How Salespanda CEO Samit Arora grew Salespanda to $344.7K revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is samit aurora he's a sass entrepreneur specializing in channel digital marketing his company sales panda is our flag is their flagship product for partner relationship management covering recruitment onboarding enablement sales and marketing with brand control and deep analytics samit are you ready to take us to the top absolutely okay tell us a little bit more about what this means can you give an example of a company that's using you yeah so uh see we are in the prm space partner relationship management if you look at the current growth in the digital world you know we're moving towards uh like mckenzie codes we call it ecosystem 2.0 you know it's a collaborative uh ecosystem which is being built right so the channel relationships become important you you work with you take any example of any vertical our biggest vertical right now is financial services and insurance so you have insurance agents you have distributors you have branches you have sales team so how do you ensure that you automate digital why are the channels as the ecosystem right most of the people focus on direct to customer digital rights we focus on the pr and the partner relationships how do you recruit partners how do you onboard them enable them how do you automate the marketing sales and but we have a cross industry solution vfsi is right now our strongest forte but we're now expanding to edgetech and take those areas and so i mean how many customers do you have today so we so we are in the enterprise space you know uh like when i say enterprise means real enterprise so you know we have some of the top 10 insurance companies top cell financial services companies so we have a couple of smbs but we have almost eight to ten large enterprise customers each of them having a thousand plus users there okay and what do they pay per month on average see uh we on a month our ticket size is somewhere around uh on an annual basis i'm saying a contract value is somewhere between um 30k to almost 150k yeah i'm saying so 3040k to 150k error okay and so and so how much mrr did you do last month so we are maybe crossed around 30 35 kmrl yeah 35 okay yeah you last time we spoke i think in december we're around 250k i think we're almost like 400k now that's right i'm looking at uh maybe not revenue at least the bookings uh to double by december when we meet next movie no i love that congrats on the growth now you you i don't think it looks sounds like you've kept the same amount of customers but your revenue is increased are you just expanding revenue into your current customers is that where the growth is coming from we've added some cr uh if you look at a couple of years back we used to get a customer in four five six months then it came according now we're getting faster while uh so we get a customer as a pilot customer initially right for three months six months and then the revenue goes because uh if you know these uh organizations typically they have thousands and thousands of partners right uh so they start with hundred thousand two thousand five thousand yeah so so the one it's a land and expand kind of a model where you engage and continuously engage with these customers mm-hmm yeah very cool and then have you done all this bootstrapped or raised you step two we love that how many people on the team the team size is grown by four five people so we are around 20 25 still but see what we do is we have almost like 15 people outside when we look at smes you know consultants partners and these are like long-term partnerships in different areas so 2025 we know 10 15 outside uh a need base very cool okay so 25 on the team and um tell me a little bit about how you're going to grow how do you get to a million dollars a year in revenue ah so that's the question yeah so in fact that's the exercise we were doing this month and looking at where the growth comes in so uh we what we've done is in the enterprise space we've now built building the entire prm space a little deeper right the next growth comes a by the number of modules we add right plus we are looking at cross industry expansion like i told you we entering edutech and health because they also have ecosystems so you look at partner automations for tutors and resellers branches franchisees uh till december that's the plan because we still we are an enterprise space so we cannot uh so it's not a inbound mostly outbound right now so january onwards we can i'm assuming we can travel we'll be getting some traction in the asean region uh string up for indonesia we've done almost 15 demos that's the next growth which comes from the geography so you add expand the product cross vertical cross geographies and then next year they probably will look at smb inbound product also that's up in the plan so so multiple areas to go there and what would you value the business at today i never thought so i'm just looking at uh doubling my revenue also 500 i need to type some million mark as soon as possible that's my first target i'm not looking at any evaluation right now honestly i know it's on me if one of us one of these folks watching on youtube or listening here on itunes if they say i want to buy the company for a million dollars all cash up front do you sell no what's the number right now so i tell you uh you know what we want is uh the plan i've told you let me execute that in the year right and uh when we have cross vertical cross geography platform that's when we just maybe we will be open for funding also that time because i don't think money solves all the problems how did you close these enterprise customers a lot of people struggle closing thirty forty fifty thousand dollar acv accounts i've been an enterprise fellow for almost more than two decades that's what i've done throughout my life so i and maybe that's the reason i started top down with enterprise first and uh we all so we do a i'll tell you how we do it if you want to understand we we do a very deep account based marketing so i exactly know which are those 200 accounts i have to go and close in the next one year we have mapped every executive from linkedin we have the data we keep nurturing them we send newsletters we have ads so so it is we actually do a very very targeted uh outbound account based marketing digital as well as you know inside so that's what we do across the country so so what is your total sort of hit list look like all of your customers and your list how many total are there potentially so it's my country right so we do it by country by vertical so within the vertical we do sub verticals so so like you know in india you have around 20 30 top insurance companies so we're looking at at least we're getting 12 out of those right so and each of them will can have 10 000 5000 plus so then we also filter out not every customer would have a channel network they might not be relevant for us so we do a lot of background research and even if you get 200 300 good accounts to filter in one geography then right now we're doing indonesia indonesia looks to be a very good country for us because it's an agent-based country huge population huge agent network we're looking at singapore philippines so that's where we are kind of doing the groundwork so whenever you open the pandemic and allow us to travel we are ready very cool and and talk to me more about india you're based in new delhi there's a lot of great sas companies coming out of india you know you look at fresh works you look at you know uh you know document 360 and kovai where he you know he still has an office down in pune i believe and then you've got you know others like kiss flow what are some of the fastest growing companies you're seeing in new delhi uh wingify is one i mean we've always looked up to them i mean yeah in delhi otherwise you know i'm part of the fast food group and we we keep deeply uh engaged with each other on a daily basis so so uh most of the companies uh like you said are more of inbound sas models maybe might be an exception where i started enterprise first so uh but but enterprise yeah enterprise gives you growth in terms of upsell process and volumes yeah no you're that's all accurate to me let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book uh i'm looking at right now hooked uh you know hooked by nia yeah yeah so building habit forming products in fact i'm trying to implement some of the hacks into the product there let me see if it works number two uh is there a founder you're following or studying uh see in india i i look up to facebook i mean he's been an inspiration uh otherwise my all-time favorite has been steve jobs i mean it's no more but you know number three what's your favorite online tool for building sales panda see uh nowadays in fact every two in fact i was looking reading uh by listening to some of your podcast and some of the you know every tool i was looking at you know uh really inspiring there but i i like in intercom as one of the tools we've been using and uh plus uh uh what do we use yeah jeera i mean i mean for development you know that's a base bread and butter tool for all developers they love it number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night i sleep well i sleep seven to eight hours that's good and situation married single kids i have two kids i have two...