India’s emerging as a global sales hub for SaaS, cloud

For all the human tragedy that Covid-19 was, it also changed human behaviour in ways that made it ₹advantage India’ in several areas. One of these is global online sales. It became much easier to have sales folk sitting in India and generating leads from here and concluding sales from here. Today, lots of companies – both Indian SaaS (software-as-a service) ventures and MNCs – are building big salesforces in India to sell their products to clients globally.
“I think Covid fundamentally changed the way we build trust with each other,” Manav Garg, who founded the SaaS company Eka Software, said on our webinar last week. Previously, he said, trust was built by meeting, by having a drink with each other. “With Covid coming in, that was not an option, and tools like Zoom and Google Meet came in. And the fundamental way we build trust today is very different. The product or service starts taking centre-stage in a discussion and that’s how trust starts getting built. And that proved to be an advantage for India,” he said.
Job Sam Koshy, Apac head of partnership & channels at Avalara, a US-based company that develops and delivers cloud-based compliance solutions for various transaction taxes, said Covid made buyers realise that they don’t need to be face-to-face for every conversation. They realised they could use online setups and still have really fruitful and productive discussions. While physical connections were still useful in many cases, the new buyer behaviour, Job said, became very useful from a scalability point of view. “I can be in one meeting, and immediately after that I can just hop on to another,” he said.
Manav said buyers became comfortable even in buying software costing over $50,000. It also became easier to sell to the millions of small & medium businesses globally. So, from just 40 SaaS companies in India in 2015, the number surged to 3,000 in 2021, and to as many as 6,500 now, with total revenue of close to $80 billion. “Now we have about 1% share of the global enterprise software market, which is pretty big for where we have come from,” he said.
Avalara’s India centre, Job said, started from a back-office, task-oriented mindset, but then matured to running processes, and then to owning functions. He said the efficiency, quality and complexity of the work its India sales teams do has grown enormously. “Our account management function has evolved to building and servicing partnerships and customers from India. We have a large customer base. And we have teams here who are servicing customers based out of multiple regions,” he said.
This is particularly complex work because every region has its own localised requirements. “While global frameworks that are well defined are very important, they need to be paired with localised execution flexibility. The frameworks that have worked for us in the US and the EMEA regions are great, but how do we make it centric to Apac, and even within Apac, there are different contexts – India versus ANZ versus Asean!” Job said.

Making everyone salespeople
Training of sales folk, of course, is a key part of all this. Job recollected how even during his earlier Oracle days, new joinees would be given a script, and they would have to call a board line set up for such training, and get into the rigour of making those sales calls. “When you do that for about a month or two, you make it your own script and personality,” he said. Now, in Avalara, with his teams scaling up rapidly, there are even greater levels of rigorous training.
Manav said training is required on cultural context, on the timings that work best to make a call, on the script, on how to ensure politeness. India, he said, has mastered all this. But he noted that India is still tinyin sales in the overall global context. “The US is a sales and marketing nation; there everybody is a salesperson,” he said.
Job said students in India need to be taught presentation skills. But he also noted that the youth today are digitally savvy and globally aware. “I’m betting big on our young workforce to really change the trend,” he said.