Soft Skills instead of Selling Skills

Every New Business needs Sales efforts to scale

In 1998, when we created Servion, there were 5 promoters with diverse work experience and skillset with overlaps sometimes. As a founding team, we had consciously decided to bring in professionals to manage key functions and have promoter to demit executive roles, progressively. Three of the founders assumed mentoring and strategic roles as part of the Board of Directors. And for the past five years, it is run by only 2 of the founding team of five members. Green Quotient Systems (GQuotient for short) was created in 2009 by two of the promoters of Servion, including me.

The transformation of entrepreneurial DNA from professional competence led business to replication of practice orientation has evolved over a period, for me. We initially, sold the promise of design competence and later years, signed up clients for recurring projects. I played a catalyzing role in development and sales of software products made for India and made from India for the global markets. There was a healthy competition between economies of scale and scope and my next venture was born out of this conviction to offer Consulting services.

At GQuotient we chose the area of Green IT as our focus in a bid to blend environmental aspects with economic benefits. Our initial customers were keen to hear from us, giving us the credit of subject matter expertise, I hit the market again as a sales person, this time to position our knowledge on best practices to help companies to be eco-conscious. We had built a product that could automate the data collection part of our consulting jig – our “ppts” were now straddled with data analysis.

We had tremendous success with initial customers who saw the branding potential and CSR value from Green IT as the driver to engage us. The scale was difficult to achieve with the McKinsey kind of approach to business model. One thing led to another in our search for solutions to demonstrate economic benefit from greening the IT infra-structure. Today, we are enabling companies to adopt Cloud Computing technologies to reap the advantages of elasticity and flexibility of compute resources to support the business growth.

GQuotient (www.gquotient.com), offers Engineering Service to emerging technology companies; Consulting and integration services to enterprises migrating to the cloud; Operations and Management services to companies that have embraced “infra-structure as code.” We have been successful in signing-up clients for all the three pillars under the banner of DevOps for agility, frugality and sustainability. The challenge remains in finding the right sales resources to scale the business as I believe that every business is growth business.

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