Upcoming Blogs

How do you demand 'Excellence' from your team?

How to handle priorities and juggle 100 balls in the air without dropping them?

Agile - How do you scale in distributed environment?

How to make yourself redundent?

How to embrace feedback?

 

Thursday
Feb262015

Follow-up - Entrepreneur's Mantra for India Market

It's been few months since I started my own entrepreneurial journey. While I have nothing to complain and my enthusiasm continues to be at the levels where I started - I learned something, which I completely ignored and underestimated. It wouldn't be too far fetched to say that I forgot one of the most important ingredients to be successful in Indian market.


That ingredient is ‘FOLLOW-UP’. Sounds simple? Silly? Rubbish? True but a reality that one must accept to avoid frustrations. Here is a small story:

For my product TalentOjo.com, I reached out to my friend Raj, a senior operations manager who worked for a multi-national firm in Pune. Raj realized that this product would be invaluable for the company he worked. He happily introduced me to the head of HR, Sameer. After the demonstration of the product, Sameer said he loved the product.

He asked for some time to internalize this with his team in India and US and get back to me. After agreeing to run a no-cost pilot to appraise everyone with the product, I happily waited for some days but no reply.

I started ‘following up’. After few phone calls and messages – I learned that Sameer was out of the office and will get back to me in another week’s time. Another week went by but no news from Sameer. A series of phone calls, messages and emails were of no use. It only helped grow my frustrations and my ‘follow-up’ list every time.

While this should be considered as ‘Unprofessional’ and somewhat linked with difficulties of saying ‘No’ in Indian culture (separate topic by itself), it is important to highlight the fact that this happens with almost 90 percent of the prospects.

As your sales pipeline grows – number of follow-ups goes up. Very rarely in B2B scenario – a long awaited call with come without follow-up.

There have been times where more than 50 percent of the time goes only in follow-ups with prospects. Needless to say that you need really smart ways to remember all the conversations, follow-up dates, email trail and much more.

Over the last few months – ‘Follow-up’ has almost become a skill set, which I try to check in potential business development candidates.

This is one ingredient one must learn to have to be happy and survive in the Indian Entrepreneurial fraternity.

Are you an entrepreneur? What has been your experience?

Sunday
Sep152013

To Lead Thoughts - Get Disruptive

It was super exciting when Liz Alexander asked me if I can choose my favorite tweet from her top selling book #Thought Leadership Tweet book and write my views on it. I chose tweet #1 which is around 'Definition of Thought Leadership' and here is what I have written. Please let me know your views on 'Thought Leadership' and what it means to you.

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Wednesday
Jun192013

In conversation with Mahesh Baxi on global expansion - Archana Sudhendranath

Bangalore based IT services firm, Compassities has been in operation for seven years. In these years, they have had several successes, which has also helped the company go global. After setting up offices in Australia and Middle East, Compassites is now gearing up to open offices in Singapore, joining the list of other Indian startups looking tap into South East Asia markets through Singapore. So far our articles on ‘going global’ have focussed on legal and procedural aspects of setting up operations in another country, here Mahesh Baxi, the CEO of Compassities talks to us about the entrepreneur’s dilemma and the mindset required for global expansion.

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Friday
Apr192013

Compassites: Reverberating Tech needs with a 'WOW' Experience

Compassites and I were lucky enough to be features on Silicon India magazine. This article summarizes my leadership and organizational development philosophies very well.

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Friday
Mar152013

Learn To Be The Leader

My article on situational leadership was published in one of the leading Bangalore paper as 'Learn To Be Leader'. This blog is is photo image of the same.

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Saturday
Jan192013

7 Reasons To Get Associated with Compassites

This blog is also published at http://www.compassitesinc.com/blogs/7-reasons-to-get-associated-with-compassites/. The reason for publishing this on my website is because 7-reasons mentioned here reflective of my philosophy of organizational development, culture and value proposition which services companies should target for.

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Friday
Apr202012

Design Led Thinking - Why Emerging Markets? (Part 2 of 2)

Hello again! Part 1 of 'Design Led Thinking' addressed the 'Why Now?' which cited examples and reasons of why well designed products / websites are becoming key differentiator and brought out reasons as to why design led thinking is the main stream now. This blog is focused around 'Why Emerging Market?' for design led thinking and why developing economies are and will play vital role in shaping and changing everything that we know about design.

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Friday
Apr202012

Design Led Thinking - Why Now? (Part 1 of 2)

I was fortunate to have been invited to the 4th annual Human Computer Interaction 2012 (HCI) conference as a chief guest, which was held in Pune in April 2012. After pondering over different topics, I decided to talk about something that I feel very passionate about which is 'Design Led Thinking - Why Now? Why in Emerging Markets?'. This blog is a synopsis of my talk at HCI and represent my thought on this topic.

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Thursday
Apr052012

Academia to the Industry – How to stay ahead of the game?

I happened to watch a Hindi movie called ‘Aarakshan’ the other day and was shocked to see how the education ‘industry’ is portrayed. I am not saying that the movie reflects the absolute reality, but it does bring some disturbing facts to light. Read on to learn how you can stay ahead of the game?

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