Venkat Srinivasan, Senior Vice President – US Sales at Indium Software, speaks about Indium Software, its specialization in AI, Advanced Analytics and Text Analytics services, how its has helped companies with digital adaption and the advantages of account-based marketing. He also addresses the challenges and opportunities that technology-driven sales cycle offer and the trends that will shape the industry.
Venkat is an experienced Sales Consultant with more than 20 years of experience in sales technology. His expertise lies in building high-performance sales teams and designing value-based sales proposals. At Indium he is responsible for acquiring new business from customers in the US.
Prior to Indium, he was with Trigent Software Inc., where he acquired and built numerous partnerships. Venkat holds a Bachelor’s degree from Coimbatore Institute of Technology.
What services does Indium Software offer and what is its USP?
Indium Software is a Technology Solutions company with deep expertise in Digital and QA services. With our global presence serving customers ranging from innovative product start-ups, Fortune 500 and global enterprises.
Indium Software’s key differentiators are our specialization in, Ai, Advanced Analytics & Text Analytics CoE. We also excel in Big Data, Data Engineering, Stream Processing & Data Virtualization. Ans have expertise in Low-code development across platforms.
Indium has offices in 5 countries: India, US, UK, Malaysia & Singapore. In India, we have delivery centers in Chennai and Bangalore. Indium has around 1400 employees who work round the clock to help our customers achieve their business objectives.
What sets Indium Software apart from its competitors?
Indium solutions are not vertical focused, however, from the portfolio of customers, we see our solutions are well aligned with Healthcare & Lifesciences, Retail & e-commerce, Finance, Hitech and Real Estate sectors.
Our differentiation comes from the fact that our offerings are niche and IP based. Our solution approach to solving our customer problems – If we compare our competitors, we can proudly claim that we are one of the few companies that has an R & D to create solution accelerators to implement a solution much faster.
How does the current roster of Indium’s clients look like (Indian and Globally), and where do you see yourself in the pecking order today?
Even in these tough conditions due to the pandemic, Indium has grown multi-fold in the last twelve to fifteen months. The first two months of the 1st quarter of this fiscal year has been fantastic, we had double-digit additions of new customers predominantly in the US.
We see significant demand from enterprise customers for Low code application development, AI & Advanced Analytics, Cloud Deployment & Migration and Data Virtualization.
As an company that caters to both Indian and global clients. What are some of the challenges and opportunities you’ve come across?
Indium has been an early mover in certain technology domains and has achieved scale in those offerings over the past couple of years. Research findings indicate that these are break-out services in the next few years, there are a lot of new small and large players entering this space, this poses a definite challenge both in the demand and supply.
Like I mentioned earlier, we see a huge explosion in demand specifically in the areas of AI and Advanced Analytics, Cloud Deployment & Migration, Low Code Development. We have seized the opportunity to partner with key players in these spaces like AWS, AZURE, Siemens/Mendix, Striim, Claris and offer solutions to customers.
Due to the pandemic, many businesses have tried to adapt to the digital lifestyle. How has Indium helped them on that front?
There definitely was a surge in demand for digital adoption. Indium has helped organizations from innovative product start-ups to visionary enterprises in their digital transformation journey.
Our ISO audits and secured infrastructure have evolved over the last year ensuring we have robust processes in place to ensure customer delight.
How have sales evolved into a technology-driven revenue generator for companies in 2021?
The current situation has pushed all stages of the sales cycle to be technology-driven. We need to leverage technology to be in front of the customer across all touchpoints. One of the major sources of our lead generation activity is tradeshows and events.
Over the last twelve months, all the events were virtual, we had to set up our booths virtually, network with the delegates virtually. Similarly, in-person meetings with customers are replaced by Web meetings.
We even make use of summarization tools that summarize all the prospect and org info on a single page. Quick access, easy conversation starter and the fact that you aren’t reading a TL;DR doc are some of the advantages. All of the data that we collect and work on to refine our sales strategies can also help structure our products or services.
How does data-driven findings help to rediscover customers, reset the sales team and re-enable them to approach the market?
In today’s connected world we can get a good amount of information about our prospective clients right from their technology spend and budget, their priorities for the year, the technology landscape they currently use, future technology investments etc.
In the earlier days, we would spend a lot of time gathering this information, with this information readily available, the sales conversations are very targeted and effective.
On the other side, customers and prospects also research about us extensively before they want to engage with us. They are very well informed on our offerings and the role of the sales team today is more on reinforcing those perceptions.
Why is it important to invest in sales technologies and how can companies activate account-based marketing (ABM) techniques?
Sales automation increases the productivity of sales teams and facilitates them to be customer centric. A lot of activity in the sales process can be automated using CRM – we can build cadences for all the outbound campaigns, create rules and workflows for these campaigns with minimal manual intervention.
There are tools that help in acquiring direct phone numbers and email addresses, our outreach can be very targeted and effective.
ABM has evolved as the boundary between sales and marketing is getting thinner and thinner. It helps us to focus on a select list of accounts rather than traditional spraying and praying.
ABM tools help us create customer personas and reach out to them with appropriate content across multiple mediums. The lead time in ABM programs is a bit longer to acquire a customer, however, the ticket size and stickiness of customers are bigger and longer too. Today ABM is a must-have sales strategy in the growth story of any organization.
What are some industry trends that we should look out for in the coming years?
LinkedIn has become a powerhouse when it comes to prospecting, it helps you figure the one key tenet that everyone is confused about – ‘What is the prospect’s role in the organization? Are they the decision-makers or not?’
We even have automated cold calls which are extremely well-trained models and are the equivalent of speaking to a human.
Selling today has evolved into multi-faceted engagement models – Joint thought leadership, round tables, webinars, fireside chats – invite prospects and engage in different ways. Social selling is a big trend today.
