Leap Edtech event in New Delhi on 21st April, 2017 by TLabs was a very insightful event for new Edtech entrepreneurs entering the space. The founders present at the event learnt vital sales techniques from industry leaders who have a great chunk of market share in the Edtech domain in India and grabbing eyeballs globally too.
Realizing the importance of sales in a startup is the first and foremost step of starting a business. The second would to be knowing the potential market and using the key marketing strategies to reach them before your competitors do.
Consider a situation where an edtech startup goes to an investor for raising a fund, be it an angel round or any of the further series, the first question the investor would put up is, “How big is your target market, 50 million or 100 million?” Sometimes, they throw numbers at your face for testing you. But effectively if you are in the K-12 sector, the target focused number is 7-8 million and that is a very big statistics. Never be unaware of your market and who belongs to the segment you have built a product for.
What a typical entrepreneur thinks is that he has built a product and so many happy features inside it, he thinks it will sell itself but often reality hits very quickly.
Rupesh Shah, Founder, InOpen; Murlidhar Suryanarayan, Founder, Lodestar; Ranjith Radhakrishnan, CPO, Byju’s; Robin Aggarwal, Director, Learning Paths Schools; and Satish Iyer, CTO, Indian School of Business discussed many hacks that they followed for their startup on a panel about cracking sales witheducation institutions & consumers.
Rupesh Shah, while sharing his views on the same said, “Most of the entrepreneurs who create a product or services, romanticize their potential customers. So, create a product while staying among your customers, never lose touch as you might need to evolve during the creation product.”
Murlidhar Suryanarayan, added “Each entrepreneur who approached schools or clients provides a list if things of what he or she can do, rather being a very professionally flexible founder, the focus should be on the consumer needs and what you can do the best. Ticking off the check-boxes in a list, however, can be good for the consumer, but very time consuming on the part of the entrepreneur. So, make it a good balance of both.”
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Soumya is a young writer and journalist, with bachelors in Multimedia and Mass Communication. She is an alumini of the Asian College of Journalism, and finds politics and sustainability intriguing beats to work with.
