peel-works: Helping organizations keep a keen eye on their sales staff

Measuring the effectiveness of a sales person is a huge challenge for any business. And when these salesmen are employed indirectly (via distributors), the problem intensifies multifold. Sachin Chabra had spent a good 14 years with the FMCG giant Hindustan Unilever (HUL) and was aware of the problem.A Stephanian who went ahead to get his MBA in HR from XLRI, Sachin had played various roles in HUL and he reached a stage in his life where he felt the need to startup on his own. The year was 2010 and thus was laid the foundation for peel-works. The idea was to help businesses maintain their sales force better by giving them intensive analytics and actionable data.

Developing a strong core team, the product development began. 9yards was the result and it would help businesses keep a track of activities of their sales force- who is their best performer, keeping a tab on individual sales cycles and overall sales performance. Owing to the strong network Sachin had in the industry, getting the initial few customers wasn’t very hard.“When you’ve been in an industry for long, the first set of customers can be acquired for pilots but your success will obviously depend on the product’s capability,” says Sachin. The product got acceptance, was validated by the market and investors also came onboard. IAN invested INR 3.25 crores in November 2011 and the ship steadied. “We began to establish a name in the industry and the initial resistance that companies used to have is now not there,” says Sachin about the challenges of a B2B startup.

Couple of things worked out for peel-works: The segment has been really hot for the last few years and recommendations kept the business coming in. Acquiring customers mainly in FMCGs and Telcos, peel-works is now a 40 member team with 9 in the core management team. Charging clients on the basis of number of people on the sales team, this Mumbai based company aims to close on 20 clients by the end of year.

Website: peel-works

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