Sales! — My First-hand experience.
It was a long time since I had started thinking to work on my 4th Income stream from a side business. I start, work for some time and then allow folks to run it and I keep my time managing it, taking share in profits after what remains of the free cash. This way it becomes my asset and not a job.
So, for this one, I decided to something in the technology industry. I started researching the most profitable tech businesses and found a pattern.
This post talks about my research and then how I went to do sales myself — I failed and learned a thing or two about sales and decided to let it be for experts to sell stuff for me 😅.
Coming back to the story, the pattern —
First Problem I had to think on:
There are 2 types of industries in this world revolving around tech.
1) Product based — Eg: Google, BrowserStack, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Stripe..to name a few
2) Service-based — Eg: TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Accenture..to name a few
Now, to gain knowledge and experience, it’s always better to work for product based companies. They teach you a lot and you gain priceless experience. But these companies get profitable a few years after they start if we speak in terms of business.
On the contrary, a service based company is not focused on solving a particular problem with the limited market, it focuses on solving different problems for different people in a wide market, not narrowing its reach as per the product, because they don’t have a single product. Hence, money flows in from the first customer. And it’s recurring money for maintaining that software built, for the customer. The success of any service company depends on how well the service is, how affordable it is to the end customer.
But the most important problem for any small customer is that they can’t reach out to big service firms like TCS, Infosys etc. It’s out of their reach in terms of cost for building a solution. That’s where different, small software service agencies come into the picture. They charge customer fewer bucks and build a solution for their problem.
Now another problem from the customer’s point of view is the sustainability of the solution that is being built for him. This is where good engineers come into the picture for solving his problem.
So most of the good engineers follow the above advice from our all-time favorite villain.
So after this few weeks of thinking and research, I was sure of starting a service company who builds any software required by the client as per his requirement and charge for the time, solution and maintenance.
Second problem I had to think on:
Now as we speak, there is another software development agency being started by someone, so there is competition, right?
How do we tackle this?
If we decide to go via freelancer portals like Upwork, Freelancer, Truelancer, etc. there are millions of freelancers sitting with their proposals to submit for a job. Point being, building a profile on these freelancer platforms takes years and till that time you are underpaid for your time, I won’t approve of it for myself.
So my best take was to search for clients offline, by meeting them face to face and explaining what I do.
The Day:
After a few weeks of thinking, talking to my friend and now my business partner Anand. Well, I and Anand have started a couple of things while in college. So I knew his skills and talent. (He now owns the looking-for-clients department 😄), I decided to shortlist a few restaurants in my locality to offer them build a website for their restaurants. Luckily I found one and their website was down when I tried to open their URL. I was very happy now because I got a problem to talk about, with the restaurant’s manager.
So as usual after returning home from work, I went to the restaurant, ordered a dosa, just so that I get time to talk 😆, BUT,
I was not able to think of a way to initiate a conversation with the manager (my first failure to not being able to think for sales), after 10 good mins, I opened their website and showed the error page to the guy who took order from me, he was dressed in a tie, in formals and I thought he can help me. But to my astonishment, he said something strange.
Following is how the conversation went:
Me: Arey sir, aapki website down hai? Dekho chal nahi rahi hai.
He: Sir, usko password lagta hai.
In my mind, I was like, What?. You need a password to open a website?
Me: Password? website nahi khul rahi aapki sir.
He: Wifi na? password hai (with a look on his face).
Me: Sir, wifi nahi, website. (He went ahead a called his senior)
Me to Senior: Sir, aapki website down hai dekho (showing him the webpage on my phone.)
Senior: Acha, down hai, kya dekhna hai? Room ke rates jaane hai kya?
Me: Huh? kya? Nahi nahi. (He goes to the counter and brings me a pamphlet of the room, wedding hall, food rates.)
And the senior goes away to talk to someone else.
I was confused as to what just happened, then right there, I thought, how difficult it is to sell something… 😢
A different, higher level of respect rose in my heart for the folks who do sales. I never behaved rudely to credit card salesman on metro stations, I use to deny them politely. But after that day, I decided to explain to them why I don’t need a credit card ever.
Man, Sales is tough, really tough, and companies ask them to reach their quarter goals, every 3 months.
How they do it? I say it’s the superpower.
Huge respect for the sales guys.
Continuing-
I was blank on how do I proceed to talk about this problem to the restaurant. Meanwhile, I got my order, I left the place, and that got me thinking.
What options did I have? Either learn sales from scratch and then try again OR, don’t jump in a pit whose depth I didn’t know.
I decided to go with the latter.
Later that week, I talked to my friend, and he said he will take care of it and get clients for us to work with.
And, today, we landed a client after meeting a few, some ditching on us after a few days of discussion, we did not get dejected, kept trying until we landed.
So this new gig is a 6 figure gig for development, and further maintaining it, hosting it on AWS Cloud. I am well aware of saving costs on AWS, thanks to my seniors at AWS during my internship. So, all in, it’s a profitable one 😄
I will be running hands-on for few months during weekends until we get enough clients and recurring cash flow and I am confident enough and then hire few engineers to keep working on the tech side, while my friend looks after the operations and sales.
To conclude, the experience trying to sell was phenomenal, I learned that it is really tough to sell stuff, be it whatever, a thing, a service, talent, etc.
On a side note, you see, the subconscious mind is very powerful. As I am writing this line, we have landed 3 other different clients with long term support for maintenance. An untapped market of small and medium business, executed properly after learning from folks I have/had been working with. Truly grateful.
You can check the company’s website at TechWithUs. If you know anyone or need something to be done like build software of any kind? Shoot an email at anand@techwith.us
We have a generous lead submission bonus of up to 10% of deal value to whoever submits a client lead.
Thanks for reading.
Peace! ☮️
