Dancing with the elephants in a global world - Samir Palnitkar #PNCamp

1. Dancing with the Elephants in a Global
World
Product Nation Camp
Dec 5, 2013
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2. Quick Intro to ShopSocially
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3. ... social commerce for retailers
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4. Company Confidential
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5. Benefits (click images to learn more)
$50MM+ in attributable,
incremental revenue &
counting
• 2MM+ Facebook fans
• 1MM+ Email subscribers
• 4MM+ Rich profiles (b’day,
gender, geo, likes & more)
Via friend recommendation,
the best possible way
Social signals are the #1
driver for SEO rank
200MM+ word-of-mouth
impressions & counting
Social influencers,
trending products & more
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6. B2B Sales in US Markets for India
Companies
ShopSocially’s experiences
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7. Suggested Agenda
• Interactive Presentation – Samir
• Interactive Presentation – Girish
• Open Q & A
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8. Ground Rules
• Leave all mobiles switched off except during the
break
• Please limit “air time”
• Be succinct
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9. Things critical for a sale
• How to get the customer interested?
• How to get the customer to try your product?
• How to lock the customer in?
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10. Initial Sales
• Founders had to do the selling first
– Sales people need a template to selling
• Changed our pitch multiple times
• Trials were conducted in an ad hoc fashion
– We learnt from the trials
– Now we have set methodology that is very likely to
succeed
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11. Pricing
• Pricing was a challenge. No pricing precedent
– Started with Cost per Sale pricing
• Too much variability
• Too much pressure to keep campaigns active
– Move to fixed monthly subscription
• Either our pricing scared away merchants
• OR we were leaving money on the table.
– Monthly subscription + cost per social action
• Allows us to go low if needed
• Covered on the high end with overages
• Performance + stickiness are very important
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12. Trials
• Offer free trials if possible.
– It eliminates the barrier to get engaged
• Started by offering free trials
– Our product was not naturally sticky
– People would kick tyres for a month and then cancel.
We spent a lot of time serving junk customers.
– Offer trials ONLY if the product is sticky or shows
performance without too much hand-holding.
• If the product is not sticky, add sticky features
– Sticky means like if they pull the product out of their
system, they should scream in pain.
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13. Sales Lessons
• Create a sales template
– How will it benefit the customer?
– How will it integrate?
• Visuals are extremely important
– Stunning visuals will make a difference
– Show customers the tool in “their” context if possible
• Do not expect them to extrapolate mentally about how the
product will fit in their environment
• Be ready with pricing
– Some of our customers close immediately
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14. Channels
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•
Channels are extremely important to create scale.
Identify possible ways of distributing the product.
Create a value proposition specific to a channel
Channels for ShopSocially
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Brand Agencies
SEO Agencies
Affiliate Networks
Tag Companies
Shopping Cart Providers
• Decide on the cut to be given to that channel
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15. Physical Product vs Online Product
• Physical Product
– Processes to do trials, shipments has to be extremely
mature
– Lot of working capital needed to distribute physical
product
– Distributors have to stock the product
– Resellers sell the product, but do not stock it
• Online Product
– Get customer to visit your website
– Get the customer to try the product
– Lock the customer in
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16. Strategies
• Inbound Leads
– Referrals from our own product (Powered by ShopSocially) 60% of our
inbounds
– Success Story Webinars (once a month)
– Thought leadership articles – blogs (twice a month)
– Guest blogs (once a month)
– Competitor press releases (twice a month)
– Best practice series
– Social Edge Newsletter
• Outbound Leads
– Use LinkedIn to search for customers in a category
– Build lists, name, email, phone
– Efficient Lead Sources
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LinkedIn
Dedicated lead lists (e.g. retail, data.com)
Published lead lists
Need to extract email and phone #
– Inefficient Lead Sources
• Conference Attendees
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17. Outbound lead touch strategy
• Email the lead
– Invite to webinar OR
– Invite to read a whitepaper or interesting article
– On click, call the lead
• Follow up
– Arrange a phone meeting
– For large customer, in-person meeting
– Persistent follow-up required
• Automated follow up via Pardot (not customized)
• Or manual followup (using a person)
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18. Split of customer facing functions
Sales
Post-sales
Customer
Success
Marketing
(Conferences)
Business
Development
Global Split
Sales
Marketing
(Blog, Webinar, Lead
Gen, Collateral, Site)
Business
Analytics
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US
Customer
Support
Campaign
Creation &
Support
India
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19. Thanks
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