Founded in 1999 in India by 3 ex Microsoft employees who left their lucrative jobs and founded their dream company Denave. They chose the hard way of choosing niche segment of Sales Enablement which is a new concept in India. They made Denave a global sales enablement company focusing on driving profitable revenue growth for its customers through a gamut of service offerings that have a direct impact on the sales. They started with 3 members now they have the workforce strength of over 3,500 employees, a reach spanning 5 continents, 23 countries and 500+ cities globally and a clientele that’s rich with Fortune 500 and industry leading companies, Denave has traversed the evolution from an Indian to an Asian to now a global company.
The company has built multi-industry cross-geography expertise partnering with global businesses. The company has rich clientele across IT-ITES, Telecom, Consumer - Consumer Electronics, FMCG industries cutting across geographies. Over the past 17 years, Denave has generated over USD four billion in revenues for its clients, and is driven to be an organisation that will contribute to the global sales revenues for over 100 years by focusing on innovation, optimization, expansion and talent.
BWDisrupt team member Sujata Sangwan interacts with Snehashish Bhattacharjee, Global CEO & Co-Founder, Denave, and spoke to him
Tell us about Denave. Give us an insight of your 17 years in the industry. Sales enablement is often a nebulous concept, defined differently by different organisations. That’s the realm that Denave has set out to conquer with a service bouquet that has a direct impact on our customer’s profitability. The company was founded 17 years ago to fill the void in the industry of a service provider that can provide end-to-end sales enablement solutions with clear focus on revenue acceleration, ROI optimization and measurable impact. Over the years, backed by 700+ man years of sales domain experience, we have built multi-industry expertise partnering with global businesses and take a solution-conscious last-mile approach to deliver best practices in sales by leveraging people, processes and technology.
17 years and over four billion dollars in revenue contribution to clients, we understand the industry pulse and what it takes to be profitable in the marketplace. We have delivery centers in India, Singapore, UK and Malaysia. With reach spanning five continents, 23 countries and 500+ cities globally and generating revenues for the largest brands in the world, Denave has traversed the evolution from an Indian to an Asian to now a global company. Our success is because of our ability to bridge the gap between strategy and execution, based on our evolved processes and systems.
Denave is focused on generating employment opportunities through delivery centers across the world and creating sales leaders of tomorrow. We feel that building sales competency is an answer to leverage a country’s demographic dividend.
How do you help your clients in accruing more ROIs and sales footprint? Can you share some of your client based case studies? 90% sales strategies fail due to bad implementation or gaps in understanding of the plan. An accurate strategy needs a perfect execution for it to really qualify as a success story, which is where the sales process understanding fits in. Enterprises are increasingly becoming aware of the importance of adopting processes that will fill the gaps in their sales operations. As a strategic approach, enterprises today employ sales enablement as a key driver.
Let’s look at our technology solutions. In most available sales force technology solutions in the industry today, the customers often come back and ask about the final impact to the sales process which in most cases, stays a big question mark. Our technological solutions solve that problem. The main advantage of leveraging our technology solutions is to bring in sales/ ROI orientation to sales process automation. The technology solutions developed by our internal R&D team are clearly focused on enabling access to information at a click of a button, reducing the sales cycle to feel the impact of the service and bringing in simplicity to the approach.
With our sales enablement services, we provide competitive edge to our customers by:- Bridging the gap between sales automation and deployment by bringing in sales & ROI orientation in all our technology platforms
- Focusing on revenue maximization and incremental market share
- Providing an enhanced customer experience by creating an effective sales ecosystem and driving partner readiness engines
- Providing quicker realization on ROI, therefore driving profitability
- Increasing the size of the pie by providing access to untapped potential customer database
o A large part of the untapped customer base is the growing SMB segment especially in emerging markets. Denave has effective geo-expansion, geo-penetration and SMB market penetration strategies to help companies drive incremental revenue generation from untapped SMB markets
We are bound by contracts to not share customer names; however we are pleased to share that we create tools and processes for establishing selling practices through the entire value chain which drive incremental and optimal returns for organizations. With competencies such as Cloud Penetration, Geo-expansion, Mobility Adoption and SMB Penetration, we cater tailor-made solutions to companies across the industries globally.
You broke-even three years into business. What is your present market share? Being a self-funded company throughout, this definitely was an important milestone for us. We learn from our past experiences quickly and probably that is what led the UK operations to become profitable within one year and our Malaysia operation in a short span of 3 months.
Sales enablement industry is made up of several components, and gauging a market share is not possible since we have a different competitive landscape for each of our services. Also, when it comes to sales enablement, no player in the industry really addresses sales enablement in its entirety. However, we operate in a market that showcases huge potential owing to its diversity of the service line. According to us, globally the Total Addressable Market (TAM) is as huge as over USD 600 billion. Looking at the Serviceable Accessible Market (SAM) which looks at the industries we operate in across markets where we are present, the opportunity is over USD 250 billion. Even the Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) presents a potential of USD 30 billion globally – which reflects that we are currently only leveraging a miniscule market potential that exists and the opportunity that is present in front of us.
Discuss your goals with respect to global expansion? What are your future plans, for say next 5 years, to expand into new markets? Our vision is to impact global revenues for the next 100 years. However, if we look at 2020, we are aiming to become a USD 200 million organisation, grow almost 6 times our current size. Considering the huge market potential, we are aiming to set up 3 more delivery centres by 2020 in order to expand our reach through the length and breadth of the globe.
As a huge company with reach across 5 continents, what are the challenges you face? How do the challenges differ in domestic and international markets?
The challenges are varied, however we also look at each challenge as an opportunity to expand and become more relevant in the industry. Keeping up with the pace with which the market is growing is both a challenge and an opportunity – we need to be able to match up to the speed and continue to build capacity – and that is valid across any market that we are present in, or aim to have a presence in. Also, talking about the growth, another major opportunity that also poses up as a challenge is productizing of our services and methodologies to scale innovative solutions, again matching up with the pace of the industry evolution. Lastly, another challenge especially with respect to the international markets is to be able to increase management bandwidth to drive seamless expansion. To take care of this we have a clear focus on acquiring management bandwidth locally for each market instead of exporting management from HQ.
What is the next big development in your company that you want to talk about? The next big development at Denave is our focus on completing the sales enablement bouquet of our offerings by introducing new competitive service lines and incorporating and leveraging major industry trends to enhance the relevance of our services. With the emerging trends linked to mobility, cloud, whitespace discovery, analytics, marketing automation and localization of speech recognition – all of which have a huge impact on the effectiveness of sales strategies – we are not just at the heart of it, but also building these as core competencies that our customers can benefit from. With this as our core focus, we will be driving the future of sales enablement leveraging technology.
As stated previously, we are also aiming to touch the length and breadth of the globe by expanding our presence and establishing three more delivery centers by 2020.
With our solutions, we are changing the industry landscape with the integrity of revenue, proof of execution and ROI orientation that we bring to marketing processes as well as technology solutions. These are definitely exciting times for us – the industry is at a growth curve and there are many interesting developments that are happening which will only enhance the potential and the value we can bring to our clients.
