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He has more than two decades experience selling IT and telecom products, a substantial part of it in convincing customers over telephone to buy from the companies he was working with.
Having quit his corporate career, Balaji Chakravarthi decided to put his sales experience to good use.
FirstFewCustomers.com, a website founded and run by him, seeks to help start-ups get their first few customers.
Why start-ups? They most often do not have this expertise, says Chakravarthi.
The entrepreneurs behind these start-ups may be tech- or marketing-savvy, but very rarely do they have sales experience, and that is one reason a number of ventures suffer, he says.
The triggerChakravarthi says he got interested in launching a website for start-ups as he conducted a few sessions on sales at Nasscom, the software industry lobby body, and TiE, the organisation dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship.
He has also done such sessions at various management institutes.
“I have done 30 workshops over the last 30 months. That is when the idea for this came,” he says, adding: “The kind of questions that come, they are so basic because they are not sales people. They don’t have any experience.”
A few senior company executives might have some sales background. However, opening doors and closing sales is tough.
No two companies are the same, he adds.
Initially, Chakravarthi thought of writing on sales for start-ups, but then realised that the internet is a more powerful medium, and how better to do it than conduct interviews with entrepreneurs who have made it big.
He conducts the interviews either over phone or in person, and puts them up on the website, which is free to access.
His idea, he says, was to capture Indian examples of sales, rather than rely on what foreign textbooks and websites offer.
His strategy is to ask the founders to refresh their memory and recollect the first steps they took while trying to sell their product or service, the mistakes they made and how they corrected them.
Phone sales tips“This is a knowledge portal targeted at early-stage and aspiring start-ups. For them, this is an Indian sales portal, a live experience of people who have been there and done that,” says Chakravarthi.
He also plans to shortly launch a paid-for portal that provides tips on selling over the telephone.
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