NASSCOM Emergeout, August 12th 2011: Workshop by Mukund Mohan of Jivity on Hiring, Managing & Nurturing Great Sales Talent

The NASSCOM Emergeout Conclave, scheduled to be held on 12th August 2011 in Gurgaon, is focused on “new age opportunities for software companies via cloud, mobile & social platforms”. We at YourStory.in caught up with Mukund Mohan, Founder & CEO of Jivity.com and also, one of the speakers at the Emergeout Conclave, to know more about his workshop on how to build and manage high performance sales teams.Mukund, you are going to talk about the art of hiring, managing and nurturing great sales talent at the NASSCOM Emergeout Conclave. Tell us more about the workshop and the issues that you seek to address.

During the last 12 months I have done around 15 workshops for NASSCOM all across India, primarily attended by entrepreneurs and small to mid size companies (with revenues between 1 crore and 10 crore INR) that want to be able to grow their sales team. The workshop is about selling and about how to scale and run a business by selling more effectively.

So, during these one day workshops, I focused primarily on how to put together a good value proposition, how to make your elevator pitch, how to go ahead and do the initial customer targeting, how to create lead generation mechanisms etc. But a lot of people came back to me with a lot of questions around how to build and manage a high performance sales team.

The workshop at NASSCOM Emergeout Conclave is to address that one specific question for entrepreneurs. Some of questions I shall address during the workshop are, what should one look for before hiring for sales positions, how should one structure sales team, what kind of compensation should one be given, where should one look for sales people, what kind of tests should one conduct to understand whether a person is a good fit or not, etc.

Sounds interesting. What are your expectations from NASSCOM Emergeout conclave this year?

Fortunately, I have no expectations. I am going there because I am really passionate about helping the Indian companies. I think that Indian companies are very good at technology, very good at processes, very good at hiring/managing people and also, very good at understanding what client requirements are and translating them to reasonable goods and services.

But their biggest challenge is sales. Most companies in India don’t know how to be able to target effectively clients in US or UK or other regions of Europe. So, my expectations from this specific session primarily are to be able to make sure that there is enough awareness about what goes into building a good sales team. In terms of my expectations from Emergeout conference itself, typically most of the people that tend to come to Emergeout conference are small and mid-sized companies that want to scale. So, I expect to learn a lot from them.

Need advice about building your sales team? If you’re in Gurgaon on the 12^th of August, do try and make it to the workshop. To attend the NASSCOM Emergeout Conclave & participate in Mukund’s workshop, click here. And, to know more about the agenda of the event, click here.