster you can close your deals, the faster, the better you can grow the business.
00:24:48
Speaker
And the third step out of the playbook is apart from these guides, which I call it as I use cases case studies, battle card and objections, they're all part of guides. Third part of it is around templates, right in terms of
00:25:01
Speaker
what goes in, right? I mean, if you have to do an old email, what should be the content of that email? How it can be personalized and contextual? What template has worked well for us in the past? If you are going in a discovery meeting, what are the type of questions you need to ask to get the best information for you to send the best proposal out and have a better chance of closing or qualify the opportunity better?
00:25:19
Speaker
Or if you're doing a demo meeting, how do you run the demo in terms of asking the leading questions, getting that acknowledgement during the demo process to be able to navigate the buyer and get them out in the demo process, right? So they like different steps. Consultative selling or a typical B2B sales process can be quite complex, right? I mean, and there it just codifies it, right? So these templates can be very handy.
00:25:42
Speaker
So, but then again, different people are following different templates. Nobody has like one, one way of doing it. And this is where consistency can be brought in, right? So if something is working and you can codify it, you can, I mean, it's like manufacturing, right? Where you can like have an assembly line and you can do great at scale in terms of production efficiency, just apply it to like a B2B sales parlance in terms of codifying how a process can be run like a well-oiled machine, right? And that's where playbooks become very important. So process,
00:26:11
Speaker
guides, best practices, and templates. I mean, these are a combination that goes into our typical playbook. This is stuff that you can provide to a company off the shelf, like email templates and content around best practices and the process to be followed. So all of this is available off the shelf, like a company doesn't need to configure this, they can just, or like you would configure it for them, something like that.
00:26:35
Speaker
We are very flexible there. We've got like a playbook engine built out where you've got a library of playbooks which are best in the world. I mean, you've done all the research, spoken to a lot of people. We interviewed 150 salespeople even before we wrote our first line of code to understand that point. Similarly, when we're doing a solution exercise, we went to a lot of best in class companies, figured out what are their playbooks, what are the best in class sales practices, processes, etc.
00:26:58
Speaker
got them together, right? I mean, so as a business, when you're starting off, you don't need to think about, okay, I don't even have my playbooks, I need to sit and write it, like, look at what is plug and play and start.
00:27:08
Speaker
start using it today, right? So we've got this out-of-the-box playbooks that you can use. Or if you have a very well-defined documented playbook which is customized to you, you can just configure it onto a platform, right? So it's a no-code platform where you don't need to write a line of code or like go through an implementation process. You just come in, configure a few things, and your playbook can start executing out of that. How is this delivered? Like the third part of Nectar, which is the orchestration. Talk to me about that.
00:27:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's where the magic happens, right? I mean, we've got the data together, we got this playbooks together, then it's all about how you show user the value and at the right time when they need it, right? So it's all about going into the user's workflow and making your tool working for the user and then user working for the tool.
00:27:53
Speaker
So what I mean by that is I'm traveling, I need to be able to access it on my mobile, be there, have a mobile app. Or I'm sitting in my home working remotely, I'm on a call with my prospect, I'm using, most sales people use two screens, one screen for presenting, one screen for like looking at their own data sets and answering questions and all. Typically you will see most good sales people generally keep two screens open.
00:28:18
Speaker
have the desktop experience ready for them before the sales, during the sales and all. Then they might be busy in day-to-day life. They don't have time to come into your UI. Go and send them a WhatsApp or send them a message. Send them a Slack message if they are on Slack and collaborating. Send them an email right on a Sunday night that tomorrow you have a forecast call. This makes sense for you.
00:28:41
Speaker
or we notice in your calendar that you have a big meeting coming up next Tuesday. Here is one study that might work for you for that week. So this becomes very proactive and it becomes like a guide to the salesperson, a friend to the salesperson.
Target Customers and Pricing Strategy
00:28:55
Speaker
That's what Nectar does. So that's where magic happens and it becomes very powerful that you create this whole unique multi-channel experience for the salesperson in order for them to do their job better.
00:29:08
Speaker
It could be on the UI, it could be UI less. So we support both and we built it that way to guide the users to success. So companies can choose what kind of integration they want, whether they want WhatsApp or they want Slack or they want on UI, like that they could configure that.
00:29:24
Speaker
Oh, it's all productized. So I mean, these are all like, once you have the data, it's about distribution of the data where you show that data on to web or you show it on mobile application or you show it on other communication channels. It's about like, maybe I mean, the form factor changes and it could be more concise version on a smaller on a platform like WhatsApp or Slack, it could be bullet size information versus like on a desktop, you'll have like more graphs and color coded charts, etc.
00:29:52
Speaker
What are the low-hanging fruits for you in terms of customers who would be best fit for this product? Like, you know, who you think should be the early adopters for this? Is it like Salesforce users? Salesforce users. So in terms of CRM, I think we've got a strong integration with Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics. So we've been like, I mean, these are three systems where we have done a lot of work and been able to add a lot of value to customers across these CRM systems.
00:30:18
Speaker
In terms of our size of the customers, I think anywhere between like 100 to 2000 employees, we've generally seen them to work very fast. We have interest from a lot of big companies also who are like having digital transformation initiatives going on where they want to transform their B2B sales. There is like somebody who's like a chief digital officer or like innovation head or head of sales excellence. Those kind of people are also like
00:30:42
Speaker
Very keen and we got like a lot of requests on early access of the product We within like six months of opening up our early access program Which we opened up earlier this year because even in a stealth mode, right? So we're not like gone ahead and started selling to everyone when busy building the platform because platform is complex It takes time to build out like this so we build that first and then while obviously we work with design partners to make sure that it is what we're building with works and
00:31:06
Speaker
After those validations and all, we opened up our early access program, and we got more than 500 registrations, all organic without any marketing, without spending a dollar, without hiring a salesperson, were registered for our early access of the program. So there is a lot of interest in the market on what we're doing. Both our funding rounds that happened, we raised $8 million in seed funding, a pre-seed and a seed round. It's one of the biggest seed rounds for a SaaS company in Asia. All happen inbound, right? We were not looking for fundraise in both the cases.
00:31:36
Speaker
I mean both the investments happen within like a fortnight. What is your pricing like? It's similar to what you'll invest in CRM, right? So CRM is like per user per month kind of a pricing for seats. So it just ranges like that. $10 to $50 something in that range per user.
00:31:51
Speaker
It varies. I think you're talking about like a lower end of the spectrum, probably in Asia, some of the entry-level CRMs. But if you look at Salesforce and all, they charge much higher. So it will be similar to what companies pay for CRM system. So it's sizable. It's not cheap. But there's a lot of value. Because businesses see CRM as a record collection system, they see Nectar as a productivity system, which is helping them grow business. So you can pay a small fraction for that growth.
00:32:18
Speaker
Nectar could also be used without a CRM like say a company which does not yet have a CRM like which is not using Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics or any of these. Can they just straight away start using Nectar as a CRM++?
00:32:31
Speaker
No, not yet, not as yet. I mean, that could be a long term goal, like five years later or something where we could probably be robust enough and big enough as a platform where we could even offer that. But I don't think so. And our early or mid journey, we are going to focus there. So we are a system on top of CRM, don't intend to compete in the CRM space. It's quite crowded and an industry and finally a record management system.
00:32:53
Speaker
So, we want to play the productivity game, right? Which is the future of our future of like... I'm assuming this would not need too much investment, right? To also create a system of record in addition to what you already have. It won't, but it's also about focus, right? I mean, once you start creating one thing, then you have more feature requests, build a lot of other things. Because CRM does a lot of things. It's not just capturing the contact data or activity data. It also does like you manage your pricing, your codes, you manage like all your other integrations with other tools and different systems who access your contact records.
00:33:22
Speaker
So it's a much more complex system. But it's a record management system, finally. So we don't intend to get into that space. So we, unfortunately, today have to say no to customers who don't have a CRM system.
Market Positioning and Final Advice
00:33:33
Speaker
Our prerequisite is they need to at least have a CRM implemented in order to enjoy Nectar's benefits. It's like you need to have a phone to use Google Assistant, right? You can't operate. So it's something like that.
00:33:45
Speaker
You could also look at an acquisition and that could be an interesting play. I mean, it's just that you unlock a much bigger market by adding that. Yes. So I think the market is growing, right? I mean, if you look at CRM, it was a very small market 10 years back or 20 years back when Salesforce started. But it's a huge market like Salesforce, what, $25 billion in revenue. Now the guidance for next year is $31 billion. So at their scale, they're growing that much. So the market is expanding and they are pushing the CRM market further and further.
00:34:14
Speaker
And companies have now like in the last 30 years implemented CRM systems. Now they're realizing that I need to do something better than CRM to like be productive, efficient as a business. That's where the need of sales enablement comes in. So we play the broad category of sales enablement, which is like very nascent, it's getting defined. And that category itself is I think now $10 billion now and that time will only grow just like CRM grew over the last 20-30 years. I think the time for sales enablement should grow from a $10 billion to like $100 billion over next decade.
00:34:42
Speaker
My last question to you, for founders of B2B companies, do you have some recommendations of sales strategies?
00:34:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think I would say that for founders, I would say, I mean, there's a lot can be done. I mean, there's always like 1000 things that you can do at one point in time. So the focus becomes very important, right? So, and the journey needs to be broken down, like your first early stage pre-product market fit journey, like typically in SAS terms, it's zero to 1 million. Then that you do that early market, go-to-market phase where it's one to 10 million ARR journey, and then 10 to 100 million is the path to IP. Or I would say post-product market fit kind of a journey.
00:35:21
Speaker
So there are different priorities at different stages. I actually wrote a blog also about it, which basically helps you to understand what you do from 0 to 1, 1 to 10, 10 to 100 million. But the key takeaways there are like one is like stay focused at every stage. Don't skip any particular stage, right? In 0 to 1, what you do is very different than what you do in 1 to 10 and what you do in 1 to 100, 10 to 100 would be very different. So don't skip stages there in between and follow those stages.
00:35:49
Speaker
that will help. So zero to one is all about like product market trading idea to like a product which it's a minimum viable product, then it's a minimum sellable product where somebody can put money on it and then a minimum lovable product where people will love it and use it again and again and renew it. So that's the journey in zero to one.
00:36:06
Speaker
1 to 10 is all about finding what's worked, documenting it, creating those playbooks, creating these processes, systems, scaling that team out, and getting it right, and then going for a market share in one segment, where you become the best in that segment. Establish that core anchor position.
00:36:24
Speaker
10 to 100 is all about diversifying and then you can't typically for a SaaS company, you can't get killed once you are at a 10 million ARR because you generate enough cross margins for you to sustain and float. So once you hit that 10 million, you then try to create more moon shots and experimentation around go-to-market partnerships, channels, new product launches. Brand becomes important to establish yourself as the best brand in your category.
00:36:49
Speaker
So, then you hire like the VPs in different functions and all and then you scale out from there, right? So, it becomes very different there. It's a very complex question, unfortunately. So, yeah, it's when you change that event and takeaways there.
00:37:06
Speaker
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