Following up Sales lead - "Man" a word which screwed up my whole conversation with a end costumer.

Following up sales lead and not ending up screwing it.

So this is a personal experience of mine which I would like to share with all my fellow mates who are working in start-ups who are taking care of sales part in-spite of being from technology background. Reason behind that is simple, being in a start-up domain you need to change your roles and responsibilities as per situation. You can't be a pure technical guy being in a start-up(this is what I feel).

So as everyone say, that Costumer is "God" and that is very true for everyone, you say about big corporate or start-up or any one. Things are a bit different with respect to the big corporate houses, but when we talk about start-ups, costumers are the one who make a start-up turn to corporate house and to do so, you need to have a high level costumer satisfaction. This post can even be a self confession for me. 

This is what happened

I was in process of generating some sales leads - both inbound calls through some of the B2B websites promotion and outbound calls. Along with that had to take care of certain other important things. I was out on field and was engaged in some other work and suddenly a thing strike in my mind. "how to become more productive" and at the same time god might have though "i will teach you a lesson today". 

I put out my phone while the my colleague was getting taking care of work. I checked my mail and listed whom to call and called some one who had send some query to us. The other guy picked up phone and i said

Me : "Hello Sir, this is shailendra from X, i got a query from your side. Can you please let me know your specs."

Costumer : "I  am looking for blah - blah - blah" 

and he told me every specs on phone. When he was just going down through the specs, i think he was outside and in a hurry. I didn't get full specs and thus i said

Me : "sir, i will drop you a mail with respect to our products and in the same mail will drop some questions just for clarification" 

Costumer : "No no, i am telling you specs, listen here"

Me : "ok sir" 

and then he asked me question which i think no one will try to reply back on phone 

Costumer : "what is the approx cost ?"

Me :  "Sir, let me discuss with my senior over your requirement and then i will reply back" 

Costumer : "No no tell me now"

Me : "Sir what budget you are looking at" (probably i asked wrong question, but this is what i learned after talking to many of my target costumers)

Costumer : "No no, you cannot ask such question to me" 

Me : "Sir approx cost is between Rs A to Rs B"

Costumer : "then no need to send quotation, you will waste your time and my time" 

and then he started arguing on the same. And then blunder happen which must not had happened and i must not be writing this confession cum post. As we all talk among us in office , we use work dude, man and i know when you are taking part in business related activity, you had to come out of your tech role. I said "Listen 'man' " instead of "Listen 'Sir'" and very soon i realize that i had done the blunder which i hadn't done till now in my past. I know very well that what costumer mean and how should i talk to one, but i really don't know how that happen. And then the other guy started 

Costumer : "How can you use that word ,i am not your friend and you don't know to who the hell you are talking". 

I was aware that i had done a mistake and i listened and then disconnect the phone. Actually i was about to say, "Listen sir, cost depend upon MOQ and we can always talk on that", instead i used work "man". Inspite of being a man who know and duel y follow the fact of "costumer = god", used nonsense word and language. And people like us, who always have some ego, don't apologies easily but then i thought that no, you had used wrong word and you must apologies to him. I called him again and said 

Me : "Sir , i am extremely sorry, i was not supposed to use that word, but unknowingly i used that word, i am really sorry and i apologies for that".  

Costumer : "No, no you send the quote, i will think". 

And from that time, inspite of saying sorry, i am feeling too much guilt, that how the hell i can do this kind of mistake. I am kind of guy who always respect others and want to maintain a level of costumer relation and satisfaction.  But then i analyze my routine from the morning and came to some conclusion which lead to this kind of mistake 

(1) Don't try to be over-productive, some time trying to being over-productive leads to conditions like these. 

(2) Never call a sales lead while you are in field. 

(3) Try to manage your activities in a day depending upon priorities. 

(4) Never call a sales lead with out proper planning just for sake of engaging with him. 

(5) Try to figure out the priorities and work accordingly. When doing some work, don't think about other tasks.

So people said right, first think, analyze , plan and then execute and i think i missed everything. So lesson from the above incident - "Don't follow your sales lead while without preparation and while being on field" and that is the best thing out there in start-up domain, you do mistakes and learn from them rather then some one telling you how to do things, you learn things to do by your own. 

Below are some of the articles which i read after above incident, so as not to repeat such kind of mistake in future and specially for guys like me who are not actually sales guys but trying to put their part being in a start-up. 

(1) Link - 1

(2) Link - 2

(3) Link - 3

(4) Link - 4

I hope that my above post might help some of the guys are in same domain and in some point of time will do this part of sales also. 

Happy working..........

Life of a Entrepreneur -- It happen daily.

Life of a Entrepreneur from his eyes and from world eyes.

From what world see:

"Oh my god, he is a owner of a company, f****ng awesome, he must be so rich". These are the lines which some time even i say and most of the people say. "He must be having a good life", "what he do, just sign some documents, make some plans, order some execution and he is making millions". This is what people think who don't have any idea of life of a businessman or entrepreneur.  

From What Employees think:

This is what some of the employees think who joined company after 2-3 years when it was founded - "bullshit, we keep on doing all work and he keep on making money, why should i work of my a**, i will work for 8 hours only(well this doesn't happen always)". 

This is what happen in reality:

Night 

Ok, Sales planning for North done, need to assign some more elaborated task to Mr.X, Oh, have to call Mr.Y tomorrow and talk to him regarding our sales agenda over there. Need to complete that code review(this is what happen with tech based start-up even though they had raised seed rounds), Oh have a meeting with marketing manager too. Need to finalize agenda for our next marketing campaign on facebook and linkedin. "phone rings and sound come from other side - when are you coming(Family call- wife on high tone), on my way- he says". And then one more things strikes in mind, have to talk  to CA too, need to clear some taxes. And then leaves for home.

In home after dinner

Wife say "i need to go to my home tomorrow for a function, you need to come with me" and you cannot say anything. Open laptop and start replying to mail's in your inbox and its not 4-5 mails, its like 20-30 mails and you cannot neglect(you already refined). And then come the code review and as all software engineers, it takes a hell lot of patience. And then when your code review is done, you need to do your part on technology side. And when this is done, you start lining up tasks for the next day and what is the time now - 4 a.m in the morning.

Next morning 

You wake up and the first thing you do is check your mail box on phone. Its already late and you start leaving for office and here come the PM of home, "what are you leaving for office, what about function" and you cannot say anything apart from "sorry" and some time it work and some time it not(although this is not always true, you partner need to understand you and when she does, you life become a bit more simpler). You reach office and here they are, ready for another meeting, every one, your sales manager, your marketing manager and in between you HR might also tell you that you have to take final round of interview. What?

Afternoon 

You need to look around the finance figures(cash flow i think is one of the important aspects from which no founder/co-founder can run away) and find out did we still have runway for 6-7 month. In the mean time, some thing strikes in your mind that you have to plan to meet a VC for next round of funding. 

Evening
And in the evening, you start working on your stuff that you love to do apart from many other things that you are required to do and again the same routine start, making strategy for the next day, building plans to increase the sales and cash flow in the company , looking after a dream to make your start-up successful and their to-do list never end.

Reality is for a entrepreneur, weekends, holidays means nothing, what means for him is his/her start-up growth. Absolutely, if he/she succeed, he/she get reward in terms of appreciation from every one in the industry, money in terms of salary and equity in the company and a personal satisfaction that he is able to build something from scrap but at the same time, if his/her start-up don't succeed, he/she is the one who has to suffer a great loss, but again, being a entrepreneur they learn a lesson from their failure and again start from the very beginning.

In total, everyday, every hour of entrepreneur is full of struggle , challenges, victories and failures and that is what make them worthy of getting the greatest price of success and learning(failure means learning for them).
  

Yuktix Air Weather station

Yuktix Air Weather Station

Yuktix - As clear from the word yuktix define itself, its a way out for some problem. So when we are talking about Yuktix AWS (Air Weather station), we here at Yuktix try to resolve some of real time problem which people in a city like Bangalore faces quite often. Bangalore is a city which always has some short of micro-climate existing in the environment. You can have a look at Know your climate blog. Now with this type of climate you are never sure whether to go some where with a umbrella or not , or even that is right time to leave for some place as rain may cause traffic issues in a metro city like Bangalore. Its not like that it will be great asset, but anyhow, it will help people to atleast mentally prepare them when they are leaving for a place. 

So when we meet people from Know your weather climate they put up a brilliant idea of rolling out a citizen weather project. For more information on this citizen weather project, have a look at this blog. Well it was a great idea to work on. Assume, we have a network of about 100 AWS installed in various part of city, pushing their data on a cloud, from where it is being displayed on a website open for citizen. People who have subscribed for notification can get instant SMS or email with respect to the weather condition in their area. Or they can simply find out information about climate of a specific area. On the other hand any researcher who want to access the climate related data of a city can easily access the data for his/her research. Not only this, research institutes or any agriculture institutes can use this data for weather updates. Well it was always a interesting idea and has got many interesting use cases. 

So we at Yuktix started working on this project. I was a part of Yuktix at that time, but only at the suggestion level. I wasn't the one who was in action. So when we started working on this, we were in state of mind that this is a pretty easy project to work upon and we can finish it up pretty easily. But believe me, it wasn't easy and that is a thing, you love while working in a start-up. You are aware of each and every component of the project you are working on. Its unlike very big level projects where people who are working aren't aware of what is happening in real(well it's not always true). Being in a start-up, you got to deal with each and every part, starting form making a plan of execution, hiring, sourcing of parts(even bolts and nuts), electronics hardware, firmware, software, cloud etc. So coming back to our execution of AWS project. We started from very scratch. We got a proof of concept with a well know open source board arduino. Well very soon, we came to know that working with Arduino is ok till the time you are working at DIY(do it yourself) level, but when you are working on deploying a projecty which had real time applications and that is helping people even on a smaller scale, you need to build a customized pcb. Well again, i am not against arduino implementation. Although there are many projects like Ardusat in which people are talking to build a diy platform to perform experiments in space. But still, we think to build our platfrom on AVR micrcontrollers(Arduino platform is based on AVR MCU's). 

In our work to build, a customized pcb, we meet our hardware expert, a experienced hardware professional form IITK, 1975 batch and we came-up with a AVR microcontroller based unit which provide features like

Balcony Variety AWS

• A Microcontroller with sufficient processing power. 
• Sufficient ADC channels .
• I2C channels.
• Sufficient UART channels
• GPRS feature
• In-built sensors
• wireless feature like Xbee for implementing WSN like features.

So our one crucial part i.e hardware was almost done(although we never consider it done as we are further working on adding features in the next iteration). At the same time, our team was working on implementing  the  firmware part for the hardware as well as cloud software. And on the same time we were working on developing the mechanical part of the AWS that also including making our product work on the green energy that is using solar power to run our electronics. A small picture of the same is below. Well it seems to be too simple in this pic, but believe me it take a hell lot of time to develop this thing starting form finding the right guy for fabrication, keeping in mind that he supply quality product, getting tress design from CAD designer, installing in on one of the site. 

Field type/Open space type AWS

So in the end when we are done with all these i.e hardware, firmware, cloud software we are up and working with a real time Air weather station which is capable of measuring climatic factors like 

• MM/Inches of rain.
• Temperature
• Humidity
• Wind speed(in next iteration)
• Air quality including factors like CO2, Nitrous oxide and other gases concentration in a specific region. 

And with that if you have subscribed for the alerts and notification, you can easily get notifications on SMS or email. At the same time you can easily see the real time data on the Yuktix cloud as well as on the Android app that we had build specifically for AWS. With all these things working, we are trying to resolve some of the problems which people faces. So we at present have two AWS models. One which is a field unit running on solar power and the other one which people can easily install in their home in balcony.

Start-up Recruitment : getting the right guy in.

Start-up Recruitment

How you must deal with recruiting in the very start and in in-coming years.

 I am not a follower of many things, but i always keep on seeking new learning's. With a zeal in me to have have mine own start-up and working previously in 2 start-ups i.e. Thinvent Technologies and Silverline Design Inc, and consulting Yuktix technologies, i have came across a small bit of experience in start-up recruitment which i want to share as recently i came across a telephonic call followed by a email conversation which make me feel , what the hell is this?

I don't want to mention the name of company as i understand what it means, but it was defiantly a bad attitude from their side. After a bit of emails and follow-up, i got a online test request which i wasn't able to take for 2 time and for the same, i had dropped them a apology mail. I was a bit curious as that was a start-up from my field of interest. The very next day, i got a call from their HR and he said that "Are you able to take the test because i have a long list of people in queue and i cannot wait". Well that sound a bit rude and absurd and following that i said, please carry on with the queue. May be i am wrong in showing attitude, but at the same time, what impression they had left on me, i cannot forgot. It was just like saying some one "Dude we are the one big start-up that is booming up and we don't give a shit for people like you", well that is welcomed and that show that you are a booming company and heading towards great height, but just think, with that attitude where are you heading towards? On LinkedIn i came across a great article "Don't fuck up the culture". That is a good article to read. Culture is one of the major part of any start-up and it is the thing that is going to help you out in the future. In my previous company, Saurabh Jain(Director/Founder) said "It is the culture prevailing here that make us different.". It might sound like i am a bit disturb with the way that start-up company treated me, so answer is "Yes" i am. But at the same point, it let me think, what will be the guidelines should i make during recruitment. 

Start-up recruitment is a long-time process. Some time it may decide the future of the company. If you get the right guys, you can achieve you aim with the common focused energy of your colleagues, but if not, you will end up splitting in too many broken parts. 

During my last meet-up visit, i heard from a start-up founder Mrs. Sugandha Dubey (www.Stockimagebank.com), that start-up hiring is  long and important process. You need to find the right guy and your search must continue till the time you find a time with synergy with you . 

So as per me , we must continue with the culture of company , till the very last end. I may not say that we must follow the same guidelines every-time, but yes, thing will revolve around these points and will change according to situation. 

1.  Refer the social networking web-sites like linkedIn and facebook.
2. Work out on the referals. 
3. Job portals are good source.
4. Initial conversation will be just like introducing your company and asking for the very next conversation .
5. Getting them for a telephonic interview, rather then a on-line test. It make people a bit absurd. 
6. Follow-up with their availability. No one around you is free and keep in mind that you are dealing with one of the probable employee of the company, who is always going to help out in your venture. 
7. If that guys meet your requirement , call for the next F-F round. 
8. Have technical round/management question round.
9. Set a threshold, if qualified, ok, if not, talk to him in person. Now the talking person may be head _HR(if any or founder itself, if they have time. Keep in mind, talent and employee acquisition is a important part. ) 
10. Personal conversation must be to find out the personal interest of the candidate in what you are doing, how much interested they are in your venture, how much they can give and what they expect in return.
11. Get the aggregation of points and find out if he qualifies or not. 
12. If he/she is missing by some points, neglect technical/management round and go withe personal interaction result. 
13. And the most important point is "Dont  make the guy feel that he is just another shit candidate for you, but he is a probable employee"

 It is what i feel for the recruitment. There are experts sitting around me, who can tell us better what need to be done, but some time, it's your personal interaction with the probable employee or employee which make him/her feel that it's the right company in which they want to work and they can put their enthu and commitment for the company. For me, my co-founders, my employee are the one who are running my start-up and if i can make them happy , i am very sure, they will take care of others things in a better way.

Its' not being different by nature, its your passion towards a goal which make you different.

Young Entrepreneur

What does it take to be a be passionate about what you think?

Well its a big question to be asked and i think i might not be the best person to answer that of my experience, but lets me try. When you say you are passionate, that means you love the thing which you want to do, some people say that you are becoming "romantic" with what you want to do and not becoming realistic. I find them to be true upto some extent. Now upto some extent means, being in romance with what you want to do give you more confidence in what you are doing and you don't see  other things that are going to be effected by your romance, and that make you different from others. "A beautiful mind" a movie on Nobel prize winner JOHN NASH, describe the what it take to be in love with what you want to do in your life. It always have it pros and cons. Although till the very last stage you might not get the pros of loving what you do, but you will always face cons from the very starting but what you get in the last make you different. Not much people are able to do that and of-course there are conditions around you which not let you do so. There is no body to blame around. 

Now question is why the hell is my post heading is YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR and what is the necessity of all that philosophy which i had written above and what is the relationship between the 2. Well there is a relationship between two. Well everybody around here cannot become John Nash or Albert Einstein  or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs as there need to be diversity in the society( well it can be said as bloody excuse though ). "October Sky" a inspirational movie  which show how much struggle you need to put to do things differently from the very early stage. So here is where my article topic is justified. Being a young entrepreneur means a lot of trouble in the early stage of life. Lets take a example around you and ofcourse i am not talking about "nerds", i am just taking a example of a common boy having a average IQ and what will make him different will be his passion. 

Now take a example, you are a very common person, belonging to a average grade group in college or even not in college. You had a family around you and you got all the expectations roaming around you which are continually stopping you to fly, fly high in the sky , chasing a dream of doing something different. You don't have anyone around you to guide you what to do and what to not, you just want to do be different. Now this point of being different make you choose a option infront of you. You choose that option and then being in that field you develop a idea  and that is nature of your's and start working to achieve you goal, not thinking where it will lead you, not thinking what it is giving you in return. Now those person who will follow this path will definitely reach a point where they will feel themselves to be different. Well ofcourse in the meantime you might have missed many things, your girlfriend might have left you , your parents expectation might have been broken. That will take a lot of courage to do the same and that is what i missed. 

Looking back in my past, i become greedy. I wanted to take everything with me and that's not possible in reality and that is why i said it is difficult to be romantic with what you want to do until and unless all the others things around you are being taken care of  or unless you are not a born nerd. 

So my advice to my fellow "YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR" is that , the path you had taken might be a bit difficult, you might have to face a lot of people and their sayings, you might not be that lucky that your girlfriend will support you, you might have to listen too much scarce comments from your parent's like you cannot do that, it's not that easy to do so (yes ofcourse it's not that easy to be a YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR, but it's what i want to do, let me take a decision for my life and i will take care of the rest), you might have to face your inner dignity many time that what the hell you are doing, you had got some responsibilities towards your parents, but believe me my friend, just give a try and not try, just give your full for the one time and you will see the result , you will feel that you are different from others. There is a possibility that people around you might not identify you as a different person and you might fail, but the confidence you will fell will be immense and beyond description. 

Again there are lots of pros and cons related to this action of being in romance with what you are doing and becoming "romanceliastic". The later will make you feel safe while taking risk, but what will be the meaning and benifit of taking a risk when you are being safe on the other hand.