Somesh BhagatIncreasing sales through customer success
Bio

Increasing sales through customer success.

Get my customer's customers to be more profitable. This helps make my customers more successful and helps me be more successful!

B2B IT Enterprise Cloud sales and marketing, mainly.  Industry leader. Business and marketing strategist. Developer of leaders. Performance manager. 

Currently business coach and consultant with Stanford GSB, Stanford Seed - for growing businesses.  And consulting practitioner and blogger.

Successful in persuading customers to invest over 100 million dollars, annually, on IT productivity solutions thereby creating new revenue for organisation.  Work experience in global scale world leading organisations like Oracle and Microsoft, in India. Superior know how in communicating with widest range of C-level, across industries, across company sizes from enterprises to small and medium, and across technology solutions in software, platform, and infra clouds. Consulting clients range from McKinsey, Bain, and Goldman Sachs to small and medium growing organisations. Work includes business and marketing strategy, tech investment advise, sales closures, lead generation, sales training, turnarounds, and growth hyper scaling.

Blessed to be able to give back some through extensive volunteer work.

Golf!

www.linkedin.com/in/SomeshBhagat
www.twitter.com/SomeshBhagat


Recent Answers


I felt you need answers to following questions.
- What is success as defined currently over 1,3,5,10,20,30,50...years, (you do not need all the answers right at start but need to find them over time.)
- Where do you want to go
- Where are you currently
- What are the steps to get you where you want to go
- What is the plan of action for the above
- What is the review process

Hope this helps. Let me know if you want to talk. All the best.


Hi - many freelance gig economy marketplaces have customers publishing such requirements. Register on them and make compelling pitches. Examples are fiverr, upwork, freelancer, contently, clarity(!), and dozens others. Be ready to negotiate first few at very competitive rates or payment only on acceptance basis.

Once you have some successes you should make a 3-6-9 month revenue plan.

Hope this helps. All the best.


Hi. I felt you need to establish an MVP - minimum viable product - for this segment. Since this is a service it is easier to do.

Very briefly. Create a package and test this out on a small segment and numbers - say a language or geography or a language learning need etc. Depending upon feedback modify the package and keep doing fast it till you get feedback it is minimally viable to go to market. Alongside find out what your competitors are doing in this area. You will get very good feedback on questions that you ask and many more in this process. Then go a phase 1 of your sales campaign again in a geography or a high value learning where you offer substantial value compared to your competitors. Along side build a business plan on where you want to go 1-2-3 years ahead.

Hope this helps. Let me know if we should talk to flesh this out. All the best.


Hi. I try to ask strategy questions - if the map is right then better chance to reach destination.

A better question to ask is what is the best way for you - a dentist - to promote your services.

Next question is what services and if it is consultations then specialized medical consultation portals or dentistry portals will serve your needs better. Your geography is not mentioned but say a sub second search on such portals in USA gives hundreds of results. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dentist+consultation+portals+in+usa&ia=web You may be better off joining these due to focused reach.

On the other hand if you want to give business advise on dentistry or healthcare business or healthcare - say how to set up a dentistry business - then this can be a good forum. This forum is better for business advice.

I hope this helps. Let me know if we should talk further to better define go to market. All the best.


Hello. I help increase sales through customer success.

I quote below my answer to a similar 'business strategy' question. This outlines an approach. We can talk about your specific need and solution. Let me know. All the best - Somesh

"Business Strategy: In a two sided service marketplace for freelancers what should be the Go-to strategy or the best way to reach the target audience ?

Somesh Bhagat, Increasing sales through customer success answered:

Hi.

My expertise is in helping expedite business outcomes.

The best advise is to tell your prospects of the unique value of your service or its unique positioning in terms of how it will help your customers. You need to articulate compelling propositions that are irresistible and sustainable. It should be better than your competition and communicated strongly.

A two sided service market place it a tough spot. You have to address two big audiences, who may have totally different characteristics, messaging need, and business development strategies.

Before your Go-to strategy you need a compelling story, a mission, and a vision. You also need to articulate a business strategy encompassing both ends of your business model.

The go-to strategy will evolve from your business propositions, market, business model, and audiences. What kind of freelancers you are taking about - professionals, technicians, labor et al. Who is on the other side of the market place - individuals, households, businesses-small/medium/large/government et al. What is your revenue model and business plan. How strong is your competition? How strong are you versus competition? Do you want to go for the whole market or a niche depending upon your SWOT? How are you different from Fiverr, Upwork, Clarity, and the like or unlike? Your go-to strategy should answer all these questions at the very least.

You may find better and sustainable success going this route.

Hope this helps and let me know if I can be of further assistance for the above. Best wishes."


Hello. IMPO this is a wrong question.

The correct question is what s my business plan, what is my key strength in this business, and how do I plan to succeed, versus competitors.

This does not seem to be a business that has high barrier to entry. Namely, many can do this. Some of these will have deep domain know how that they will likely know the answer to this question and some may even have high credibility in trade and suppliers.

You have not specified the market, but voila - a google search for camping gear market in USA gives over 5 million searches in much less than a second. Page 1 alone has over 15 listings and 7 ads already. Many have great websites already. Some have ratings over 5 from hundreds of customers.

Are you aware of such competition in your market? How and why would you win from them?

This may help think deeper into this question and plan action. Hope this helps.

Let me know if I can help think through this into a more viable action plan.

All he best.


Often in a growing market it is possible to go with a lower cost strategy for some time and piggy back on a leader.

Mostly, one has to differentiate as markets mature.

If one can offer lower cost than competitors sustainably, grow the business faster than market - execute very fast, then that itself is a differentiation. Else there may be a tradeoff between growth, market share, profitability, and cost, or even between staying or exiting - even at loss.

It also depends upon what you are looking for as a mission and that may determine your sweet spot. For example there are businesses that offer cheaper options, but cater to limited geographical market, and are happy to operate on a thinner margin and moderate volume. Or some offer more expensive options but offer better product or service, and are more profitable but lower on volume.

Normally lower cost as a strategy is very tough to sustain as a going concern. Many times others will catch up and offer cheaper. Some incumbents may decide to exit the market at this time.

In a mature markets, normally a key differentiator or unique positioning will be helpful. It can help sustainability of business and make it more profitable. If one aims big and for dominance of market, say like Uber, then this strategy is necessary.

Eventually the strategy will also depend upon your own capabilities, challenges, and the size of market you want to address. They can determine what path you may take, and it may be different for someone else.

Uber is not the only hailing app. There are many others that catered to different geographies that Uber had not reached yet. They may have been cheaper than Uber. Uber's competitive edge is scale and network today. Their product or idea is copy-able by anyone, and has been copied many times across the world. But not their scale, size, market share, and progress. Yet these companies have good valuations as they were ahead of Uber in a geography it had not reached yet. In fact in some geographies Uber exited at loss as it could not compete on local incumbent scale.

And then they have Lyft too to contend with in their market as well. Lyft has been known to be faster to get and cheaper at times. Yet both companies have good valuations, too.

Hope this helps. As you see this is a nuanced point if one thinks deeper. Ping me to sent up a call to discuss further to evolve an answer specific to your needs. Bye and all the best.


Hello Ansha.

I help increase sales through customer success.

This is a nice idea I think.

I also think you have a pretty good idea of the canvas of your 'UVP'.

What you need I felt is an MVP - minimum viable product. You have to create a first cut working model of the platform and validate it with users. Kind of do 'design thinking'. This will help you fine tune the 'VP' based on actual user experience and needs. It could also indicate to you how 'viral' is it going to get.

As for your VP being 'unique' many other factors come into play. It is not that anyone cannot copy this idea or even come up with it on her own. So how fast can you go 'viral' and add a lot of subscribers is also going to determine success. My personal view - I do not think Facebook is unbelievably unique in features or idea. But it is unbelievably unique in scale. So lot of it has been virality and lot of it great execution, IMHO.

I hope this helps. Let me know when we can talk.

All the best.


Hi. I help increase sales through customer success.

I seeing this simply and trying to put it the same way.

The founders need to delegate. It is typical of a start up. Founders try to or end up doing everything or many things.

To delegate two prerequisites are there.

One, ability to delegate and two, a person to delegate to.

Clearly latter is a problem. One solution is to hire a Chinese proficient marketing manager.

Former may or may not be an issue but it has to be judged and improved. Part of delegation skill is that the founders have to have it to define performance metrics for the marketing manager. Business coaching can help here.

Let me know if you need my help to achieve the above.

All the best.


Hi. Theoretically you can do anything you want. However practically it may be not be adequately profitable or even profitable.

If it is high growth market and you are relatively early then potentially you can do the same thing that others are doing but you have to monetize sooner. As market matures you will need uniqueness to continue to be as or more profitable than your competitors. Else likely you will operate at low margins or even negative which will make you exit the business.

All examples given by you are relatively mature areas with number of competitors, many with unique offering, and many with bigger names. If you go with a similar offering then your cost of entry will be high. This will hurt profitability. There are smarter ways to do this.

Hope this helps. Let me know when we need to talk. Bye.


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