India requires patience

Askar Rakhimberdiev, CEO of the MoySklad cloud service, told how the cloud software market in India is maturing, what is unique about Indians as clients, and why registering a local company is a path to harmony in chaos, which you just need to get used to.

Kladana — is a subsidiary of the cloud service "MySklad". It became available to Indian users in 2022, the office is located in Mumbai.

India — a country of difficulties and opportunities at the same time. To do business there, you need to be patient, be prepared for bureaucracy, long negotiations and clients who are completely atypical for the Russian market.

At the stage of registering a company, we had to overcome constant obstacles, then the same thing was repeated when opening a bank account and again — during post-registration actions.

The consumer in India is also special, he always saves on everything, with the exception of — wedding, gold and education. Discounts, promotions, free training — necessary conditions for sales, but most importantly — trust, but it’s the hardest thing to win.

We have been working in India for a year and a half now, and it’s time to share our experience to make the path easier for entrepreneurs who are just looking at this market.

It will not be possible to quickly register a company in India

Initially, the plan was to launch quickly, and then at the moment adjust the product to suit clients. I can now note that it was a good decision: first launch the product, and then register the company. If we did the opposite — everything would drag on for too long.

It took us about 6 months to register the company. In January 2022, we decided that we would enter the Indian market without spending a huge amount of resources and time on adapting the product. That is, the approach was this: we prepare for several months, launch, and look.

It is clear that, just like in Russia, we focused on small and medium-sized businesses. And for the most part, on d2c companies that produce, promote and sell their products themselves. This entrepreneurial segment is widespread in India.

Initially, we improved the localization of the product through translations, reworked taxes, and made printed forms. Made the API and application store available. Next is the website, the first advertising campaigns to start receiving leads. At the same time, we communicated with local entrepreneurs to understand the sales culture, how the client thinks and buys.

Only 4 months after the launch did we decide to register the company. I was once skeptical about what I was constantly told: “India requires patience.”. But it is within the framework of opening a company that you understand this phrase one hundred percent.

This is a difficult, long process, some things will definitely go wrong, there will be a lot of unsubscribes and demands for more and more new documents. And you need to be mentally prepared for this, or rather, perceive it as an inevitable process of harmony in chaos.

It's not you who are so lucky — This happens to everyone in India when starting a company. It is clear that everyone may have their own characteristics. But you just have to exhale every time and do it.

It is virtually impossible to open a company on your own, so it is better to seek local services. Opening a company takes place in several stages: registering a company, obtaining a GST (Goods and Service Tax Identification Number - this is a unique taxpayer registration number for the supply of goods and services in countries where GST is in effect), post-registration actions.

The process took six months, since each stage requires a separate package of documents and the personal presence of the company owners is required.

In general, with all flights from Russia to India and back — will cost approximately 6-7 thousand US dollars. The certified public accounting firm we contacted provided a list of 15 documents. It took a lot of time to understand what exactly needed to be apostilled and what the procedure for submitting it was.

There is no single company registration authority in India. All stages (registration, tax, account opening and post-registration actions) take place in different structures, for each — your requirements and your documents. There is increased attention to a foreign company, so there were many clarifications and requirements for additional documents. In general, it took only 2 months to collect documents.

If you compare it with Russia, heaven and earth. We dealt with a whole list of requirements: where to get a legal address, or why Indians have a digital signature — This is when you sit facing the camera, and not through a special key, for example. We had to adapt to all these features.

And so we were just happy to register, and then we realized that we had to go through the quest again — Opening a bank account involves similar legwork, but with its own specifics. However, it was worth it. Customer trust then increases exponentially.

Remote control — not an option

Quite quickly it became clear that it was impossible to manage the Indian project remotely. Part of the team moved to India to have direct contact with clients.

Our country manager Alexandra Brovchuk spent a lot of time networking not only with Indian entrepreneurs, but also with Russian companies with local experience. But the main thing — studying local color and its features is impossible from a distance.

The client needs to be shown the product, not expect him to figure it out on his own. Use personal meetings

We encountered the first difficulty in the spring of 2022, when we received our first leads. Users behaved completely differently from Russian ones. They registered in the service, but did nothing. In the Russian Federation, in the first days after registration, clients, on the contrary, begin to actively act: purchase goods, print documents, connect the services they need. In India they did nothing. Registered — and silence.

We have placed a “sign up for a demo” button on the website. Demo — It is a sales tool through product demonstration. An online meeting is scheduled to show how the product works. The demo is also used to find out the client's expectations and needs.

Indians love to learn, and for them the opportunity to understand the program — also a kind of training, so the flow of leads increased sharply after the button appeared. Through demo meetings, they began showing the service, setting up the necessary functions, demonstrating how to print documents, create a product range, and place a customer order.

Scripts for India have their own characteristics

At the demo, we saw that most of the questions are not specific, entrepreneurs do not understand what they need. That is, they have an understanding that keeping records in Excel or on paper is incorrect and inconvenient, since they suffer losses; if someone forgot something or made a mistake, you won’t find the person who did it. There is a request for automation, but there is no understanding of the processes.

If users come to the Russian Federation with specific questions: how to carry out inventory, how can I automate trading on marketplaces, how can I control employees, then in India this is more difficult: I need order — How can I do it. There is an understanding of the problem, but there is no understanding of the process.

In India, we had to delve into our clients' businesses in detail, helping them describe the processes that they should have. At each stage, we suggest where and how to automate. The scripts had to be changed, moving from general to specific.

The communication between our managers is aimed at identifying a specific user problem and starting to work with it. The manager helps, for example, take an inventory, showing how you can quickly help, and then shows more serious things.

In difficult situations, please describe a specific case — step by step, what they do, where the hiccups occur. In addition, we recorded an overview video where you can see all the functionality of Kladana.

You can’t do without local specialists — only Indian sales

The second difficulty arose during the demo. We realized that classical English and classical Indian English — two different worlds. Indians borrow a lot of words from Hindi in their English. And despite their good command of English, they often use words from their native language.

Some people are more comfortable communicating in Hindi. It was not always easy for employees from Russia to understand them. Therefore, our decision to hire only local sales people paid off: it is much easier to communicate over the phone for those who can fluently switch to Hindi if necessary.

Bet on training

At some point we realized that if the owner is able to quickly understand our system on an Indian scale, then his employees — no.

In India, technology literacy is low. Most employees use very simplified programs in the “three buttons” format. Therefore, the owner of the company, after he has figured it out and definitely decided that he really needs our product, certainly wants to send his employees to study with us.

In India, by the way, they take any training very seriously and always require a certificate and reflect all their hundreds of certificates on their resume. Even if the course is for 2 hours. We are currently in the process of creating quick courses on working with our platform and launching training videos on Youtube.

On the plus side — Indians always tend to buy the annual version of a product, as they spend a lot of resources on employee training. They always think about the future. That’s why it’s so important for them that the company is local — this means that founders are easier to find if something happens. And this increases the trust of locals.

When to expect clients?

The first clients appeared in September last year. To arrive at a conveyor belt story, a lot more work is needed. But the previous year of complex processes, bureaucracy and other things — this is a pledge to the future long-term strategy. Throughout the previous year, we essentially worked on debugging processes and making a name for ourselves. Now it's slowly starting to pay off.

We hope to reach 100 clients per month by the end of this year. But at the same time, I understand that we don’t know even half of Indian entrepreneurs. But here they say this: “If the problem can be solved – You shouldn’t worry about it, if you can’t, it’s useless to worry.” And this is 100% about India and its market.