Become Number Focussed

Now that you have narrowed down on your strategy to a specific domain, region and industry, it’s time to set a clear target in terms of customer acquisition. This piece is the soul of the entire business strategy and provides actional to your sales and delivery team. 

Let’s talk numbers taking NeuroIT Consultancy as an example. They did $80,000 in the last year, from 30 ERPNext implementations. They have a decent team size (about 20 people). Also, they wish to grow this year by 60%, which means they will have to reach $128,000 in turn over. However, as per last year's unit economics, they would need a 40 people team? Nah, their profitability would be just the same. Can we do new 60 implementations with just 30 people? The simple answer to this would be picking a battle like focusing on Pharma companies within Maharashtra region (one of the states in India).

Sales Strategy

NeuroIT looks at their previous conversion records. Within the Pharma domain, they had a strike rate of 30%, which is best compared to other domains. As per this conversion rate, if NeuroIT has to be close 80 deals, they should generate:

Now that you know you need 400 leads, you will need to identify the sources which will give you these leads. Given pharma as a domain, NeuroIT can adapt to marketing strategies suggested in the relevant section to garner 400 leads in a year. It can include:

• Participating in exhibitions targeted at Pharma industry (replace with industry targeted by you)
• Write blogs and success stories specific to the industry
• Building the contact list of pharma company and sharing your success stories
• Designing web pages to reflect your expertise in the specified domain
• Creating Frappe apps specifically required by the pharma companies
• Conducting webinars and social media campaign to outreach individuals from this industry

Now, just step-back and think, if you were doing all sorts of implementation coming your way, would have you done this? Very unlikely. Now, let’s move forward to creating a business plan which helps you define the specific plans and ticket size your sales-team should target selling.

Before making a plan, let’s consider all the different service Frappe can offer:

• Partner Services

  • Implementation + consulting services

    • Rates

      • Small customer: 3,00,000 to 5,00,000
      • Enterprises: 6,00,000 to 15,00,000

  • Customization services

    • As per the scope

• Frappe Services

  • Frappe Cloud
  • Premium product support

Following is the business plan which indicates the FrappeCloud plans, no. of customers you should target converting on each plan, and value of your own implementation service. Do note that it doesn’t consider customization fee, as it can vary based on scope.

Industry: Textile, Food and beverages

Region: Maharashtra (West India)

Customer size: Small and medium businesses

New customer: 70

Implementation: Vanilla & small customization

Team size: 30

Note: You need not follow the exact same format. The broader idea is to formalise the strategy and quantify the targets, so that you can make actionables to drive it.

On the similar lines, if you are a partner who is serving the enterprises and corporate customers, then you can count more on closing Frappe’s Enterprise deals, and fewer FrappeCloud customers. Naturally, the value of each deal will be higher, though no. of deals itself will be lesser. 

If you are serving enterprises, and looking forward to growing faster by reaching your yearly target faster as  Frappe Partner, you must plan for the certain no. of enterprise customers in your strategy. Here is an example.

Industry: Telecom

Region: Maharashtra (West India)

Customer size: Enterprises

New customer: 30

Implementation: Vanilla & heavy customization

Team size: 50