Episode 58: Aditi Shrivastava: Pocket Aces- Building an Effective & Profitable Sales Function
About Aditi Shrivastava:
My next guest, The One Percent Project, is the very talented and driven Aditi Srivastava. Aditi is Co-Founder and CEO at Pocket Aces, India’s largest socially distributed content network, which includes five diverse brands: FilterCopy (short fiction), Dice Media (multi-episode web series), Gobble (lifestyle), Nutshell (infotainment), and Jambo (young-adult animation). Pocket Aces also operates Clout India’s largest digital influencer management practice. The company incubated Loco, India’s largest homegrown game streaming and esports app, which was spun off successfully into a separate entity in 2021.
Sales are a critical contributor to the success of any business. They are the source of revenue generation, but more importantly, they help build and sustain relationships with clients. Sales offer crucial insight into the efficiencies of a company's marketing and product development initiatives. A competent sales force may assist a company in reaching its objectives by spotting and capitalizing on new possibilities and cultivating and maintaining connections with important clients. Undoubtedly, sales are crucial in any business's long-term existence and expansion. But how does one build a robust sales force? In this contemplative conversation, Aditi shares her understanding of sales through years of hands-on experience in building sales businesses, the role of storytelling in sales, striking a balance between creativity and numbers, the difference between sales and marketing units, building sales teams through the years, if founders should be key salespersons, and much more.
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Key Highlights:
One is always selling in life: One is constantly selling, whether in personal life to a spouse, parents or children or in a professional setting to a colleague, superior or client. People generally don’t like the word ‘sales’, but ultimately persuasion and negotiation are all forms of sales.
Role of storytelling in Sales: Storytelling is central to Sales. A good storyteller is able to build trust and authenticity to convince the customer that there is value in what they are buying.
Are all salespeople extroverts? Salespeople are usually perceived as extroverts. But sales is as much, if not more, about listening than speaking. Listening helps to customize your pitch to suit the need of the customer.
Should founders be the key salespeople? Aditi believes that you cannot find a better person to sell your product than yourself; the reason is that unless you sell your product enough times, you won’t know what to expect from your salespeople and what the client wants. The founders should do the first few sales themselves and then hire sales experts to grow their sales. At different stages of the company, different salespeople are needed.
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In this conversation, he talks about:
00:00 Intro
02:15 A day in Aditi's life
02:50 How as humans, we are constantly selling
04:31 Role of storytelling in sales.
06:22 The balance between creativity and numbers.
07:56 If all salespersons are extroverts?
10:18 Where she draws the line between sales and marketing functions.
13:11 Her insights on building a sales team.
21:09 If she thinks founders can oust revenue generation or business creation from other key members in the initial days?
26:48 How she manages sales rejections?
31:03 The nicest thing anyone has done for her.
32:09 Her legacy.
Transcript:
Pritish: Hi, Aditi. Welcome to The One Percent Project.
Aditi: Hey, Pritish. Thank you so much; very happy to be here.
Pritish: Let’s start with the question, how was your day?
Aditi: My day was interesting; pretty typical day. It started with a client meeting where we talked to an advertiser and tried to build content for their marketing needs. Then we went into a monthly P&L review with my HODs which was everybody talking about their challenges and growth and trying to solve some problems and build for the future. And then I went to an investor meeting, and now I am here talking to you.
Pritish: That actually weaves into what we want to discuss: sales. I understand from your day that you went into places where either you are pitching or talking about your products and services, or somebody else is pitching to you. So, what do you think about that?
Aditi: The way I’ve always thought about sales, Pritish, is that one is always selling at all points in time to almost every person that they meet. Whether it is in your personal life with a spouse, a partner, your parents, or your kid, and of course, in professional settings, you are constantly selling an idea of a new product, or you are defending your team member, which is basically selling their value to the company or having a conversation with the direct client then obviously they have to buy into your product. Many people don’t like the word sales, so I give them many synonyms. If I need to convince you of anything, then I’m selling; if I need to think about what the pros and cons of me working with you and you working with me, negotiating anything, keeping our cards on the table, deriving value together, building 1 + 1 equals 3, any of that stuff is sales. For me, it’s a part of life. Ever since I was a small kid, I wanted that extra ice cream that was selling. That hey, if you give me this, I won’t do that, or I’ll bring these marks, and so you give me this dress or whatever it was. So, negotiations at the end of the day are the sale for both parties.
Pritish: That's brilliantly put. We are constantly selling. It is just that we don’t term ourselves that we are selling or negotiating.
Aditi: Yeah.
Pritish: What role does storytelling play in sales?
Aditi: Storytelling is all of it because, at the end of the day, you have to convince the other party that there is value in what they are buying, and for that, you first have to build a relationship. You have to come across as genuine and authentic and that you actually care about their interests as well. Then you can discuss the true worth of whatever it is that you are having a conversation about. So, see, it’s human to human. Any feeling which is between two humans is all about building a connection of friendship, determining a genuine need, or even if you have a product that is not a need to have but a good to have, determining how that can build value, and it is all about trust. So traditionally, people think about taking their clients to wine and dine. That’s not just to blow away money but to get to those deeper levels of conversation. You know, in those traditional settings, I can’t ask about their family or their kid. Luckily, we are in 2023, in a world where relationships can very much be informal in the workplace, can very much be informal with your client. I can ask about your family in this conversation and build a connection. But traditionally, that was not the case. Storytelling is a part of relationship building. Humans respond to stories. In fact, I will do the storytelling with you; let’s leave the numbers to our teams. Because you are the main decision maker, I’m not going to get into it with you with the number. Let’s keep it at the story level; that’s what it means. Other people can fight about the numbers because the number suddenly break the story, connection, and relationship. So yeah, it is all about storytelling.
Pritish: You brought up numbers; my follow-on question was, what is the balance between creativity and numbers?
Aditi: If you don’t have a story and you don’t get buy-in, even a very cheap product will not be able to sell again and again repeatedly. Very often and with us also when we first started Filtercopy as a channel, we were charging more than any other short form channel at that time, and we could make that sale. Of course, we had shown that the product works with the audience. When we went to an advertiser, and we are charging, say, fifteen lakhs for a video when somebody else is charging eight, they gave us that money because we built the trust, the data around what it would mean for them, what RoI they would get. Then the price was justified by the relationship. Often you will hear zyada mehenga hai lekin zyada chalta hai (it’s more expensive but lasts longer). So, it’s counterintuitive to many people, but the value is in many things. It is in our relationship, and my product has to perform according to whatever story I told you. Otherwise, you can only fool somebody once. If I can sell you this pen, but if it doesn’t work as I told you it would, you’re not going to buy it next time. The product obviously has to follow a good conversation, but I can definitely sell you this pen at 2x than perhaps the person next to me. That’s the value of my storytelling. This can be taught because you cannot just depend on great storytellers and identify them; if they leave, your sales go down.
Pritish: There is a belief that good salespeople are extroverts. Is that true?
Aditi: This was a realisation a few years ago. As an ambivert, I love talking to and meeting people, but it is energy-draining. So, my recharge happens when I’m alone. I could be alone with my dog, alone just being a zombie in front of the TV, reading or listening to music. You know, many people feel that salespeople need to be extroverts because they think it’s a speaking job. But if you just go by what we just talked about, if you are trying to connect with somebody, it is very much a listening job as well. So, I believe that if you listen, you can customize your story, which is the most important factor in sales. First, I have to know if you use a pen; when you use a pen, do you write or take notes on your computer or phone? Then I will sell you the pen in that way. To somebody else like me who goes through a notebook a month, it’s very easy to sell a pen to me. So, I have to observe. It is as much information in resting as it is about then customizing my pitch. I don’t think a person should be either an introvert or an extrovert. They just have to have this realization and this skill. Introverts, in many ways, are scared to go sometimes in front of new people and that kind of stuff. What you can do is you can tag-tail. So, I always say two people to every meeting because no matter how amazing you are, you miss certain cues and body language. For example, I just came from an investor meeting; it was me and my CFO. When I speak, my CFO observes their cues and body language and adds on top; when he speaks, I do the same. I think you just need to be a good duck team. As long as you have people in the room doing both listening and then customising and talking, that works. There is no thumb rule, I would say. Anybody can be a part of a great sales team that goes and consistently builds very strong relationships, and then, of course, the product follows.
Pritish: That actually brings me to sales versus marketing. Where do you draw the line, and what do these functions actually do? Are they the same?
Aditi: Today, these functions mean many different things. Sales and marketing, when it was clubbed together, it was because marketing was actually a pre-sales function, and it was a direct pre-sales function. It means that I reach out to you in various ways. That could be through a billboard, an ad, or even a cold call. I would maybe offer you even a discount on the phone, that’s marketing. Then somebody would write to be followed up and close that. Today they operate independently of each other; sometimes, there is no sales function, and there is a marketing function. Obviously, we know about the pre-revenue, high-burn companies where a lot of the money goes into marketing. So this marketing not converting into sales is a brand new concept, I think, over the last fifteen years maximum, mainly over the last five to ten years, where a lot of venture capital money has gone into, hey, these people can’t actually pay so you’re marketing to a set of people who are not actually paying you and then you are doing a different type of marketing to a set of people who are actually paying you. Businesses have evolved and have gotten more diverse in terms of the segments of audiences Vs. client, B2B2C, etc., without getting too complicated. Today I think largely they are understood as two different functions. In my head, marketing is always pre-sales. If you want to build a profitable company, it has to be that way. Marketing which is brand building has to then result in you being able to get either a higher market share or a higher value for the same product. Your brand equity needs to also translate into sales. Marketing is of various kinds. You’re building a brand, increasing awareness, consideration, or conversion. Awareness, consideration, and conversion are technically all pre-sales because they are part of the user journey. Brand building is what everybody spends, like IPL Mein mera banner hai (I have a banner in IPL). Somewhere the sales function is to find that target audience and find a way to convert them cheaper because the cost of customer acquisition has already been spent. If it doesn’t reduce your conversion cost, then that marketing spend was useless. Back to fundamentals will happen, which has been happening for the last year or so. It will continue for the next couple of years, and I think the marketing not resulting in the way that can be attributed to sales will stop greatly.
Pritish: How do you think about building sales teams?
Aditi: It is one of the most complicated things that I have ever had to do. I have done it in different organizations at different scales. The interesting thing is that in media, where I am currently building, the sales teams have been around for a very long time, and the interesting part is that often the sales and the product don’t sit together. That is where the biggest challenge comes in because when I am storytelling you and trying to solve your challenge via my product, I will not be able to do that effectively if I am not sitting with the product. Essentially, I will be able to story tell you just a generic story and not be able to customise my product on the fly for you as a pitch; somebody else will have to come and do that. So that’s where the sales and solutioning have become two different teams. There is one person jo sirf ja ke door kholta hai, fir ek banda ja ke ye baat-chit karta hai, teesra banda ja ke product provide karta hai (One person who just opens the door, another person who makes the pitch, and the third person actually provide the product). I think that traditionally this is how it has worked, and I feel that there are a lot of inefficiencies. Not only is inefficiency there, but the first person is also really written off by the client. Sorry I hope it’s okay if I go into Hindi as well.
Pritish: Absolutely.
Aditi: Great. Toh voh toh saleu banda hai (He is a sales person) Guess what? kisi ko usse baat nahi karni (Nobody wants to talk to him) Banda invoice bhejta hai (the person sends the invoice), but nobody wants to talk to him. So, the solutions and the content people are actually your sauces who are actually converting the deal. That makes an ambitious salesperson insecure and frustrated. What we have done at Pocketaces is not to distinguish its sales and solutioning because solutioning is what your client is buying. As a salesperson, you should be able to do that. You are not someone who goes and sits on the side and doesn’t talk at all. That said, when you are trying to build sales teams, another sort of obstacle that comes into play is this individual contributor; who is like an individual salesperson, and what is their growth path? At the bottom levels, everything is great, everything is fine; you train the people, you do the mock pitching, explain the product, explain how to listen, the whole thing that I said that we can train, add that person so that the person grows in the food chain, basically their targets increase, they get bigger clients, they start managing your key account. Then comes the place where they are like ab toh main sabse badhiya account manage kar raha hoon, ab main kya karoon? (Now I am managing the account in the best possible way, now, what do I do?) Then suddenly, it is ‘let me become region head.’ But guess what? They’ve never managed any other human in their life, and that’s when the problem starts coming in while building a sales org. Imagine you have a team of ten; out of that, you have five very high-quality performers who are at similar levels. There are only three regions: North, South, and West. Usually, these are the regions where most sales teams in India are located. Now five people and three regions. If you tell them to compete for the regions, here the ego is very high, somebody thinks I am your Rockstar salesperson, I’ve been making commissions, my client is also as good as their client, and look chhote log toh manage ho jaayenge humse (we can manage the small clients). So, I think the problem in sales orgs is that nobody realises that performing individually and motivating others to perform is really difficult. Also, many salespeople have often only done that as the main job for, let’s say, ten years; the high isn’t closing that deal, but that clutch moment you know the client is in your hands. When you become a people manager, you don’t get those clutch moments; your team gets them daily, weekly, or monthly. So, you miss that and then you start going to the meetings, then you start getting some of those clutch moments for yourself, you keep some key accounts to yourself, and that’s when the team is also confused that s/he is only closing himself/herself. Then the people management people feel that the only way to motivate salespeople other than this kind of growth is through incentives growth. So yesterday I was making half a percent, today I’m making one percent, tomorrow I’m making two percent. But you are separated from the product. You have no idea about the margin and bottom line. The people making the product are like product toh main bana raha hoon, but jab voh achchha perform karta hai saara margin isko mil jaata hai (I am designing the product, but the salesperson is getting the margins when the product performs well). So, honestly, building a sales org, and I have built many types of teams, Pritish, is one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. You must continuously think about different models and ways to incentivise people. If it is only in the money, then I always believe they are not there fit for whatever product you might be selling. Back in the day was very different, the period of salesforce was very different. Earlier, you did not care about culture alignment to that extent. So how did the commission model combine sales? The base salary was close to zero, and you ate what you killed. You hunted, and then you ate a part of that. Yahaan pe toh aapko base salary bhi acchi chahiye, kyun? kyunki aapko EMI pay karna hai, bachche hai, rent hai, gaadi hai, aur aapko commission bhi vaisa back in the day vaala chahiye (Here you want a base salary, why? Because you have EMIs to pay, you have kids, rent to pay, car loan etc, and you want commission as per the earlier model). It doesn’t work economically. Many salespeople people find it very hard to get that. A few high-payers have built that like DNA, and we compete for the same talent. I never say I want to compete with money for talent. I’ll give you decent money for sure, but you have to be passionate about my product because that solves more than one thing. You can find solutions better; you can talk about the content better. Every two years in Pocketaces, now just in the seven-year journey, we have actually iterated team structures for sales to align with where we are as a company in terms of product. Earlier it used to be one sales team selling everything. Then we have done basically a product alignment; we have done a key account versus others. I think there is nothing wrong with iteration; depending upon the stage of the business, you have to restructure the sales teams, basically. So, the orgs must be malleable, meaning people have multiple skill sets. Today, I think high-quality resources want to have multiple skills, and then they want to grow in multiple ways; they don’t want to get pigeonholed anyway. It is a hard thing to do but I think you continuously keep talking this language that hey you will get an experience of selling one more thing, or let’s start to manage two small resources first and then we will see whether you are ready for region head. I think this kind of stuff works. Usually, they are happy if they are in a fast-growing environment. But the org building is still something that takes a lot of time.
Pritish: Brilliant! I could see the passion and pain that you have gone through in actually building these teams.
Aditi: Both.
Pritish: So, these guys are making you money.
Aditi: Yes.
Pritish: And then obviously, once they do that, they are looking for getting the world. So, you need to balance it for them and help them because, as you correctly said, usually, they are a one-man team. They just don’t know how to manage them because they lack experience. It is not that they can’t be great leaders, but they just don’t have the experience. It’s like giving a child some sand; the child doesn’t know what to do with it. As you grow old, you can find a lot of purposes.
Aditi: Hundred percent.
Pritish: Let’s go to day one of Pocketaces. When you were starting, did you think founders should be the key salespeople?
Aditi: You mean key revenue generators because, as we said, everybody is the salesperson for something or the other.
Pritish: Yes.
Aditi: Even our CTO is selling. In today’s tech market, they are selling every day to a prospective person who needs to join them or who wants to leave them.
Pritish: I think we’ll rephrase that. Do you think founders can oust revenue generation or business creation from other key members in the initial days?
Aditi: I don’t think so. There are two reasons. The reason is not that you cannot find a better person to sell your product than you; the reason is that if you sell your product enough times, you won’t know what to expect of that person. You will not know how to train them on your products, and you will really not know what your client wants. You have to go there and sell enough times to know whether you are really building something that can be sold. It doesn’t matter if you are a tech guy or a product person because, at the end of the day, there is a product and a need. You’re just going and having a conversation about why Pritish needs my product. It is no sales conversation to be had. It’s a relationship-building that we are doing. So, anybody can do it and the person who can do it best on the initial day when it is unproven is the person who is massively passionate about the product. Also, Pritish, there is a lot of product iteration that happens after you talk to your clients. Your first few prospective clients, I would like to call them product builders because whether it is the audience who referred us those comments in the first few hundred videos shaped our product market fit. Similarly, the conversation for the first few brands that I or Anirudh or Ashwin had, they gave us an idea very much. We didn’t even know how to price our product, the exact metrics people wanted, how to measure that, and what the product price will be based on. See, today is not the real world of a cost-plus model. If I am selling a pen that costs me ₹10, I can sell it to you for ₹12, but today everybody wants to sell it to you for ₹20. So how am I going to prove the premium to you? It is only dependent on two things: one is your need and how I can tell you that my product meets it, and the second is what are the competitor products. Competitor products main use karke dekh sakti hoon (I can use and test competitor products) but guess what? If you perceive the competitor’s product to be better than it is, and I have never spoken to you, then I will be optimising for God knows what. Perception sets the price in today’s world, and that’s called brand or what is called the relationship, call it anything but it is a perception. It’s a good win, an equity value, a brand value, and that sets the price, and I can sample all the other pens; what if you have a favourite pen because of something? And if I want to sell you my pen, I have to know which is your favourite pen from before, and I have to tell you why it is better. So, I feel that the founders, no matter their profile, age, background, etc., need to have the first few sales they do themselves. By sale, I mean money in the bank. Then hundred percent, they should hire a sales expert who will then do the kind of sale that their product requires. When we started, our entire requirement of sales was educational. Mujhe Pata bhi nahi tha ki aisa kuch hota bhi hai kyunki maine kabhi educational sales kiye nahi the (I didn’t even know that there was something called educational sales because I had never done that) but when I started going out to clients, I realised the true picture. Digital yahan kyun hai, digital mein display aur content integration kaise alag hota hai (Why is digital here? How are content and display integrated into the digital?) So, you need a lot of patience in educational. You need a person who can explain better, which means I need to know the backend, I need to know my numbers, and I need to know my product inside out. Then you need to hire a salesperson of that nature. Cut to five years later when I am doing OTT sales, not educational, but web-series pitching is storytelling. I have to narrate; I have to tell you about the characters. Yes, I can call in my creative guy to do that. But first, I have to open the doors and get you to a point. Otherwise, the creative will say I’m not coming to the meeting. So I must be a storyteller of that script, not just your need and my product in general. If I have Nutshell, we are selling Nutshell as hey XYZ brand, come and buy the entire finance category on my channel. Now, why can we do that? We can do that because Pocketaces, Filtercopy, Dice, and Gobble have already built a great brand. Now Nutshell is just riding on top of these. Secondly, I’m returning to the same advertisers I already worked with on my other channels. Thirdly, my product is a volume product. Then I need a very different type of person. Then I will get the people who sell ads on a TV network. So same company, different products. Not only that, but at different stages of the company, I need completely different salespeople. You will never know that only if you never tried to go and make that sale.
Pritish: Yeah, brilliant. That was really insightful. How do you manage sales rejection?
Aditi: It’s a huge part of our lives. Rejection is a huge part of life in general. I want to cover another topic with this because failure and success within a company for salespeople get discussed extremely objectively, and everybody believes they can comment on that. But failure and success of a product are often a team’s or a company’s failure as a whole, which is very hard when you are in sales. It’s because somebody can literally say you didn’t close that deal. That’s actually the hardest thing about sales. So, depending upon the kind of product, one part of our business deals with advertisers. So, there are five hundred advertisers, so there is that coverage that you do. You divide your teams into regions; then you do coverage. So, then there is a funnel. The rejection is part of the funnel. It gets narrower because of the rejection at every stage. I think how to maintain the relationship, how not to take it personally and how to go back with renewed switch the next time is basically part of it. I’ll go into this in a little bit more in detail. On the other side, if you sell to streaming platforms, there are only seven; that funnel is not exactly the way to sell there. There is one person who does the coverage of the entire thing. There is all or nothing very often. Either there, you can sell to some of these seven, or you suddenly have an unsold product. Here anyone out of those five hundred will buy, and I can sell it in bits and pieces. If I have a web series selling to advertisers, I can send it all to one brand, divide it up, title sponsor, powered by sponsor, associate sponsor, and I can sell it to anyone. So, I have a lot of whirring room to design my product. It’s not a binary sale. Here it’s binary. So innovates easier to cover the entire market, have great relationships, etc., but it’s binary. Bika ya nahin bika? aadha series toh nahi bech sakte aap kisi platform ko? (Did it sell, or did it not? You can’t sell half a series to the platform) I think, based on these, you have to prepare your team very differently emotionally. The strategy is completely different. One is parallel sales. If you could sell to five hundred people simultaneously, it’s sequential, you prioritise, you sequence everything. Emotionally, as a leader, you have to award the effort and the process followed well. That’s another big problem in sales because closures are often celebrated. I am also guilty of this. In my sales review meetings, if the numbers are good, then I don’t go into detail; I’ll go into detail if there is a problem with the numbers. This is something that we are all guilty of, and actually, it’s like the worst thing you can do because you might have a rockstar closing deal without following due process in a very non-repeatable manner, but if he leaves, then it’s a big problem. Whereas you might have a more meticulous resource closing slower, when things were way, handovers, check marks, this and that. So, I think you also have to celebrate the process; you have to celebrate if somebody did coverage very well, and the intermediate steps on a funnel must be celebrated. In some way, there is a little bit of luck, timing all of that in closure. So, sales rejection is real; it demotivates people, especially if their peers are doing well. So, as a leader, you can celebrate small or intermediate wins. You can also make sure that you’re continuously dividing your clients well. These are competitive folks; the peer comparison means a lot. So, ensure that all of them have an equal share of the potential of some easy-to-convert clients. some more difficult and some very hard ones. Then you can award more on the hard ones. But voh basic numbers sabko kar lene chahiye (but everyone should do the basic numbers). I think a lot of iterations lot of motivation are needed. Some leaders will do it just with drinks, and others will do it differently. There are many ways, but it’s a real thing, and everybody will question it. If your product doesn’t perform, first of all, it is not zero; second, you can hide it and thirdly is often a team failure versus an individual failure.
Pritish: What is the nicest thing that anybody has done for you?
Aditi: In light, I think it’s a hard question, but I think I would definitely say that there are people in my life who are either my parents or my husband, a couple of my professors in college who made me believe that I can do anything that I want and I think that vote of confidence in your capability takes you very far in how you conduct yourself, in your belief in yourself, removing self-doubt, being secure and hence seeking help. The nicest thing that anyone has ever done for me is told that I can believe in myself and that I am capable of doing anything that I want to if I put my mind to it. Honestly, I think that’s the greatest gift that I also tried to give, especially to the young women that I work with, because often women are more ambivalent about their success; they are confused about whether their ambition is a good thing and this is something that I'm personally very passionate about. If somebody can make you believe in yourself, then I think the sky is the limit for everyone.
Pritish: Brilliant. Before we close, what would you like your legacy to be?
Aditi: This is an easy answer because I have thought about this for many years. Pritish, I want to impact the world via my work positively. I used to work in impact investing before, which was a very direct way to create impact. I used to work with social enterprises literally. But when I came into media, my thought process was that even though I would be a few levels removed, the scale of impact I could create in the youth of this country would be significant. So, I want to be remembered as someone who built something that lasted beyond themselves. So, you will have to build something that lasts and positively influences people and this planet. Those are the two North star metrics of my own life.
Pritish: Brilliant. Aditi, that’s a great place to close this conversation. Thanks for being on the show.
Aditi: Thank you so much, Pritish. Very introspective talking to you.
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