Coming back to busy corporate life after NPC (NASSCOM Product Conclave – 2012) is like starting the second innings 🙂 I thoroughly enjoyed being a core volunteer managing 140+ speakers, and the speaker lounge itself on the day of the event. Not just that but was also managing, choreographing and moderating the session “Differentiate or Die – there is a brutal market outside” with the speakers...
How far should you go with Professional Services in your product business?
For any products company, product support is a given, and part of the products business fabric. However, almost all Enterprise Products Companies end-up offering the professional services beyond basic product support. These services could range from simplistic implementation support, to integration, to solutions-building, to architectural consulting, to IT advisory support. The decision to...
Conversation with Customer Interaction Management Provider, Drishti-Soft Solutions
Launched in 2003, Drishti-Soft Solutions specializes in software products for Customer Interaction Management and now empowers more than 10 million customer interactions per day for customers in 40 countries. We interviewed CEO Bishal Lachhiramka about the company’s product development journey and other advice for startup CEOs. SandHill.com: How did your company originate? Bishal...
SaaS and Silicon Valley are Game-Changers in India
A revolution is taking place in India’s businesses, which is transforming India at large. It began with mobile phones. Although there were telephones in India prior to mobile phones, they never took off in a big way. But mobile phones are so inexpensive and provide such great benefits that now everybody has a phone. The software-as-a-service model is a similar phenomenon in that SaaS fills a void...
Test and Improve Your Pitch at Product Conclave
Test Your Pitch is one of the ideas proposed for the unconference style sessions (aka unsessions) driven by participants. Here is how it works. Every one wants to know how their pitch works. So we want to see whether we can provide you a platform to test your pitch in small groups. Here are some thoughts. We get a room full of people and give them a template for a small (10 sec) pitch We divide...
A KISSMetrics Case Study :: Infographic
Just look at the money saved by KISSMetrics to achieve a Million Dollar Marketing budget result.
Does your customer know what you are talking about?
Let us face it, technology startups are often founded by geeks, employ geeks and hence are, more often than not, geekdoms. There is tremendous value in it. However, there is a significant downside to this as it relates to communication. Geeks speak geekspeak and unfortunately that is all the customers hear a lot of times. This is a HUGE mistake. Never forget who you are in the business for. It...
10 No-Brainer Marketing Lessons for Nerds
Marketing a product is always tricky business. Step into a marketing discussion and it invariably ends with, “Should we really be spending so much on marketing? Isn’t there a better (read: cheaper) way to do this?” Now observe the marketing head honcho whose responsibility it is to get the product into the hands of users. He or she will scrunch the shoulders into a compact shape, ready for the...
Just open the door for me, I can close the sale
In the course of my career, I can’t remember how many times I have heard some version of this phrase from entrepreneurs. In fact, there is a thriving industry that has grown to service exactly this need: door openers that use their connections to get warm introductions to companies for a retainer and a commission. Even with that, why is it that most startups fail for lack of sales? Is it because...
3 objectives your homepage has to accomplish
As a tech startup, your homepage is the first encounter a visitor will have with your business. The first real encounter. And as a business, what is it that you would like to convey during this encounter? Ideally, you would talk for 30 hours straight but then people have lives to live, promises to keep and food to eat. So what do you do? Get your homepage to cover you on three simple grounds...