Who am I?
I'm a Chemical Engineer turned software sales professional. Currently, I'm Head of Sales at Almabase Inc (a bootstrapped SaaS company). Right after graduation, I took a Digital Marketer job in an e-commerce start-up. One day my company's phone rang without a break, I was alone in the office and answered the call. A person wanted to place an order for 10 t-shirts and had high urgency. I took note of all his requirements and emailed my COO. My COO instructed me to create a pricing link for the order and send it to the customer with a promise of 3-day delivery. Within the next hour, we received a payment confirmation email for an order of 10 t-shirts. I made my first sale. All I did in this activity was helping the person on the other side of the phone.
I realized that I am an accidental salesperson and so are others. Yes, the school of hard knocks is the best teacher for sales and that is why there is no university. But then some structure, some guidance would have been great. I asked this question to myself what could have that been and spoke. Came away learning that world of sales changes, selling SaaS is different and is a great opportunity. I am putting together these learnings.
Why am I doing this now?
There are three reasons why I’m doing this now.
One day Rajat Dangayach who was working at Oyo as an Area Sales Manager called me and asked "How did you get into sales? What should I do to get into SaaS sales?".
“India is sitting on a great opportunity to build a trillion-dollar economy in SaaS" - Suresh, Founder & CEO of OrangeScape
I grew confident of my expertise after spending 6 years of selling SaaS and committed myself to give back to the community.
The above three factors made me realize that we need to build a salesforce and there are many out there who are unaware of this career option.
Why you should consider Selling SaaS?
Firstly, as Suresh said India is sitting on a great opportunity to build a trillion-dollar economy in SaaS. You heard it right, $1 trillion opportunity!
SaaS in India is like what IT services were in the early 90s. It is one of the fastest-growing segments. According to some estimates, SaaS has the potential to reach a trillion-dollar market capital potential faster than the IT services industry. It will create as many job opportunities (around ~4.5 million) in the next 10-20 years as the IT services industry did in the past. Suresh has penned an IEEE paper about the $1 trillion dollar opportunity here.
If the SaaS is creating ~4.5million opportunities, out of those opportunities 1.5million would be in Sales. On average every SaaS company has a salesforce 1/3rd of their total workforce. Now 1.5million sales jobs means a massive opportunity to build a career.
Secondly, COVID has proved how vulnerable service industries can be to any unexpected external force. All the companies are only moving towards more digital adoption and this means the world needs to create more SaaS products. More SaaS products only means more opportunities. The sunset industries (like hospitality, automobile, services, banking etc) will take at least 3 years to recover. Even if they recover they will never be the same as before. These industries will adapt to the new normal.
If at all there is a better time to transition from selling in sunset industries (like hospitality, automobile, services, etc) to Selling SaaS or building a sales career in SaaS, it is NOW!
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