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The Values that Made Mobisy the 3rd Fastest Growing Tech Company in India

MOBISY – IN NUMBERS

**Editor’s note: This post was updated on 15 February 2018, to include the accolade Mobisy received when it was ranked 43 in the first-ever Financial Times High-Growth Companies Asia-Pacific list.

We are able to do all this because we are a close-knit, passionate team of professionals (engineers, business analysts, sales executives, and data scientists) who share a deep belief in a set of values, or principles, that help us deliver value to the customer every single time. Here are the principles we live by: How does a small, largely bootstrapped B2B company of 150 show such numbers five years after entering the competitive FMCG retail sales automation business? How is it able to convince customers that they are a better bet than the Salesforces, Accentures and Microsofts of the world?

1) WE FOCUS ON CUSTOMER SUCCESS.

We recognized the value of retaining and winning more business from existing customers early on, something business theorists have been talking about a lot of late. We believe that we are in the business of selling outcomes, and not just the tools that help achieve these outcomes. This is why even after a sale is made, our account managers and business analysts remain in constant touch with our customers. They find out if they are getting the outcomes they wanted from the product and help drive those outcomes if required. We act as consultants to our clients and recommend the technology, forms, reports, dashboards and alerts they must be using and set it up for them.

One of our largest accounts – Parle Agro (makers of Frooti and Appy) – experienced several positive outcomes after implementing Bizom (sale productivity spiked by over 60%, discounts offered reduced by 50%, and partner satisfaction improved by 50%, to name a few) and they turned into one of our most enthusiastic champions.   Not only did the Parle Agro account grow exponentially, but their references and case study also helped us win new businesses and revenue.

2) WE FOCUS ON CREATING A PLATFORM THAT ENABLES HIGH LEVELS OF CONFIGURATION, SUPER-QUICK ROLLOUTS AND ITERATION.

Bizom’s “platform approach”, where we make it possible to create highly customized solutions that are aligned with customer needs – without writing a single line of code – has been a huge contributor to our rapid growth. This approach allows us to deliver super-fast go-live times to our customers (2 days to 2 weeks as opposed to having to wait 4-6 months if they were to go with a conventional solution provider), which greatly reduces the risk for them and provides rapid validation. It also enables fast iteration which means the product aligns itself quickly with customer needs and achieves greater adoption and success. This has consistently won us more and more business from our existing customers.

3) WE FOCUS ON INNOVATION.

We have a joke in the company that apart from our in-house cook, the rest of us are all geeky engineers. We like to think of the most efficient way to solve a problem.

So when we realized that brand managers relied on manually compiled brand visibility data from manually entered forms and pictures, we decided to build 35Hawk, a product that uses advanced image recognition technology to automatically derive brand visibility statistics such as share of the shelf from pictures.

Next, when sales managers told us that they needed a way to make sales force automation adoption more effective and less forced, we decided to convert it all into one big game through Bizom Arena, our gamification feature, where salespersons form teams and compete with each other to win leagues.
Similarly, when our customers told us of challenges in getting their sales force to use our application consistently, we designed a system that would keep track of their usage and metrics and intervene if these are not above certain KPIs.

If a user’s metrics remain poor, an alert is triggered to our support team who proactively call the user to sort out any app-related issues or knowledge gaps that may have prevented him from using the application properly. This ensures user adoption, plus the proactive approach to solving problems reduces our support loads drastically and improves customer success. We call this innovation evangelization.

Innovations such as these have put our product in a different league in comparison to our competitors and is a huge reason for our fast growth.

4) WE FOCUS ON OUR IMPACT.

We have blogged before about our mission to impact 100 million people. We also recently wrote about the socio-economic impact that our product has. We’re deeply inspired by this and it allows us to focus 100% on delivering more and more value to our users and the ecosystem that we serve.

We’re inspired by the fact that we’re making consumer brands and their retail ecosystems – the very nerve centers of our economy – much more efficient and intelligent through automation and analytics. Bizom is making the frontline salesman of an FMCG company more effective at his job because he now knows exactly what to sell, where to sell, and how much to sell.  Also, our workflow automation solutions make the jobs of ordinary distributors, merchandisers and store promoters way easier and faster.

We’re also inspired by the fact that in making it so, we’re capturing huge amounts of real-time data and unlocking its true value through analytics. These analytics help a brand make the right decisions about what products to stock at each distributor and retailer and in what quantities. These decisions, in turn, ultimately decide whether the retailer or distributor – small-time businessmen who have bet their life savings to run this business – take home enough profit to support their families and ecosystems.

5) WE HAVE AN “INCH WIDE MILE DEEP” STRATEGY (A.K.A., WE HAVE A CLEAR VERTICAL FOCUS)

Through our two products Bizom and Distiman (our stock ordering app for small retailers), we’re deeply entrenched in the consumer goods industry and feel a deep sense of mission in impacting its ecosystems. Our case studies, built up through consistently replicating this impact across the 200+ consumer brands that we work with, are a major reason why we continue to win business from great companies.

Over the past 4 years, FMCG brands have started to look at Bizom as an expert in data-driven transformation for sales, distribution and retail execution and this vertical focus and credibility have made it easy for us to attract big FMCG brands. Our vertical focus on consumer goods and retail has given us deep knowledge and insight so we’re able to double up as consultants to our customers. Our account managers get called in regularly to attend strategy meetings where brands hash out their digital transformation agendas – what parts to automate and how, what data to capture, what dashboards, alerts and predictive analytics to employ, etc. Our account managers are able to look at complex business requirements and come up with technology solutions on our platform to address them.

The way forward

At a time when the consumer goods industry is going through fundamental changes in its ecosystem (the rise of e-commerce, disintermediation, rapid changes in technology), I can say one thing for sure: the principles that got us here will continue to be instrumental in helping us digitally transform the industry – one workflow, one company at a time.

Mobisy’s growth story has been lovingly documented by our CEO, Lalit Bhise, and the rest of the team over the past years.

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