This Startup Wants To Be The Shark Of The CRM Ocean

In any organization, sales team plays an important role and thereby requires efficient tools and resources to achieve targets. Although, technology, to an extent, has made their work easier, a majority of traditional platforms offer automation of sales processes operationally. As per facts, an average sales representative sees 5 LinkedIn profiles while almost 22% of them have incomplete information of their prospects. Also, on an average, the entire sales force of the company is replaced every 4 years, thereby resulting in data loss, wastage of time and poor efficiency.

In order to ease this out, Ajay Chauhan and Saif A., came up with SalezShark in US last year and launched its subsidiary in India in early 2015. SalezShark, as a CRM platform, aims to nurture connections between businesses and their customers. It helps sales professionals comprehend their clients’ personality traits better and facilitates stronger relationships for increased sales opportunities and multiplies profits.

“With SalezShark, we aim to create a disruption in the cluttered CRM market. We seek to equip organizations and sales professionals with a tool which is not only easy-to-use but also helps them in achieving higher sales targets,” said Saif A., a seasoned entrepreneur based in the US..

What is SalezShark CRM doing differently to increase its market share in India?

SalezShark’s Relationship Cloud builds an intelligent web of relationship network to make connections with prospects easier and faster. It enables tracking down customer’s response to a particular product or service, likes and dislikes, spending pattern, etc. which allows a business to form an accurate gist of the customer with a complete array of information such as location, age and gender. Based on the comprehensive set of information, businesses are enabled to segment the customer base according to their specific needs and on basis of their purchasing power. In the process, businesses can identify the segment of their most loyal customers and actuate targeted marketing saving costs and optimizing returns.

At the same time, Marketing Automation on the platform allows business to efficiently set up and track email marketing and social campaigns. Also, with the help of contextual intelligence and recommendation engine, one can measure results at every stage and target the right audiences all through the sales cycle. Other features provided on the platform includes Sales Automation, Intelligent reports, 360 degree collaboration with social media, enterprise social network, data sources like Dataguru and Global Datapedia, etc.

As believed by the Salezshark team, their USP lies in the creation of compelling factors for sales people, giving them a reason to love their CRM platform. The platform fetches customer intelligence – likes, dislikes, preferences, workplace etc, in front of the user, within just a few seconds.  This not only encourages the sales professional to customize his sales pitches but motivates him to really understand the need of his customer, leading to a higher number of positive results.

“SalezShark envisions disrupting the market by transforming the traditional CRM space to an innovative user friendly platform. We want to enable organizations to perform better sales and manage processes efficiently, and help change the way companies sell,” said Ajay.

Market Opportunity In CRM Space

• According to a NASSCOM survey report, SMB market is expected to grow at YOY rate of 15% CAGR.
• IT spends of such companies are expected to grow further with CRM platforms as their top priority. SalezShark CRM.
• As per Gartner, the CRM space will be growing rapidly, with a revenue forecast of $36 Bn by 2017.
• SaaS- or cloud-based CRM deployments currently represent more than 40 percent of all CRM deployments, and look set to reach 50 percent during 2015.
• Of the top performers in B2B, 69% use Marketing automation for Customer acquisition and 50% for Customer Retention. – ACT-ON and Gleanster Research “Rethinking the Role of Marketing “ (2015)

Current Traction, Monetization and Plans Ahead

Since the incorporation of SalezShark, before coming to India 6 months ago, the company has around 50 new customers joining onboard. They targeted SMEs initially but now services have been expanded on an Enterprise level too. Till date, a total revenue of INR 2.5 Mn has been earned. The success ratio of company is about 70% right now, associating with brands like Neo Synapses, Prognosis Digital, Buildwell, WeVerify and UTL India.

The company is presently offering three packages in a price range of $20-65. The founders have invested over  $1 Mn in the company since its incorporation. “Our focus is to bring the product to a world class level with at least 100 customers on board expanding the CRM to around 5000 users by the end of this year and proceed further to pitch to the venture capitalists to raise more funds.” said Ajay.

Challenges And Competition

As per Ajay, most SMBs do not have a clear set of objectives which they would like to achieve through CRM.  These objectives need to be listed and defined as measurable metrics. Another prime challenge they encounter is the lack of importance given to appointing a core CRM team. It is important to realize that it is not an IT project and a specialized CRM team would be required to handle the same.

Other players in this space include Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, MHelpDesk, FreshDesk, ZenDesk, etc. On the competition front, the founder believes that they have done their benchmarking with some of the biggest industry players, in terms of features and efficiency of the product. “But, at the same time, we offer premium services at affordable prices, quite contrary to other players in the market. SalezShark is apt for businesses who aim to streamline their processes, and want to spend maximum time in selling, rather than aggregating things spread in a haywire manner,” he added.

Editor’s Note

The CRM space today is quite cluttered and is getting crowded. Till now, sales representatives have been viewing CRMs as a mundane platform, wherein manual data entry takes up most of their time. However, technology updates have garnered them with right customer intelligence, thereby improving their overall performance. Thus, we see the space far away from saturation and hope to see some more exciting fusions.