Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Senraj Soundar, CEO of ConnectLeader (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the product? Can you talk a bit more about what was the product that you took that long to build?

Senraj Soundar: A good sales representative working hard typically makes 60 to 80 dials on average, but he could talk to only three to four decision makers or prospects. The challenge is that it takes about 20 plus phone calls to get one person live on the phone. All the remaining 19 won’t go anywhere.

If you do the math, about 90% of the phone time is all wasted time for the sales rep. Only 10% of that phone effort yields a conversation. We wanted to change that equation. We wanted to have the sales rep delegate the non-productive time to some other resource outside of their desk.

We designed a calling system where the sales representative can delegate that non-productive task, which is basically dialing the phone number and then navigating the phone call through the phone tree, talking to the gatekeeper, and things like that. We wanted to delegate all that to some other low cost resources.

Sramana Mitra: It’s still a person who’s doing that calling, right?

Senraj Soundar: It is both. Technology facilitates this entire process seamlessly. You have a CRM system in front of you. You have your calling list. You simply tell the system, “I want to make calls to numbers on this list.” The system assigns each record to different calling agents sitting in a call center. That agent can be from anywhere. They make that call.

While they make that call, the sales rep gets to watch what is going on. For example, if you have 200 records in your screen, four might light up at any given time. Those four are being dialed or contacted right now. When one of those calls is successful, the calling agent hands over the call quickly to the sales rep.

The prospect thinks the sales rep made the call. That’s how the prospect experience will look like. As a result, the sales rep gets to talk to a lot of people. They end up talking to anywhere from 8 to 12 people within 60 minutes instead of waiting all day to talk to three to four people.

Sramana Mitra: Do you supply the junior people who are doing the filtering, or do your clients have to hire the junior layer as well?

Senraj Soundar: We have subcontractors. We hire call centers. We bring them on our platform and they do the work based on what our customers want. All that is fully automated within our system. For our users, everything is seamless. They are simply using a CRM system and we are an add-on to the CRM system. They simply come and tell us, “I want to call this list.” Everything happens behind the scenes seamlessly. The actual calling agents are supplied by the call center.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Senraj Soundar, CEO of ConnectLeader
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