SM: Please describe your personal background : Family, upbringing, early career, etc. leading up to this venture. SS: I grew up in New Delhi, India and my dad was a senior military officer. We had a lot of change every two years as we moved from place to place. This taught me how to make
SM: How big is the market? How do you calculate TAM? What is your business model? UM: One way to calculate TAM is by the money available to spend today on sales intelligence. This includes licenses to database information, such as Hoover’s. There’s about $5-10 billion spent today on this in the US market alone.
One of the things I did when I designed the Intarka product was that I went and interviewed tons of really good sales people to understand the various kinds of tactics they use to prospect. To this day, this experience has always helped me in my various business development activities, and has today become second
SM. What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? Competition? Competitive Positioning? UM: The market landscape did not include any “true” competitors at that time and still do not today. InsideView represents a unique technology that uses Web 3.0-type features to address sales issues in the enterprise. Although they aren’t true competitors,
While we have been revising the Enterprise 3.0 definition, and introducing sales methodology into the framework, I thought it would be a good time to drill down into certain aspects of Sales, and explore some best practices. With that goal, I first bring you an interview with a company called InsideView that focuses on making
With a solid strategy executed to date, and a pending acquisition of Gelco, it is time to explore the next step in this evolution. One obvious goal would be expansion of the customer base. Here I get more interested in strategic alliances and their potential benefits in accelerating this process. SM: What is your next
Much of the growth opportunity for Concur, in my opinion is in being able to effectively penetrate Small Medium Enterprise (SME) markets. Here, we discuss issues around market size and profitability of the sales channels. SM: Smaller deals, in the 1-20 range, you can probably close them all by phone and even in the mid
Steve says he does not segment his customer base by size. I push, because I think he should. SM: You do not have any bias one way or the other? SS: Not at all. Our distribution strategy is to reach customers of any size. We have no concentration of revenue, by customer or by market