Faiz Shaikh's Blog

While predictive analytics offers immense potential for businesses, it also comes with its share of challenges. SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) addresses these hurdles and provides solutions to ensure successful implementation. One of the key challenges is the complexity of predictive modeling and data preparation. SAC simplifies this process by offering user-friendly tools and intuitive interfaces, allowing even non-technical users to build predictive models effectively.

Another obstacle is the integration of predictive insights with existing business intelligence systems. SAC seamlessly combines predictive analytics with business intelligence, enabling organizations to derive comprehensive insights from historical data and future predictions. Moreover, SAC’s ability to handle large datasets and perform real-time analysis ensures that businesses can make timely decisions based on accurate predictive information.

Furthermore, ensuring data security and privacy is crucial in predictive analytics. SAC adopts robust security measures, safeguarding sensitive information and complying with data protection regulations. This builds trust among users, encouraging them to leverage predictive insights confidently.

Finally, one of the challenges is the need for skilled practitioners who can interpret and act upon predictive analytics results. To address this, SAC provides training resources and educational materials, empowering practitioners to acquire the necessary skills and make the most of predictive analytics capabilities.

Through these solutions, SAP Analytics Cloud effectively overcomes challenges, making predictive analytics accessible and impactful for businesses of all sizes, enabling them to unlock the full potential of their data and drive informed decision-making for sustainable growth and success.

organizations are constantly striving to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance customer experiences. One way to achieve these goals is through the implementation of robust process automation solutions. Among the leading providers in this domain is SAP, which offers an extensive suite of tools and technologies collectively known as SAP Build Process Automation (SAP BPA). In this blog post, we will delve into the world of SAP BPA, exploring its benefits, key features, and real-world applications.

Understanding SAP Build Process Automation

SAP BPA is a comprehensive suite of software tools and technologies designed to automate and optimize business processes within an organization. It enables companies to streamline their operations, eliminate manual tasks, and achieve higher levels of efficiency and productivity. By automating repetitive and rule-based processes, SAP BPA allows employees to focus on more strategic and value-added activities.

Key Features of SAP Build Process Automation:

1. Process Modeling and Design: SAP Build Process Automation provides a user-friendly interface to model and design business processes using drag-and-drop functionality. This feature enables business analysts and process owners to create process flows, define roles and responsibilities, and establish process rules and conditions.

2. Workflow Automation: With SAP BPA, organizations can automate complex workflows involving multiple tasks, approvals, and escalations. The system automatically routes work items to the appropriate individuals or teams based on predefined rules, ensuring efficient task execution and timely decision-making.

3. Integration Capabilities: SAP BPA seamlessly integrates with various SAP and non-SAP systems, enabling end-to-end process automation across the entire enterprise. It facilitates data exchange, synchronization, and communication between different applications, eliminating the need for manual data entry and reducing errors.

4. Business Rules Management: SAP BPA includes a powerful business rules engine that allows organizations to define and enforce business rules and policies. These rules can be configured to automatically trigger specific actions or decisions, ensuring compliance and consistency in process execution.

5. Monitoring and Analytics: SAP BPA provides real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities, allowing organizations to track process performance, identify bottlenecks, and make data-driven decisions. Comprehensive analytics and dashboards provide insights into process efficiency, cycle times, and resource utilization, enabling continuous process improvement.

Real-World Applications of SAP Build Process Automation:

1. Purchase Order Processing: SAP BPA can automate the entire purchase order lifecycle, from requisition to approval to payment. It automatically routes purchase orders for review and approval, integrates with supplier systems for order confirmation, and updates the financial systems upon payment.

2. Employee Onboarding: SAP BPA simplifies and accelerates the onboarding process for new employees. It automates the creation of user accounts, assigns access rights to systems and applications, initiates the provisioning of equipment, and generates welcome emails and documentation.

3. Invoice Management: With SAP BPA, organizations can streamline the invoice management process by automating data extraction, verification, and matching. It integrates with OCR (optical character recognition) technology to capture invoice data, validates it against predefined rules, and routes invoices for approval and payment.

4. Customer Service Requests: SAP BPA automates customer service processes, such as handling service requests, tracking progress, and escalating issues. It ensures that customer inquiries are efficiently routed to the appropriate teams or individuals, resulting in faster response times and improved customer satisfaction.

SAP Build Process Automation empowers organizations to achieve operational excellence by automating and optimizing their business processes. By eliminating manual tasks, reducing errors, and improving efficiency, SAP BPA allows companies to focus on strategic initiatives and deliver superior customer experiences. Whether it’s streamlining purchase order processing, automating employee onboarding, or improving invoice management, SAP BPA offers a wide range of capabilities to transform business operations. Embracing the same can be a key differentiator for organizations looking to stay competitive and thrive in the digital age.organizations are constantly striving to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance customer experiences. One way to achieve these goals is through the implementation of robust process automation solutions. Among the leading providers in this domain is SAP, which offers an extensive suite of tools and technologies collectively known as SAP Build Process Automation (SAP BPA). In this blog post, we will delve into the world of SAP BPA, exploring its benefits, key features, and real-world applications.

Understanding SAP Build Process Automation

SAP BPA is a comprehensive suite of software tools and technologies designed to automate and optimize business processes within an organization. It enables companies to streamline their operations, eliminate manual tasks, and achieve higher levels of efficiency and productivity. By automating repetitive and rule-based processes, SAP BPA allows employees to focus on more strategic and value-added activities.

Key Features of SAP Build Process Automation:

1. Process Modeling and Design: SAP Build Process Automation provides a user-friendly interface to model and design business processes using drag-and-drop functionality. This feature enables business analysts and process owners to create process flows, define roles and responsibilities, and establish process rules and conditions.

2. Workflow Automation: With SAP BPA, organizations can automate complex workflows involving multiple tasks, approvals, and escalations. The system automatically routes work items to the appropriate individuals or teams based on predefined rules, ensuring efficient task execution and timely decision-making.

3. Integration Capabilities: SAP BPA seamlessly integrates with various SAP and non-SAP systems, enabling end-to-end process automation across the entire enterprise. It facilitates data exchange, synchronization, and communication between different applications, eliminating the need for manual data entry and reducing errors.

4. Business Rules Management: SAP BPA includes a powerful business rules engine that allows organizations to define and enforce business rules and policies. These rules can be configured to automatically trigger specific actions or decisions, ensuring compliance and consistency in process execution.

5. Monitoring and Analytics: SAP BPA provides real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities, allowing organizations to track process performance, identify bottlenecks, and make data-driven decisions. Comprehensive analytics and dashboards provide insights into process efficiency, cycle times, and resource utilization, enabling continuous process improvement.

Real-World Applications of SAP Build Process Automation:

1. Purchase Order Processing: SAP BPA can automate the entire purchase order lifecycle, from requisition to approval to payment. It automatically routes purchase orders for review and approval, integrates with supplier systems for order confirmation, and updates the financial systems upon payment.

2. Employee Onboarding: SAP BPA simplifies and accelerates the onboarding process for new employees. It automates the creation of user accounts, assigns access rights to systems and applications, initiates the provisioning of equipment, and generates welcome emails and documentation.

3. Invoice Management: With SAP BPA, organizations can streamline the invoice management process by automating data extraction, verification, and matching. It integrates with OCR (optical character recognition) technology to capture invoice data, validates it against predefined rules, and routes invoices for approval and payment.

4. Customer Service Requests: SAP BPA automates customer service processes, such as handling service requests, tracking progress, and escalating issues. It ensures that customer inquiries are efficiently routed to the appropriate teams or individuals, resulting in faster response times and improved customer satisfaction.

SAP Build Process Automation empowers organizations to achieve operational excellence by automating and optimizing their business processes. By eliminating manual tasks, reducing errors, and improving efficiency, SAP BPA allows companies to focus on strategic initiatives and deliver superior customer experiences. Whether it’s streamlining purchase order processing, automating employee onboarding, or improving invoice management, SAP BPA offers a wide range of capabilities to transform business operations. Embracing the same can be a key differentiator for organizations looking to stay competitive and thrive in the digital age.

SAP Build Process Automation is a powerful tool that enables businesses to streamline and automate their workflows and tasks, without the need for writing code. By leveraging the capabilities of SAP Build Process Automation, companies can empower their employees to focus on more value-added activities, ultimately improving the overall efficiency and agility of the organization.

An Introduction to SAP Build Process Automation

SAP Build Process Automation is a component of the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) that offers a simplified and efficient approach to automating business processes. It is designed to cater to various skill levels, allowing both IT professionals and business users to create and enhance enterprise applications, process automations, and business sites with ease.

Key Features of SAP Build Process Automation

1. Low-code/no-code development: This feature allows organizations to address the scarcity of developers and respond quickly to changing market conditions. By offering intuitive tools that cater to different technical skill sets, a broader pool of employees can drive process automation initiatives.

2. Unified development experience: The SAP Build portfolio, which includes SAP Build Apps, SAP Build Process Automation, and SAP Build Work Zone, provides a centralized access point for solutions, lifecycle management, and monitoring capabilities.

3. Collaboration and sharing: Reusable artifacts like UX components, workflows, automations, data models, and business logic can be shared within teams and across projects, fostering collaboration and driving productivity.

Benefits of SAP Build Process Automation

Implementing SAP Build Process Automation can yield several benefits for businesses, such as:

1. Increased efficiency: Automating repetitive, manual tasks helps save time and reduces the potential for errors, leading to greater operational efficiency.

2. Improved agility: With the ability to respond quickly to changing market conditions and business requirements, organizations can maintain a competitive edge.

3. Enhanced compliance: Digitalizing processes ensure adherence to business rules and regulatory requirements, fostering better governance and auditability.

4. Empowered employees: By reducing the time spent on mundane tasks, employees can focus on more strategic and value-added activities, boosting job satisfaction and productivity.

How SAP Build Process Automation Works

SAP Build Process Automation follows a systematic approach to help businesses transform their processes. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Identify the process: Pinpoint the specific business process that requires automation, such as a paper-based process or a semi-automated process with inefficiencies.

2. Design the automation: Develop a clear digital process flow that adheres to business rules and collects the required information.

3. Implement the automation: Utilize the low-code/no-code tools provided by SAP Build Process Automation to build and deploy the automated solution.

4. Monitor and optimize: Continuously track the performance of the automated process and make improvements as needed, ensuring optimal efficiency and effectiveness.

Real-world Use Cases of SAP Build Process AutomationField Worker Efficiency

Consider field workers who take notes during their tours and later enter the data into a business application. By digitalizing this process with a mobile device, field workers can spend less time on back-office tasks and more time in the field. Additionally, service orders can be triggered immediately, speeding up cycle times.

Streamlining Purchase Requisitions

In a scenario where purchase requisitions are sent to approving managers via email, the process can be prone to errors, delays, and communication breakdowns. SAP Build Process Automation can help digitalize this process, ensuring that the correct information is collected and routed to the appropriate approvers, while also improving governance and accelerating cycle times.

SAP’s Recognition as a Visionary in Robotic Process Automation

Gartner has recognized SAP as a Visionary in their 2022 Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation. This recognition emphasizes SAP’s commitment to providing comprehensive AI-powered solutions that integrate applications, discover process inefficiencies, and automate processes across diverse enterprise environments.

Scaling Success with Low-code Automation

Low-code automation software, like SAP Build Process Automation, simplifies development and has seen high adoption rates, with users reporting high satisfaction levels. A recent IDC study highlights how low-code software accelerates application and automation development, further emphasizing the benefits of adopting low-code solutions.

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Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is a business process?

A business process is a series of connected workflows, activities, and tasks designed to achieve a specific outcome. Process automation refers to the digitalization of these components to improve efficiency, agility, and compliance.

How do process automation solutions enhance organizations?

Process automation solutions go beyond the standardized best-practice processes provided by enterprise applications, addressing unique business requirements and responding to changing market conditions.

Why are low-code/no-code solutions important?

Low-code/no-code solutions help address developer shortages and enable organizations to respond faster to market changes and business needs. By providing intuitive tools for users with varying technical skills, a wider pool of employees can contribute to process automation initiatives.

Final Thoughts

SAP Build Process Automation is a powerful solution that can streamline business processes, increase efficiency, and empower employees to focus on value-added tasks. By leveraging the capabilities of SAP Build Process Automation and SAP BTP, organizations can drive enterprise automation, improve agility, and maintain a competitive edge in today’s fast-paced business landscape.

Know what you are selling and who’s buying. Most websites don’t have a clear ‘intent’ and ‘content’ alignment. Ever land on a website and think to yourself, ‘What do these people really sell?’. That’s more common than you think. Marketers get bogged down in the language and the SEO and fluff up the page with so many keywords that it looks no more than a thesaurus. If your target audience can’t relate their problem with your solution, then there’s no point to the extravagant website.Conduct a thorough keyword analysis. Do this after you are clear with your intent and content, not before. You must have a faint idea of how and what your TA is searching.Check out a few competitor websites. Get a feel of how they talk. Don’t go overboard here. The one you like might not be the most famous or successful one.Now structure the website in the simplest form focusing on the ‘user journey’. Every click must give some information or salvation. Don’t put empty clicks anywhere (where people click twice or thrice to get to what their destination).Use short and action-oriented language. Be straight-up with your offering.Keep your blogs rolling. That’s the dynamic part of your website. Never underestimate the power of a good blog page.Build your social media audience. You must pull views from somewhere and until you get to a healthy direct traffic mix, you must ‘pull’ your audience. To achieve this, you must build your social media community (namely LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, Facebook, Instagram, etc.).Pick a brand and content theme and stick to it across your website and social pages. Slowly, but surely, ‘own’ this theme. That’s when you will be considered a thought leader.You won’t jump from 1000 views to 10,000 views in a day. There are no get rich quick schemes. But content is all about quality and momentum. Keep the content flowing and you will reach there sooner than you think.Put in money on your social accounts and your website (GDN) only when you achieve a significant (steady) momentum. That’s the only way you would scale. If you don’t time your monetary plug-ins well, then you would find yourself ‘dependent’ on them more often.

We live in a society. Over the course of development, we believe we have earned the right to be called a civilized society. A civilized society works as an organism, where each member is expected to perform his or her duty for the betterment of the society. The society in turn offers its members with the security and resources generated buy its constituent population. This simple philosophy can be extended to the idea behind any nation.

Citizens are expected to perform their duties in exchange of their rights. With a utopian mindset, all these aspects would fulfill all requirements of a great nation. But enough of fantasy, we have seen this is far from the truth.

We come from ancestors who idolized the female form, intellect, and abilities. We have enthralled by tales of courage and forethought of many great female stalwarts of our history. But somewhere along the line, we started singling out and highlighting the more homely aspects of these stories. The courage that we used to associate with the female mind gradually transferred to stories of adherence to duty.

There have been many roads and bylanes that have bought us to the present. Somewhere we, as a society, changed our opinion of what is ‘expected’ of the women in our world.

The society effectively chose a set of characteristics and traits that it deemed ‘ideal’ and ‘modest’ for its women members.

The women who incidentally had these traits were termed as virtuous and the rest were ignored as less worthy. It again seems relevant to point out that our ancestors celebrated the women of their age as individuals, as they were. They even associated the sexual union of the men and women with beauty and divinity. One can study the early literature to find direct instances of mutual consent in all sexual encounters.

The Kamasutra is an ideal example, as it shows, not just mutual consent, but also a respect for the female desires. Now if we bring ourselves to the world around us and the various acts of molestation, harassment, and rape that we come across, we can see that the collective mindset has turned very hostile towards women.

The laws within a society always reflect the mindset of its members. The judiciary and parliament are interrelated in their creation and amendment of laws. The ministers in the parliament who suggest the bills and amendments are members of the same society that we exist in. They bear the same mindset that many of us carry with ourselves.

The same might be said about the judiciary. It is not wise to suggest that education would eliminate all prejudices that the society has put in the minds of the lawyers and judges in the courts. Even if we believe that the law and the constitution are strictly adhered to in our courts, these laws aren’t created by these esteemed individuals.

There have been many instances where certain judges have suggested amendments in the constitution but to no avail. The citizens are bound by these laws by the virtue of being a ‘citizen’.

As of now we have seen three defining elements within a society; its mindset, its law, and its judiciary. Let’s assume for our discussion that the judiciary follows the constitution to the fullest.

The constitution in itself offers women equal rights and adequate representation. It offers them protection under The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (PREVENTION, PROHIBITION and REDRESSAL) Act, 2013, Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961 (28 of 1961) (Amended in 1986), and others. {Ref: http://ncw.nic.in/frmllawsrelatedtowomen.aspx}.

Let’s assume that we exist in a civilized society. To think that a civilized society would require so many laws to protect its female members is astounding. The counter point would be that a utopian civilized society wouldn’t require any laws whatsoever.

So even if we drop the civilized part from our society, still the laws seem to assume that, left alone, the society would instances of harassment, dowry, domestic violence, rape, etc. against women. The counter point again would be that even other crimes exist in society. If we consider all crime to be based on some or the other motive we can attempt to categorize them. If we consider murder or harm to any individual, we are inclined to find some motive there. This is not to suggest that this crime is not heinous. It is simply to point out that there ideally would be a motive. What a motive does is that it essentially isolates the victim as the intended victim.

This means that the danger associated with murder, including the motive, subsided with the act itself. In case where the murder is random and without any motive, it can be categorized as serial killing. Here the danger doesn’t end with the victim. The danger, in itself, is that any person can be a victim. The safe zone for everyone in the society goes down.

If we make a motive scale and put premeditated murder on one side, the other side would definitely have terrorism and serial killing where there is no real motive other than causing harm to random people. Crime against women like rape, harassment, and molestation fall in the same category.

The act of rape is not directed towards the individual; rather it just uses the victim to fulfill the perpetrators’ desire. This essentially means that, without motive, this is random selection, and anyone could fall victim to this. The ‘safe zone’ diminishes across society. Each violent crime against women makes the society less safe.

Let’s revisit the concept of society. The society is made up of its members. The perpetrators of such violent crimes against women come from the society as of the victim. This stems from a collective devaluation of the status of women in our society. As stated before, the society has degraded its mindset to a point that we associate a few virtues to be ideal for women. Anyone digressing from this is deemed immoral.

Many such violent crimes are often blamed on the attire and the personal characteristics of the female victim. What is more worrying is that women are then further restricted in the name of protection. This turns into vicious cycle where women are reduced to objects that can de directed to function as the society pleases.

The society places their beauty and ‘approved’ abilities to showcase its inclusiveness, and then places them back in seclusion. This takes us back to the earlier discussion about the correlation of rights and duties in a ‘civilized’ society. Women are expected to perform their duties, which the society dictates appropriate, but are not given the proportional rights. The same vicious cycle which we saw before ends up with women suffering within their houses. There are many instances of dowry, domestic violence, and marital rape prevalent in the average households.

If we add all up the instances of injustice, harassment, and violence against women, we would come to figure that only a fraction of them are ever reported to the authorities. There might not be any statistic to suggest the truth behind the previous statement, but we should ask ourselves how long we want to live in denial. It is true.

Up till now we have established that there are many instances of crimes against women. Let’s get back to the efforts of the society to protect its female members. In the recent past, there have been many fast track courts set up to settle issues relating to such crimes. This has come with success and relief to the liberals of the society. But it sadly is too little. There is another factor that determines the efficacy of the judiciary; the investigators. Most of the investigation and collection of proof is done by the local police.

The police again have the same flaw as any other; they come from the same societal mindset. They might have their own bias towards what they consider as the ideal representation of women. This might affect their judgement while performing the investigation. Further, for some reason any kind of sexual activity in society has become ethical for its own good. It is true that marriage is a wonderful union, but it is not a necessary union. It is a union for love and companionship, not a prerequisite for sexual activity.

The constitution has come to even recognize live in relationship but society has still not caught up. Sexual activity is still seen as something exclusive to marriage, and any such activity outside marriage is instantly rejected and shamed as impure. So strong are these biases that at many times innocent victims of violent crimes like rape have to live with a stigma. This apparent social stigma might affect the following of proper medical and investigative procedures by the local authorities. So in the end, even the courts of law might be left inept without proper proof, and the victims might have to live without proper justice.

Tighter legislation is not enough to protect women. We need a collective shift in our mindset as a society.

The intended point of this article is not to assign blame to any single entity. Every single person in the society has to share equal blame. We are all guilty of ‘tolerating’ all injustice against women. Somewhere we have come to accept the unsaid social laws of our society which compels us to ask ourselves, “What would the society say?” We should accept our own inadequacies and initiate a change within ourselves. We should ask ourselves, “I am the society. What would I say?” This might not seem much, but gradually enough people would believe in it and give rise to a new generation of law makers and enforces with the ‘right’ mindset.

Alas! We all have a tendency to get riled up about an issue and vow to do something about it, but to eventually let it go and get on with the daily ignorant grind of our lives. The writer of the article is as guilty of this as any reader. Here is hoping we find someone who would prove to be a difference. The only simple way to do this is to share your own opinion about this topic with at least one other person. Who knows, that one person might end up making the difference in some person’s life.

Best of Luck!

We really don’t want to get into ‘why marketing’ and ‘why startups’ right now, do we? Let’s skip the set-up and just jump right into the topic. What problems would your startup’s inside sales or marketing teams face during a crisis?

I conducted a small on-call and on-chat survey with some local, glocal, and some international startup marketers. From the interactions, I inferred the following 5 problems forming the common patterns. (These problems are restricted to the lead generation and lead qualification processes).

1.     Bounced reach-outs (out of office replies)

2.     Delayed or no response

3.     Changed prospect expectations and outdated sales pitches

4.     Change in budgets – realignment of funds (at the client end)

5.     Extended sales cycles where even hot leads turn into damp interest queries

How can a marketing professional absorb these developments and come through for their respective companies? Here are 3 things every marketer, especially for a startup, should remember. If some CEOs want to look into this, they are more than welcome to do so.

Get down to the basics – Define your brand[image error]

The past few years have seen an upswing in the ‘SaaS ecosystem’. Startups, in particular, have adopted this ecosystem across departments. During the same ecosystem evolution, some social media and digital marketing professionals started considering suggestive metrics like ‘engagement’ and ‘reach’ as the end-all success benchmarks for campaigns.

This worked for them. However, the rush to be ‘digitally-strong’ pushed keyword and hashtag stuffing. These caught eyeballs and buzz without having much impact on branding.

Riding on trends is merely a booster. It isn’t branding. Trend-hopping without a strong brand is mere grunt work. It just adds to the noise. It doesn’t demarcate and add-on to the brand context and allure.

It’s a brand bubble. It is bound to pop sooner rather than later.

Please, oh please! Define your brand. Get down to the basics. The world has thrown you a curveball and a googly together. Get back to the drawing board and rediscover your brand. Let’s set up a heuristic for this since we all ‘love’ acronyms.

The NAD basics:

a.     What specific NEED does your brand fulfill?

Don’t go overboard here, as you did before. No flash and glamour. Just the facts. Nobody’s watching. It can be as simple as helping a user write a fresh blog.

b.     ALIGN the intent of the usage with your brand promise.

Let’s suppose your startup or brand helps a user write a fresh blog. Your product might be a laptop, a smartphone, or even a typewriter. Build your brand along the lines of the intent. ‘It simply helps people channel their inner voice’.

The buyer might hesitate to put down a premium if it’s just a laptop. But, if it’s a part of their ‘growth story’ or their ‘voice’, it becomes a part of their life.

They buy the product, but they own the brand.

c.     DEFINE your brand in a simple way.

Assume your prospect’s mood to be such: ‘It’s past bed-time and no-one has the cognitive capacities to give any more time than required to understand your brand’. Make your brand language as simple as possible. Right now (and always), simple words are best-equipped to cut through the (random promotional) clutter.

Stop selling for a bit – Just communicate.[image error]

I have used this statement quite a few times in the past few weeks – ‘The current crisis is unprecedented’. But then, that’s expected from a crisis. There is no precedent on how to do things.

We, as startups, are pushed to ABS – ‘Always Be Selling’. However, that’s not the flavor of the season.

You must have heard – ‘We are all in this together’. It’s true. People all around the world are facing a similar set of uncertainties and hardships. It’s an uplifting thought which, despite its somber backdrop, adds a vague sense of security and serenity. It’s a common thread connecting everyone.

Now, some marketers, still preoccupied with trend-hopping, are excited about this thread. They want to connect their brand to the crisis fightback in any credible or far-fetched manner. In their minds, it brings higher ‘engagement’ and ‘reach’.

For the love of God, DABS – ‘Don’t Always Be Selling’.

Just communicate.Open up an impartial and personalized exchange with your followers and audience.Take a break from direct social media promotional strategies.Tone down the corporate and sales language. Make it more humane.Engage with other (even competitor) brands in a bid to bring conformity and sense within the industry.Understand the (updated) client needs – immediate and future-facing[image error]

You must have your preset consumer personas which, let’s face it, predominantly factor CXOs. Startups, some with good reason, try to focus on high-ticket enterprise clients. This is an old ‘high-risk and high-reward’ gambit. Startups safely assume that the product stickiness, the monthly recurring revenue, and the referrals are higher with enterprises.

However, this singular dedication to presets, whether they are customer personas or target clients, must be revisited. You and your clients are facing the same three-pronged issue:

Business continuityEscalating overheadMarket uncertainty

As a marketer, you must look beyond your off-hand company pitch and adopt a collaborative approach. Engage with your clients to help them find quicker ways to ride off the current storm.

Let’s take an example. You send one of your prospects one of these emails:

a.     Cut down cart abandon rates by half – Ask us how

b.     We want to help improve your remote work coordination

In any normal (not a crisis) scenario, the first mailer title would have higher open rates and greater responses. However, in a crisis, the client (and your point of contact at the company) have updated priorities and concerns. These concerns go beyond mere ‘cart abandonment rates’.

Recognizing these updated client needs and offering a collaborative and consultative hand would improve the open and response rates.

Also read: Top 7 most common brand mistakes for startupsKeep Calm and, please, Keep it Simple!

You may say that the points mentioned are obvious. Still, just because something is obvious doesn’t make it impractical. We have developed a false belief wherein complicated and multi-faceted campaigns are better than simple ones. What happened to ‘KISS’? Keep it simple, Señor.

Many startups have continually pushed agility and responsiveness as their core strengths. Startups have tried hard to inculcate these skills into their workforce by:

pushing teams out of their comfort zones,running 24-hour hackathons for some charming and some ‘smart-aleck’ solutions,gamifying the entire learning and development process, etc.

It’s time to channel the KISS principle with true agility and responsiveness. Startups should build their campaigns from the ground-up, go back to the drawing board, and really ‘empathize’ with their prospects.

‘This crisis, too, shall pass’. The startups that fall-upwards during this crisis would be much stronger at the end of it.

There is a lot of talk about excelling and fulfilling our potential. But how does one use this potential to get ahead? One of my favorite examples of such situations are movies like ‘Back to the Future’. There was a time when our imagination exceeded our grasp. When we thought of a future, we thought of flying cars, self-fitting shoes, dynamic waiter bots, etc. Where do we stand in the line of these imaginations? We have these, but not in the exact sense of the imagined idea.

Somewhere along the line we stopped imagining ideas and transformations and started imagining features. In a consumption-driven world, our breakthroughs have the shortest life-span in history. Previously, a life of successful innovation could earn you immortality in history. But now, an equally innovative life would barely qualify you for a footnote. We are too focused on creating extravagance (read: iPhone X) rather than creating qualified and lasting applications of technology.

The day isn’t far when there would be Nobel Prizes given out for the best mobile app.

To put it in simple terms, in my view, we are stuck in mediocrity and sustenance. Even in our lives, we move day-to-day, week-to-week, and year-to-year towards a commitment of earning as much as we can spend. As a species, it’s time we regressed to simple times when we dreamed, we created, and we marveled. Not the time of now where we research, we market, we marvel, and then we create.

How does this non-sequitur rant fit in the average daily life? It’s, again, very simple.

Open Your Mind to the Possibilities of Imagination

We must inspire our minds to once again lift our imaginations beyond our grasp. User engagement, design, and interface is all fair and great, but how are we using these enhanced features to drive progress? We need to open our mind to the overarching potential of the applications of our technology. If social media and interactions are a hit, we should use it to create a discourse and train our youth. If transport aggregation is bearing fruit, then rather than setting up premium services, we should partner with global governments to assist with disaster relief. Collective networking through these aggregated cars can create a self-sensing traffic control system. We have the capacity and the technology, it’s just that we don’t know how to monetize it, and hence it’s set aside.

Daily Tip: We should search for deep insights and applications within our work. It might be a sales call, but we need to open our mind to the possibility of pushing it to a collaboration. We must actively think in terms of applications and progress.

Observe and Boost Your Perception

Get up early in the morning, meditate or exercise. Observe your surroundings. If you are home, look at the things you have around you. Your phone, your television, your table, your clock, your door, and furthermore. Have you given a thought to the functionalities of any of these simple or complex machines? How do they work? We know what to do with a phone, but do we what happens within its structure? Do we care how it’s processor functions and structures data? We are used to taking technology and utilities for granted. We assume someone will make our work easier, eventually, in some way or the other. It might be networking, or simply playing. There is always an easier way to do it. But we forget, that by taking the easier way, we are missing out on the learning the harder way gave us.

Daily Tip: Interacting with your surroundings. Ask questions. Keep learning. Keep trying to find out how things work, and why they are what they are. The more you observe, the more you absorb, the more you learn, the more you perceive, the more you aspire, and even more, do you imagine. Eventually, your imagination would exceed your daily grasp, guiding you to greatness.

Apply Whatever You Learn

There are times when we realize that we have enough information and insight about a specific topic. We all reach that stage. We consider ourselves subject matter experts, even mavericks of industries. But then what?

“Can we go to the next level, please?”

What lies beyond our knowledge and our intelligence? Application! One of my greatest fears is that when I pass on (not validating or denying heaven or hell) and reach a divine judgment, I would be questioned about my abilities. When I was so gifted, why didn’t I do anything with it? Why did I waste it? Therefore, every day I make it a point to create something new, to apply my knowledge to make something unique. Just like writing this article. If this article helps someone and makes them think, that would be a good application of my mind.

We get stuck on what’s working and what’s great ‘right now’. But the world doesn’t exist in the present, it exists in the future. You lived your present when you prepared for it in the past. Now, in the present, you are creating your future every minute. We need to raise our level and take our mind to the next level.

Daily Tip: Active Learning. Don’t just learn to learn. Learn in terms of applications. When you learn something new or think of an innovation, simultaneously think of its multiple applications. Make a mental map of everything (or every person) your thought or idea could affect. Create a plan for yourself from ideation to execution, and then push yourself to realize it.

It’s our responsibility to ensure that our children are proud of the world we leave for them. Would it merely be a world full of consumables, or would it be a world of wonderment and delight?

7 Must-Knows for any Entrepreneur Starting-up

Having an idea and running with it, is the central focal point of being an entrepreneur. It is essentially what sets an entrepreneur apart from the rest. We all have thoughts, some are ground-breaking. However, we never execute them to the extent where they become breakthroughs. Perhaps due to a lack of will or a lack of vision, we tend to give up on these ideas before they bear fruits.

The first thing one should know when building on a startup is that no idea is a ‘bad-idea’.

The second thing one should know is to filter out all such non-breakthrough-generating ideas.

1. Create Your ‘Ground-Breaking’ Idea

So, you have your ground-breaking idea. Now how do you begin to transform this idea into a breakthrough? First, make sure your idea IS ‘ground-breaking’. One thing you cannot have at the beginning of your entrepreneurship journey (or ever), is to be complacent. Many startups stumble at this point.

They create a ‘ground-breaking’ idea but fail to create the proper market fit for it.

The concept or product should solve a real-world problem. There is no point in structuring a solution that even your target audience finds hard to comprehend. More importantly, as suggested, the value-add should be clear and concise.

2. Unleash the Potential of Your Founding Team

With an idea, the other essential part of your business is the team. You need people who have the talent, caliber, and hunger to crave success, validation, and glory in their lives. We all want these things but some of us have the explicit desire to rush towards them at super speed. If you visualize the eventual growth and prosperity of your business, you should channelize that energy into your team.

Entering any market is tough, you must grow at double the speed just to catch up with the preset players.

Sometimes it just comes down to ‘who-wants-it more’.

As a leader, you must unleash this need to be the best from within your team. Each founding team member would leave a strong mark on how your business functions from there on. Choose wisely and direct with perfection.

3. Test it Thoroughly! Test Your Solution Across Multiple Stakeholders

Identify multiple (unique) use cases for each of your features. Each use case has their own pattern and style of usage. Collate the information from all stakeholders to track the most optimized usage pattern and then streamline that as a pillar style on which other usage patterns can wrap around.

Each stakeholder would have their own insights. These insights, at each market spurt, is like gold-dust. Always test, and test thoroughly. Each speck of information or insight would help you better your solution. Think about each use case and the feasibility of your solution within those constraints. Therefore, comprehensive is a word we use a lot in feature and product development.

Remember, any stone unturned at testing phase would eventually become a large boulder requiring considerable efforts to rectify.

Similarly, each minute aspect covered at testing would speed up the go-to-market time and eventually add to your value and differentiation as compared to competitors.

4. Choose Your Mentors Wisely

As a leader, you must be decisive, assertive, motivated, and inspiring. To be all this at all times, you need to, from time-to-time, look to your mentors for wisdom. This is where your choice for a mentor could mean a significant push towards growth, or random circumventing strategies that waste time and money. Choose your mentors wisely as they would guide you when there is a need. This choice is extremely relative as a mentor would have a different effect on one person as compared to another.

Your mentor should be able to push you to realize your whole potential.

5. Know Your Market Well and Respond to its Demands

Along with having comprehensive testing for your solutions and infusing ambition, wonder, & desire in your team, you must know your market and your competitors completely. Any information gap here might turn into a sudden impediment while your solution is live for your clients.

You must comb over each insight you gained and validate it through multiple sources.

Even when you launch your solution, always keep an ear open for any insight that you could flag as an adaptive change. The quicker you pick up on this, the more time you have to implement the necessary changes. Furthermore, the more such market insights you gather, the higher is the potential for reinvention within your solution.

6. Ride Through the Growth Inflection Point (Test the Extent of Your Risk Appetite)

Assuming that the first version of your solution was well received (and if this assumption is correct, you are one of a lucky few), you must assess the potential for growth and risk. There is a clear balance that needs to be set here. Growth vs Risk. Victory goes to the valiant, but so does the crashes. There is always a risk when you move at high speeds. But you need to know which routes to take. Calculated risks are the name of the game. Assess each risk point to understand their cost-benefit ratio and then take an impartial decision about the same.

There will be a point where you would hit a growth inflection point when you become self-sustaining and your risks smoothen out and diversify. Know that point.

Don’t take a post-inflection risk in your pre-inflection days, and vice-versa.

7. Don’t Look Back, Other Than to Learn

Embrace Your Achievement, With Humility. Escape the struggling mentality and accept the new challenge of being an industry leader. The industry expects you to set the standards, go ahead and charge up your company to consistently perform at that level and exceed those standards.

Now you know the mindset you must follow to be successful. But you should keep this mind, the more you grow, the higher would be the industry expectations from you. So, always keep learning, growing, and achieving. The industry, then, would follow you.

When this happens, you know you have effectively transformed from an entrepreneur into a thought leader.

Previously published on my LinkedIn Pulse.

The year made news with big consolidation of Uber Eats within Zomato. Why should this acquisition of Uber Eats (where Uber took in 10% of Zomato in exchange – at $3.5 billion overall value) matter to us?

Some say it was because we are a discount-driven market. Is this a fair assessment? Companies like Amazon, Flipkart, even Reliance Jio are burning money to gain a significant hold on the market. It’s all or nothing. The old marketing and consumer behavior logic dictate that we create demand through sweepstakes, push out the competition with discounts or service standards, etc. It’s all about making and remaking the market.

There are three factors to this so-called ‘discount-driven market’.

1. Scale and depth – India has become the ‘Golden bird – Sone ki Chidiya’ once again. First it was the spices. Now it’s the youth. We were the suppliers then. We are the consumers now. Companies view this as an untapped zone with millions of potential new customers being added every month or week.

451 million monthly active Internet users (March 2019)  – that’s India, in second position, after China. The internet and smartphone user penetration has opened up opportunities in retail, food delivery, home services, and all types of entertainment.

Its unyielding growth has bought global companies put up billions in India. The consumption patterns are consistent and healthy. They keep moving or extending across demographics, in terms of age, gender, etc. The bell-curve is spreading and rising.

The icing is growing and successful middle-class achievers. This adds an inherent or intrinsic aspiration value and disposable income.

2. Competition – Since the market is ripe for the taking, companies come-up with layered and structured solutions. Either they pack their offerings with assets and values, or they strip it down to make it worth more – ‘for each paise on the rupee’. Companies like Amazon went the first way. Companies like Reliance Jio (and all others in the broadband wars) went the second way.

At the end of the day, it’s an equation. You put in x amount for y months to reach a point where the results move over the lovely ‘inflection point’. Let’s call this estimated market share value to be z. So as long is xy

3. Replicability – India is unique marketplace. It’s a compliment in terms of our unity and culture. Even though we seem diverse and (sometimes) at odds with each other. At a base level, we are quite similar. Religion or language, we share similar values and drives.

This helps companies and marketers to ride on or capture common needs quickly. Even a seemingly niche need could be potential scaled-up to a generic level (with the right placement). That’s why an average Indian smartphone has at least one app for every basic and niche need. The consumption, and its replicability, is almost universal.

So if it’s such a ripe market, where do companies like Uber Eats go wrong? Here are some Myths some of us readily accept.

1. Myth – India is a discount-driven economy



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Everyone loves discounts. It’s a time-tested tactic. However, if a multi-billion dollar valued company pins all their hopes on this single aspect, then they can’t blame the target audience.

India is ‘not’ an exclusively discount-driven economy. We are terribly loyal to brands, just look at craze of some of our films. We have value-driven and not discount-driven. It’s just the marketers (especially social-media) that tend to take the short-cut for higher engagement with discounts.

It’s not the market’s fault that it became so desirable for anyone and everyone in the world. Since the Indian market is spoilt for choice, and since the backlog of competition keeps piling up, the companies get in a hyper-FOMO. It’s pure and basic game theory.

Indians are just making hay till the sun shines. Give us good and consistent value, we would respond.

2. Myth – India is emotion-driven, not intelligence-driven



[image error]Taj Mahal and the ‘Great Indian Stereotype’

It’s totally wrong and extremely irresponsible to extrapolate ‘sensitive’ to emotions to ‘ driven’ by emotions. Not by a long shot. India, right now, is far more adaptable in terms of technology, concepts and experiences than any other (top market) nations.

The learning curve is short, almost non-existent. It doesn’t matter which demographic you are targeting. Whatever you throw at them, they’ll turn around and say, you got more? Or in Captain America’s words – ‘I can do this all day’.

[image error]Captain America – Civil War

This is the core problem which makes an ‘Uber Eats’ throw in their towel. Remember elusive, ‘Inflection point’. In a graph this is the point where the slope of the curve substantially changes, ideally from a convex to concave moving upwards.

[image error]Take-off at ‘inflection point – Image source – Marketing Insider

As per the aforementioned equation, xy

This means that the ‘advantage’ or ‘edge’ you thought you had wouldn’t last for more than a few months. Pretty soon, the market would make it the new norm and you would be at the same point you started from (in terms of market share). You need to move fast, building on your work continuously.

For example, mega-e-commerce sales were a novelty once, a long time back. Now they are so normal, people take it as a fact of state and life.

3. Myth – India decides and buys as the world buys

This is something that not many would accept. The phrase goes, think global act local. However, it doesn’t show in the actions of anyone. What’s the point of an Alexa in Indian life? Companies consider India as an extended market to the United States of America. It’s not.

If a company can’t understand the basic decision patterns of the Indian market, they shouldn’t complain if they lose on it. In recent memory, the only company that successfully cracked it was awarded likewise. Paytm. The company solved a very basic problem, without the fanfare of the world, and the market gulped it up.

Don’t bring in global products and try to fool us to buy them. We would buy them, but you won’t make much of a difference. Come here and develop solutions to the local problems.

The other major drawback is that very few companies understand how a household spends money. That’s why a DMart is successful where other stationary retailers fall by the wayside. Indians diligently plan their monthly budget. They are more than one decision partners. They give a brand some breathing space, as a trial, before they switch to another. It’s a very empirical process. Almost like business to business (b2b) procurement. Value-driven and smart.

Where did Uber Eats fail? Not in many places.



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They had a good plan with good focus on value. They became unintended victims of an unforgiving market. The ‘inflection point’ kept moving ahead till a point where they (food delivery companies) have burned more $3 billion to sustain or capture a decent share. The point, however keeps moving due to fast and insatiable adoption rates. Zomato and Swiggy are stagnating in valuation with investors keeping their burned hands safe. Ola dipped in the food delivery, twice, market to fail.

In a way it’s good as Uber faced heavy losses in the past year. It’s important for them to not cut corners within their primary business.

What’s the takeaway?

The Indian market is a siren song. It’s sweet and enticing. But only the brave and fast dare move close. At its core –  it’s very tough.

If a company, Indian or global wants to win here, then India should be awarded a complete entity in terms of marketing, business development, and most importantly, product development. Don’t, simply, have your CEOs visit us once a year. If it’s not your focus, it would stop you dead in your tracks. 

References for stats:

LivemintYourStoryEconomic TimesBizEnglish (cover image)

“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”

Came across this raw and hitting idea online, tracked it back to an Andrew Lewis who’s become famous with it, being mass-retweeted.

If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

— Andrew Lewis (@andlewis) September 13, 2010

It’s not a unique thought, we all know it. But the articulation made it extremely relatable and easy to remember. In a world where distractions are a business, it’s nice to find such simple sentences that hit home and transform into heuristics.

I went a step deeper and found this video published back in 1973 by Richard Serra. It’s become established art, being hosted by MoMA on their website.

“The product of Television, Commercial Television, is the Audience.
Television delivers people to an advertiser.
There is no such thing as mass media in the United States except for television.
Mass media means that a medium can deliver masses of people.
Commercial television delivers 20 million people a minute.
In commercial broadcasting the viewer pays for the privilege of having himself sold.
It is the consumer who is consumed.
You are the product of t.v.
You are delivered to the advertiser, who is the customer.
He consumes you.
The viewer is not responsible for programming——
You are the end product.
You are the end product delivered En Masse to the advertiser.
You are the product of t.v.”

Darting back from the time to now. ‘Consumers is being consumed’ rings disappointingly true even now. Watch the entire video to see how Richard extends his concepts to news and the entire media state. The entire encapsulation in a sarcastic television outlook adds incredible flavor, and forewarning.

It’s just a point of quiet contemplation, for someone to absorb or reject the given proposition. But, nevertheless its important to know what the outside-in view of our world is.

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