Vikas Jha left his job several years ago to build a mobile app. Now he makes the most of his small team at Alore to serve over 3,000 clients.
Vikas Jha, a former merchant naval officer, has always been fascinated to product design.Within a year of its introduction, the 37-year-old created a mobile app that had a million downloads. However, Vikas eventually transformed his company into a digital marketing agency. He co-founded Alore, a start-up with a team of eight people, including himself. The team presently services over 3000 customers.
As a VC in Europe, assessing roughly 100 proposals and seeing 30-40 businesses every week, Vikas frequently found himself helping firms tune and tinker their models to scale faster, in addition to authorising their funding.
As a result, after recognising that business is his actual calling, Vikas left his work in 2013 and returned to India. Within nine months of its inception, he had designed a Flipboard app that had a million downloads. However, due to inadequate monetization and a lack of expenditure on mobile advertisements at the time, Vikas shifted his company into a digital marketing agency.
He claims that the business grew significantly and quickly gained clients such as Ford, W for Women, and others. However, despite the outward success, the business quickly reached a plateau inside. To fight these growing internal obstacles, such as culture concerns and process destabilisation, the company subscribed to eight to ten different solutions to automate various sales activities such as email campaigns, database maintenance, and so on.
According to Vikas, while they implemented automation to increase productivity and scale the business, they soon recognised that it was slowing down the entire process.
Furthermore, as the team increased to 40 members, the cost of tools per employee began to outweigh the company’s revenues. This is when Vikas decided to decrypt the full chain of processes involved in a sales transaction.
Typically, he explains, the work on a deal begins with finding prospective clients on LinkedIn, AngelList, and Twitter. Then, tailored emails are scheduled, followed by real-time analytics to track clients’ email interaction. After determining this, calls are made through the CRM, and each client’s progress in relation to the offer is tracked.
Sales data is also kept at the individual and team levels in order to assess everyone’s performance. Because everything was managed through multiple platforms, a real-time 360-degree view of a customer was not available. He says that data leaks were common, posing a constant risk to negotiations. As a result, he created an in-house, unique, dedicated, and integrated solution to consolidate the capabilities of all ten tools into one platform.
The Alore technology, which was launched in June 2016, has allowed Vikas scale his business at an excessive rate while drastically reducing costs.
According to Vikas Jha, the company currently serves over 3400 clients with a workforce of eight people, including himself. With Alore having demonstrated its worth within the company, Vikas introduced Alore CRM – an AI-powered sales solution — for businesses in 2018 to help them automate sales, hack growth, and deliver a productivity revolution at a low cost.
