Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is at the heart of that? What do you think is the core competency that you’ve built in your product that is enabling you to branch out into upsell opportunities in the enterprise and even work yourself into additional use cases?

Praful Saklani: There’s a couple of things. First of all, I would say that there are a lot of tools out there in the enterprise right now. There’s a lot of data that’s out there. In terms of having accurate and reliable information, data integrity, in particular, is a lot scarcer than we think. When Pramata really focused on data integrity and said, “We’re going to give you accurate and reliable data on your most valuable customer relationships,” then the question became, “Who is that information most valuable for?” We focus on excellence in terms of that actual data or intelligence. Then it was a matter of time before we realized the partner that is going to get the most value out of this at the end of the day was sales and operations. The biggest asset that the company has is its customers. If you can help them grow and retain those customers, that’s really valuable.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like a complete value proposition shift from what you set out to do originally.

Praful Saklani: Yes. The core of the capability stayed consistent but we kept listening to our customers and we found that the biggest value proposition around this was an audience that was not the audience that we were originally engaging.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now? What stage are you at? I assume this is your primary business now—data integrity for sales ops.

Praful Saklani: Yes, we call it customer sales intelligence. The target is sales operations. Depending on the vertical, finance can have a very big role to play. Legal is still a collaborator with Pramata. It’s just the same question again of where is the maximum value from understanding those customer relationships. It’s the people who are responsible for really engaging with those customers, which is sales. That is the focus of our company. We’re seeing excellent traction particularly among large enterprises. We’re seeing a very strong adoption among Fortune 500 companies. In terms of revenue scale, we’re doing very well. I’ll categorize us as a very high growth enterprise software company at this time. If I had to put a bottom line to the Pramata story, I would just say if you focus on customer value and really listen to what your customers are resonating with, you can really be surprised at where your business evolves to. The key thing is to focus on one thing that you do better than any other company in the world.

Sramana Mitra: I’m glad things are moving nicely. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata
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