Preetham Poovani (an early stage entrepreneur) heads Worksphere Technologies Pvt Ltd that is in the business of digital marketing solutions. They provide multi-channel marketing solutions for companies by improving performance of marketing campaigns, enhance communications /relationships with existing customers and improve their brand value and drive more web traffic.
When they began their operations, the three partners began working out from small office. They began focusing on two segments , 1) Digital marketing companies – who had deals with customers and was searching for marketing database solutions for their clients 2) Outsourced Inside
Sales organizations – which was doing appointment setting for their clients and also consumed a lot of company leads. They chose these two segments of all the others because the sales cycle was extremely short.
When they began approaching the prospects, they were being compared with world wide market leaders and questioned on the quantity and the quality of the leads they would provide as those market leaders had a huge team to mine leads and also had a massive database rendered online.
So, in order to differentiate themselves, the founders decided to offer custom solutions where they would work to the specifications of the customers instead of collecting leads ahead of time and rendering them online.
Preetham recollects the day when they hired few people to do the back end work and sales job and had a very small office to work. The team went into soliciting business. They had to make compromise to get the first customer because they had nothing to show and went ahead
without any advance and contracted to get paid upon successful completion. All of them worked hard to keep the customer happy and eventually got the money at the end of the engagement. They delivered 10 times worth of work to the first client because they wanted a reference account. They again focused on four more clients delivery than acquiring more customers and by the end of one year they had five clients.
Today after four years, Preetham is proud to say that his company is 150 plus employee strong. Preetham’s advice as an early stage entrepreneur to young entrepreneurs is that, focus on delivering good quality of work and the initial customers are bound to get you the other set of
customers.
