Techno m’lounge – Where technology meets human senses.

Hi Friends,

Recently I have been receiving quite a few emails from colleagues and my buddies all across the country working at some of the top notch Tech. firms expressing their strong desire to migrate back to Chattisgarh for some IT related opportunities. No, not because a lot of Global MNCs are moving to C.G .. read along..

A year ago, I decided to quit the well known IT giant TCS to realize my long cherished dream of a startup here in my hometown Bhilai. Since then we have been taking up a lot of steps to contribute to the IT innovation landscape in C.G. Just like me, there are many others who after gaining ample exposure from the captive R&D centers or the so called MNCs want to return home and be a part of something adventurous, something they have a reason to feel proud of!

It’s my good fortune that I have been endowed with overwhelming support from my well wishers all super excited to join forces with us in the various mind blowing (if I may) initiatives that we are working on, here at Globussoft.

Globussoft – the startup founded by me is now a 100,000$ company in total revenues and we are looking for smart and determined individuals like you who would like to be a part of this rapidly growing IT company and contribute towards the growth of IT and Software in C.G, our home state.

Excuse me for being a little blunt, but the government of the state of C.G is not taking many efforts for the upliftment of IT in the state nor is the local STPI society (Software Technology Parks of India) here in Bhilai any friendly to entrepreneurs and startups (believe me, I have been through it all!!). It’s difficult to retain local talent and candidates flee to metros and other prominent cities the moment they get a chance for reasons which I feel sorry to accept, are true. It’s high time that we take necessary steps to ensure that our state too can match up to the southern states and attract lucrative IT investments.

In the mutual benefit of the state and individuals, I on behalf of Globussoft request one and all to extend helping hands via project sponsorships, direct or indirect equity and be a part of India’s next IT revolution. We know we have the potential; it’s time to put together our collective minds.

It’s not compulsory to be employed with Globussoft to participate. You can contribute as an individual who wants to make a DIFFERENCE – it’s as simple as that!!!

And no, we don’t need any money. By God’s grace and our hard work and will, we have ample of that; all we need is your skills, your ideas and your precious time .

This sounds interesting, how do I proceed?

You need to send us an email with willingness to contribute your time. Right now Globussoft has envisioned 10 business units which have been incepted in 2010. Some are already functioning (Namely, NetVaani and TweetMati), while others are still being conceptualized.

Other than these 10 business units we have around 50-55 products which are at various stages of maturity.

You can take part in any of these business units OR you can suggest a product or an idea which can be incepted as an entire business unit of its own. Recently a guy, Virender from Rajnandgaon contacted me with his idea on device drivers. Our team is collaborating with him and soon the product will hit development roadmap and then head straight to the markets.

This way you too can have your ideas realized with us and in turn help generate IT jobs here in C.G, make it a better state for IT incubation. By working with Globussoft, you have a great marketing team at your disposal. We will help market your product and create business out of it via an established business model which is bound to succeed.

At Globussoft, a business unit is a mature product cum service which has its own eco-system and is able to function independently from the parent company.

Ok, I am in, what do I get in return?

In return you get equity of a product, of a business which YOU own. Your product will literally be your baby. We simply help you find the chance to plant the seed, nurture it, see it maturing and take pride in calling it your baby. It’s an out of the world feeling

Globussoft marketing team helps you with all the latest marketing techniques and you get your share of the overall income the product generates. This helps us hire more people to maintain and grow the product into a mature competitive business unit of its own.

A product sold 50x for less than 100$ is 5000 USD i.e. 2.4 Lakh INR. This is our worst case scenario for sale of any of our products. We normally sell 200-500 copies of our best products very year! Don’t be surprised if this amount turns out to be greater than your annual “package”

So why wait? Time to give momentum to your ideas, see them come to life! Come join us and be a part of this revolution!!

Sumit Ghosh

(The Ideator!!!)

Popularity: 100% [?]

Recently I saw a movie, ‘Rocket Singh – Sales Man of the year’, no I’m not writing a review about the movie here, but one prominent line in the movie literally touched my heart and reminded me of the very first day of my career – which started as a salesman!

The word S.A.L.E.S has a very deep and prominent impact in my life since I embarked on my career as a Sales Man for Home Security Systems at a local computer shop in Bhilai.

That first job taught me a lot of real lessons that I value today in my entrepreneurial life.  It made me realize the importance of sales in business and how a bad sales team can actually cause a business to go from everything to nothing in a matter of time. I concluded that only goods when marketed and sold right can help build great companies. Whatever I am today as an entrepreneur is due to those very lessons I learnt from that job as a sales guy!

To be honest, I was a bad sales man during my first job as I made zero sales in the first month or rather all of the subsequent months. In fact our entire sales team made no sales, not a single one and the business eventually shut shop just in 3 months due to unsuccessful operations.

One important reason (which I do feel strongly even today after all these years) for that business going down the drain like that was their bad management policy towards sales and salesmen in general. Salesmen were not treated as men and people but only as the ‘numbers’ they generated. For them business was all about numbers. We were just some numbers having no individual identity.

After the first few months of an unsuccessful job as a sales person, this is what my senior boss had to say about sales people they employed - “Jisko Kuch nai aata wo sales me ghus jaata hai.” To be more precise, he meant all sales people are junkards, worthless and should cease to exist. As if they were good for nothing and added no value.

While resigning from that job, I tried to make my point clear to my boss why there were no sales and what was going wrong in my opinion, but he clearly had no interest in hearing a word. Probably he was under the notion what can a 20 year old guy know a thing about sales?!! His total experience in business was greater than my age!

Anyway, this failed job, yes I call it a failure since I was not able to achieve what I was paid for, what I was hired to do opened my eyes to something valuable and I made a few resolutions to myself.

That very experience turned out to be the stepping stone leading me to the entrepreneurial success I envisage today as the CEO of Globussoft where I primarily manage the sales and marketing of my company catering to customers all across the Globe – right from the comfort of a desktop/laptop, sitting in a small town in central India. We make excellent sales, we sell high end products, and we sell technology. All of this without any physical interaction! Everything is virtual and yet we are successful – this is the power of good sales strategies!

That very first failed job of my life actually threw me a challenge. Yep! I challenged myself that ‘SALES’ was no Mt Everest and I can master it in MY ways, out of my own experience. This was in the first year of college,  it was somewhere around September 2007.  Those months I used to search news paper classifieds especially for sales and marketing jobs.

Basically there were 2 reasons for this –

1. Since I was a student I couldn’t afford to bunk college and take up a full time day job ( remember this was in my first year. After third year, I rarely attended college lectures )
2. Only sales and marketing was an area where you could work at the luxury of your own timings since any company hiring you for sales was only truly interested in the numbers you raked in ! They see the number of sales you made, and give you a commission based salary.

I found sales to be very exciting, and at the time a suitable, job opportunity for me. The next few months saw me selling Mobile phones (for a Reliance India Mobile Direct Sales Agent), Cold drinks (for a local cold drink brand), and even Gutka and Pan Masala Brands (yep can you imagine a to-be engineer selling Pan Masala.. lol, it was real fun those days!!).  CDs, soaps, detergents followed. I sold every damn thing I could get hold of and made money out of it. The list is endless!

These small part time jobs led me to discover some real fascinating secrets about Sales which later on became the strong pillars of foundation for my own entrepreneurial journey which was soon to begin.  It gradually descended upon me that Sales is not just about numbers, Sales is about connecting people, knowing them and building trust and faith between each other!

Business is not about profit and loss statements, business is about people! Bringing good people near you and making them great people along with you, that’s what business meant to me.

While I was enjoying my new found success as a ‘successful’ sales person who could sell anything he got hold of to anyone you ask him to sell, I always felt there was something missing. There was always a missing link; I used to wonder what it is.

I was a geek at heart and a coder by passion, so any time that I could save from my college studies and my part time job would be spent reading stuff on latest technologies and coding projects. All this landed me my first freelance project for a local company in Raipur. The owner was so happy with my work that he wanted to hire me part-time for his projects and I gladly accepted his offer. This was still the 5th semester of my college.

And yes, I discovered the missing link too . All those years I was working hard selling almost everything, but the fact was – I was slogging selling products manufactured by others. This was the first time where I got a chance to sell something which was manufactured by ME. Yes, it was software that I wrote, my own baby! This was the first time I got to sell something which I produced and it really matched my passion as well – coding.

So I bid farewell to all my other part-time jobs and focused mainly on software development and selling my own creations to customers. They ranged from custom built software in VB6 , C++ or web sites in classic ASP in those times.

A lot of people prior to me had taken this path and failed, so I too was very skeptical at first. I had heard numerous ghost stories of software ventures failing in their very early days in Chhattisgarh at the time. However with my by-then delectable Sales skills and coding abilities which I could vouch upon, I plunged in without caring about the results.

Though I saw initial success and decent sales of my services (not softwares), I noticed that people in my city or nearby cities couldn’t care less about IT and my software offerings.  Suddenly I started feeling like it’s going to reach me nowhere.

All my Sales skills were leading me to a pit hole as people then had a common notion that all software should be given out free. It could mainly be since here we mostly get the entire windows OS (pirated) for free.

All those stories about IT companies closing down shops in Chhattisgarh kept ringing in my head. There were nights when those thoughts would keep haunting me keeping me wide awake in the middle of the night. Finally I decided not to waste any more time with the local market and carved a fresh dimension for my venture.

It was a totally new experience, out-of-the-box kinda! In fact, I have reasons to believe that Globussoft was the pioneer in entire CG area in this kind of a business concept. I am not aware if anyone before me were even aware of online market places and ways of taking their business to the next level – the virtual one!

Selling your business online is an entirely different ball game! The media, the communication channel, and payment ways – everything changes. But as usual, Sales is fun! This concept seemed to work for me and today I have one of the largest and the fastest growing software companies in entire Chhattisgarh. And without a doubt, our strength is our overtly talented sales teams who I can proudly say understand and appreciate what Sales is all about.

I made it a point to keep sales and marketing under my direct visibility since I strongly believe Sales to be a coherent part of any business and every savvy entrepreneur must master its tips and tricks to be successful in his/her venture.

Concluding words – I dedicate this post to my favorite employee Subeer who is actively helping me with our Sales. But sometimes I get the feeling that he feels he is not doing much of a “worthy” job.

He is not aware of this, but he is one of most sought after employees and truly an asset to me.  I can train 10 coders but to generate sales intelligence in someone is very difficult. I wrote this post putting in days of thoughts recalling all those earlier days, since I strongly believe Sales is not in any way a worthless job and a salesman is by no means a worthless creature.

Sales is an Art, not a skill which can be developed with run of the mill training. It has enough power to make or break an entire lifetime of a business.  Don’t you think it’s time we treat sales people with the respect they deserve! – Sumit Ghosh

Popularity: 91% [?]