How we sold a similar product as that of competitor at 3x price in the same market?

Other companies selling a product at 1x price and then we came and sold the similar product in the same market at 3x price, How? How to sell a product at a price that you want to sell, not at a price that the market wants to buy?

In this article I will be sharing a story of my recent project, how we started, built a team (60 people), trained the people, created a process, positioned the product and in the end, failed due to Covid.

We did a lot of things differently in this project, the most important thing was how we differentiated ourselves with the competitors at scale. I was very excited to share this story with like minded people as I feel this would for sure help other entrepreneurs in my network. 

Summarizing our Achievements in 12 months:

• Fresh Team Hired and Trained – 60 people
• Total Schools in which we ran Trial – 750+
• Total Schools with Paid Agreement Signed – 125
• Order Book – 8 Crores

1.      Initial days of creating a pitch

I took over the role of National Head – School Business on 1st April 2020, and at that time I myself was not very sure on how to pitch this product in the market. I had experience of dealing with school clients in my previous roles but the product we had was priced at 3x compared to any competitor in the market. Due to the reason I was very sure, if we pitch it the way our competitors are doing, we are going to lose the final battle due to price.

I thought from the first principle and the best way to create a pitch was by pitching the product to a few clients and checking what hits. I randomly started speaking to a few people in my network and observed which of the points in the product was creating an interest.

I found an interesting thing there. Our product was Assessment for classes 6-12, CBSE students. There was a teacher portal with which teacher can assign a test (concept wise or chapter wise), students attempt the test and then teacher gets a detailed report with which they can plan remedies. Product was very simple. In our demo to clients, if we show the product, it takes hardly 15-20 mins and you can cover the entire set of features. This was a major problem. If we complete a demo in just 15-20 mins, no one would be ready to pay 3 times of the competitor price.

So we built a story for presenting the product. We decided that we would never present this product as an Assessment. We presented the product as a tool for Academic Improvement. We started positioning the product as an Academic Improvement Program where we help the school in preparing an Academic Goal and then evaluating students in a micro level to track the Goal in every fortnight basis. This helped us to position our product in such a manner that no one was thinking this an assessment tool.

2.      Shaping the product as per the market need

Next target I had was to shape the product so that it satisfies the need of the market. First 2-3 months I spent in working closely with the product and tech team to build a few features from the teacher/principal side so that it would add a lot of value in the offering.

Another major challenge we had was the CBSE content. We didn’t even have one class of complete CBSE content ready and we started pitching the product in the market. Vishal (VP-Content) and his team worked day and night to ensure in the first 2 months, the first few chapters of all classes (6-12) are ready. It helped us in giving demos and to serve a few clients that adopted our platform for the FY 2020-21.

3.      Building the Team

Building the sales and operations team was my best bet. I knew that in B2B market, I can’t get good ROI unless I have the best sales people on the field. I had a few contact with the leaders of sales from my previous experience but a big doubt in mind was, a person who can perform good in selling books, digital classroom, erp (need based product), can he also perform good in selling a product that no one needed or I would say no one knew they needed. We had to create the need and then satisfy their need with our product. Value selling is the factor here and I had to build a team who can sell value.

When I analyzed the market I understood that finding people who have sold value in the past is very difficult. There were only a few companies in Ed-Tech B2B market who were selling products by creating the need. Even if there were companies, the sales people in those companies had a maximum target of only INR 20-25L an year and the best performers were achieving up to INR 35-40L an year. On the other hand, we had decided the target of INR 60L per sales person in the plan. I was left with no choice but to hire the team and then train them on how to create the value.

So I started hiring the best sales people I could, starting with the leaders. I hired 6 leaders and divided the entire country in 6 different zones. I knew a few of them will fail to perform and I wanted to achieve my target, even if half of the zones won’t perform. Therefore, I built 6 small teams.

Idea was to sell a product at a price that we want to sell, not at a price the market is expecting to buy.

4.      Training the Team

Once the team building process started, the leaders started hiring the people under them and we started to train the sales and operations team. In my experience with sales, I had always wanted to focus on training very deeply. A lot of people think that training a sales person is just to give them product knowledge, but here the case was different. No sales person had sold this product in this condition (Covid) at this price (3x) before in their life.

I took over the responsibility to train each one of the sales person. For me this was a huge challenge since each of the sales person we hired had atleast 4-5 years of experience in selling in Indian School market. It becomes difficult to change the thought process of an experienced person. But we had to hire experienced guys only since freshers can’t even enter schools in their first year of sales job.

I took sessions of team, first entire team together (every week one session) and then zone wise where I used to sit with team of one zone every day in the evening and check their pitch. I wanted to somehow ensure that each and every sales person talks the same language. I didn’t want to leave it to the sales person to create their pitch because I knew they would fail in the same.

I also travelled to different locations to check the pitch of the sales people and visited schools with them to show them how to pitch in a real scenario. With experienced sales people, there is a problem that they don’t want to listen to you unless they see that happening in a real life scenario. That is the reason I started traveling to different locations and then showing the people how to pitch. It helped a lot.

5.      Getting Each one of the Team to dream about Success

This is a very crucial step. A lot of founders/managers miss this step. When you hire good people, they don’t just work for you because you are giving them monthly salary. Good people need a reason to put the extra effort, I call that as delta effort. To success in any project, you need that delta effort from your team.

My job was to ensure each of my team members were dreaming of the success they could get if they achieve the numbers. It was little easy for me because the product I was selling was a software content based, there was no hardware involved and the cost of serving a client was also less. Hence the profit margin was good. I clearly explained this to all the team members and made them dream of the growth they can get if they perform well here.

Even me and my boss (Udit Sawhney) both wanted to give the best growth to the top performers. In every monthly meeting, I used to talk about the same thing with the team in an open forum. Even when I personally visit any area, I used to ensure the team realizes the kind of growth they can expect here once they bring the numbers.

6.      Identifying the people who could do 2x of their target

This is a major step where a lot of people miss the opportunity. Some senior sales people go slow when they get to know that they are going to achieve the target easily. I wanted to ensure they never go slow. I started personally reaching out to the top 10 performers of my team and speaking to them directly in regular intervals. I wanted to ensure each one of them achieve 1cr+ and it was easily possible at one point of time. People had great prospects and we were following up with them very closely.

7.       Reaching a stage where clients themselves started saying– You guys don’t have any competitor

At last we achieved this. We were successfully positioned our product in such a manner where our majority of the clients used to say that they don’t know if there exists any competitor to your product. Even though there are thousands of assessment companies in the market, we were successful in showing the difference and positioning ourselves separate from the market. Steve jobs used to say – “ Don’t look at the competitor and say we will do better, Look at the competitor and say we will do differently” and that is what I followed for my tenure here and with my great team, I was able to position my product differently in the market.

Everything was going as per the plan, but by the end of Feb 2021, Covid second wave came up and schools started shutting down. Due to the reason, all our implementation got postponed and we couldn't even onboard 20% of our signed schools. We could have easily signed Order Book of 15cr as per the prospects we had but after mid of Feb signups also came down. Looking at the condition of Covid right now, schools are not even expected to open in the next 6 months, and hence we decided to move on with this project.

Our product was positioned in such a manner that it helps schools in improving their academics. But during the second wave the main objective of a school was to survive and so they didn’t focus on implementing our product.

One thing that I told my team in the end – “We had a great time working together. Sometimes more than the destination, the journey matters and we witnessed the same. All of us enjoyed our time in this project, we gave our full effort and learned a lot from each other. Let this learning define who we are and what we are capable of achieving”.

I still have the same energy to again start something new, something different and lead a product from idea to market and then scale it. If anyone has an exciting project, feel free to reach out. I am open to work with great people who dream with their eyes open.