Post on Medial

How Indians buy is different from the West, it’s unique but also very expensive for companies Most purchases in India 1 are done without any assistance, ideally assistance happens if the avg value of purchase increases i.e car, jewellery 95% of purchases by India 2, are assisted by a seller, counselor, account or relationship manager Think of this, right from buying stuff in the supermarket, getting a loan/insurance, or buying an educational course - consumers need someone to talk to To onboard a merchant on payment apps, marketplaces, or e-commerce platforms - some executives have to reach out to onboard them This is a very different behavior when you compare it with the India 1.. In the West or any progressive country, most sales are self-assisted - only enterprise-level or high ticket-size transactions have humans involved. Tech companies are supposed to be tech-led but in India, most big tech companies are partly operations-led there are many reasons: What happens when a tech business needs sales executives or any human effort to acquire a user, margins shrink to a certain extent - conversions could improve a little but quality, miss-selling opportunities, and average response time increases You are in a disaster business if you need human effort to acquire a user and make them perform their key activity again ( basically your activation cost becomes super expensive) I think another big failure with this behavior is, that cross-selling and up-sell become so hard, ideally, cross-selling and upselling only exist where there is high engagement At my stint in PW, 60%+ of our sales used to be counseling-led, and there were courses with a different proposition and price points but we had to use counseling efforts to sell courses worth 4000 INR. When we were building credit profiling for businesses, we used to hear rants from SMB lending tech incumbents about how operational-heavy the entire process was. @Rahul_J_Mathur , who prev built Verak an insurance company for SMB kept telling us how they have to drop an army of sales reps to get deeper penetration When your sales become mostly operational there are more operations required to make sure they are efficient, You will have to pay them good salaries and align incentives. derive quality metrics and optimize those metrics ( average response time, average sales time, lead to sale %) Build a knowledge base and update it consistently Build an organizational structure of Senior managers, managers, assistant managers, team leads, and analysts Do quality checks and assurance, have higher NPS With this operation-led sales process what happens is that 50% of leads generated in a lead gen campaign are of no use, consumers don’t lift your call or say not interested in the first second What’s causing this is many reasons, we are a low-trust country - you need constant human touch to build reassurance ( You have to badly do this if your products fail to solve engagement) In India there are only a few products that are very well built, most products don’t have great UX and don’t have answers for edge cases, which amplifies the low trust of the consumer Consumers’ lack of understanding, we always think consumers are mature like us and have great exposure like us but it’s not true, Once at PW we were collecting our NPS, we asked consumers to rate us 1 out of 10 when we saw results our NPS numbers were bad when we deep dive into it we understood many learners rated us 1 thinking number 1 is the highest rank :) You can solve this by building great products, but also you can’t swim against the river, if you are in an industry that needs operations involved, then go for it but make sure you build a great automation system