Selliscope

Selliscope is committed to solve the challenges faced of a pen and paper-based sales force channel. We bring more efficiency by significantly cutting paper cost, reducing human effort, and reducing reporting time. We also bring more accountability of the sales team members by planning the visit routes, tracking their movements, and capturing their daily visit reports.

In Doing so, we are using a solution to collect information from the sales force through mobile apps and report to management members in web view.

Selliscope will help bring down the reporting activities to minimum. With the help of this app, the sales team can push for better sales and earn more commission income from increased sales. This extra income will impact their social life and standard of living. Additionally, the companies will be able to earn better profit that in turn will result in more government tax and better benefit of employees. 

There are approx. 6 million registered SMEs along with 8000+ registered medium and large enterprises operating in Bangladesh. These companies have the potential to employ more than 5.1 million people in sales positions. We estimate that there are close to 700,000 people who are currently engaged in medium and large sized organizations. 

This shows that there is an immense opportunity to achieve efficiency in this field where approx. 99% organizations' sales process is still manually driven. The field level sales representatives generally belong to marginal state people who belong to low and low-medium income segment and socio-cultural background. An entry level sales rep generally earns around Tk. 8000 + commission per month.

Selliscope will let the organizations to sell more efficiently as well as scale up their sales representatives to earn more commission that will help them to increase their social wellbeing and educate their children for better future.

As discussed, we want to reach around 176K users within the next five years. However, considering the huge untapped SME market, there are 5 million+ potential users of our product only in Bangladesh.

To maximize user benefits, we firstly mapped clients’ sales team activities to identify the major pain points and inefficiencies of the sales channel. We have calculated the efficiencies and found that we can save more than BDT 60 lakh opex per every 100 sales force members per year. This also helps the clients to reduce carbon footprint by reducing papers from their sales activities. 

To increase customer friendliness, we have worked directly with the field force members and according to their feedback we have reduced literature in the app and brought in more visual direction for easy understanding. We also have employed UX/UI professionals to develop a high-quality dashboard to ease data driven decision making for company top management members.

Utilizing this application, the sales force members can save at least 2-3 working hours per day to compile and report the sales data. In this way, the field force members can spend more time in the market, sell more, and chase their target more efficiently. 

Selliscope is an application on dual platform with web and mobile interface. The solution is designed in such a manner that the field force members will use the mobile app to input their information (i.e. visit report, sales order, delivery report, payment collection, and outlet audit report) along with get reports on their daily performance (i.e. visit, sales, collection, and commission performance). The sales management members will use this platform to primarily get reports on their respective team performance (I.e. the sales director/ CEO will receive whole company performance information, the regional manager will receive his region performance information, and so on).

The primary utilities of Selliscope are:

• Full automation of sales process (i.e. order collection, product delivery, payment collection)
• Employee tracking and outlet visit report
• Primary and secondary sales inventory tracking
• Visit route planning & Monitoring
• Outlet virtual inspection
• Trade Promotion management
• Live dashboard and instant reports for data driven decision making

Our web platform is primarily developed with PHP Laravel; however, we have also used Python Django to develop a few modules. In future, we plan to migrate the whole platform to Python for the ease in stability, scalability, and increase in analytical ability. For mobile application, we have used native Android language. We are yet to develop any iOS version of it. We are using MySQL as the database.

As an additional benefit, we have teamed up with micro insurance partners to offer customized packages of health and hospitalization insurance packages for the user base of Selliscope. As the sales force members move across the country, they are more exposed to physical injury due to accident. This offering has also increased the access of financial benefit and risk coverage from insurance authorities, which otherwise would not be possible. It has also significantly increased the acceptability of the solution in itself and created a good pull to get the users of this software, as they are seeing a direct future benefit of getting enrolled into this software.

Around 99% of Bangladesh based companies who employ sales force members are performing their task through pen and paper based manual system. Selliscope has brought in a mobile and web-based solution that will significantly help the selling companies to bring in more cost and process efficiency into the sales channel. We have brought in more accountability of the sales team members by real time reporting. Selliscope has also significantly improved the data driven decision making capacity at a very reasonable cost to its customers.

Comparing with the existing manual driven process, Selliscope has brought in a massive change in the working model by bringing in technology into the scene. We have used commonly used technologies to solve the basic pain points of the sales channel. However, to the users, it is a big leap in working process with the introduction of software, smart phone, and internet.

This innovative solution can be used to automate the sales channel in any industry where field force is involved (e.g. FMCG, steel, NGO, agricultural product, insurance, pharmaceutical industry etc.). We have so far customized this solution for different industries (i.e. FMCG, Seed distribution, steel etc).

Comparing with similar Bangladeshi software, we are already advanced in features and usability. We are also continuously improving the UX/UI and working on to add newer features to make the sales representatives and management members’ lives easier. We are in pursuit of continuous innovation.

Selliscope, in addition to having direct strong financial impact on the customer organizations, will have a spill over effect on its users in the short and long term. As per the theory of change, we can look into the scenario from two different perspectives: (1) Organizational, and (2) sales representative.

Organizational perspective:

• Activity: Organization start using Selliscope, and starts to bring more efficiency in the sales channel.
• Outcome: The company earns more profit and more money to spend on its stakeholders.
• Short term outcomes: To manage increased business activities generated from more efficiency, the organizations will require to retain talents. As a result, they will increase employee benefits and recruit good resources.
• Long term outcome: To make the company more sustainable in the long run, the company will design and implement better policies, increase CSR activities, and become more employee focused.

Sales Representative (SR) perspective:

• Activity: Organization start using Selliscope, and starts to bring more efficiency in the sales channel. As a result, the same SR sells more in the same time.
• Outcome: The sales rep earns more commission from the increased sales figures.
• Short term outcome: With the heightened income level, the SR increases spending on family wellbeing, improves lifestyle, and spends more on children education.
• Long term outcome: With heightened education level and exposure to better standard of living. The family will shift to more sustainable income and social class.  

Right now, Selliscope is being used by six organizations. In these organizations, around 2000 users are using Selliscope across 62 districts of Bangladesh. Within the next one year, we want to reach around 5000 users. We target to reach to 1800+ companies and touch around 176,000 users within the next five years. 

According to 2011 population census, the average household size of Bangladesh is 4.44. As per our plan, within the next five years, we want to reach 176,000 users who are also the bread earner for the family. In this consideration, we will be able to touch more than 750,000 people’s lives directly to increase their standard of living, education, access to health benefits, and an overall better future. Considering the economic ripple effect factor (5.3X), this benefit will positively impact a further 4 million people of different profession from whom the beneficiaries will take service.

However, as we discussed, we believe that there is a readily available market of around 650,000 users through which we can reach up to 2.9 million beneficiaries.

Aligning with our partner, we have introduced a highly customized package of insurance benefits for our users. This benefit has the potential to offer BDT 67,000 to 410,000 worth of health and life insurance benefits. This has provided a great opportunity for the marginal field level people to come under such benefits.

Over the next year and beyond, we intend to penetrate to the SME market, which alone employs around 4.5 million people is sales positions. The SME segment offers even less attractive benefit packages compared to large and medium companies. The potential to include this marginal population will significantly help us to impact the marginal populations lives through our application. 

The primary challenge for Selliscope is the extremely limited financial capability. The product is at an early revenue phase and need to organically increase by reinvesting the revenue. To catch the potent market and beat the competition, we need to spend heavily on marketing, UX/UI improvement, platform stability and security measures improvement to grow significantly which is not possible in this current limited capability.

High client onboarding time is another major challenge. We are dealing with corporate bodies who have a complex decision-making structure. Each client takes around 3 to 6 months (or even more) to reach a decision and takes a few months further to implement the solution.

Again, the client base is still not large enough to generate strong confidence among larger customers on the platform stability and ability to handle large data. The lack of culture to use a SaaS platform is another hindrance to enter the local market.

Bringing in more analytical capability including Big Data and AI is critical to attain the market leadership position in local and international market. We do not have enough financial resources to initiate such drive till now.

Due to resource constraint, we are highly dependent on a small technical team. This not only creates a long cue of planned deliverables, but the multi-tasking takes up a lot of time for deliveries. This delay in-turn impacts the monetization of the software. This might also become a showstopper if a critical resource leaves the organization. 

Primarily we are considering taking new investors into our business. In addition to that we plan to go for some one-time-sales of the software that should bring in some handsome cashflow.

To reduce the client onboarding time, we plan to develop a fully SaaS based platform where the clients can create and run their own accounts without any manual intervention. We primarily target the SME segment, with a less complex decision-making process, to become the primary beneficiaries of this platform. We want to reach the 4.5 million potential user base segment with an agent based selling process. We want to reduce the client onboarding time to below 15 days.

We are slowly moving ahead with our user base and bagging big names one after another. This in time will create customer confidence in our product. There is no shortcut to it.

As a short-term solution to the analytical capability issue. We are looking to outsource the relevant works to outside teams with such capability. On a revenue sharing basis, we look forward to jointly offer value added analytical packages to Selliscope clients. We plan to deploy our own analytics team along with necessary technical capabilities upon having sufficient resources in hand.

To face the immediate resource scarcity issue, we are outsourcing different tasks to outside teams to reduce delivery timeline. However, the long-term solution lies in creating specialized internal teams under a strong technical leadership, which will be done once we have sufficient resource in hand. 

A total of 8 persons now work in the solution team. Here is the breakdown: 

1. Full time employee: 5

2. Part time employee: 1

3. Contractual employee: 2

I, Mubir Chowdhury, started my career in corporate sales. Before quitting the 10-year long job and starting my own venture, I first-hand witnessed the need for a ‘Selliscope’ like solution among my customer base. I quitting my job, started my own IT firm in 2014. Even though the first beta version was developed in 2014, I started to work deeply with Selliscope since 2016. 

Since then, we have worked very closely with the sales organizations and mapped their field activities to identify the major efficiency pain points and worked to solve them through our app. We carefully listened to the requirements and studied their socio-cultural behaviour and came up with picture-based UI for easy operations.

We proactively listen to customer requirements to understand their need to make data driven decisions. We have also analysed the competitive landscape and identified different similar products locally and internationally. We analysed the features and offered them on a single platform for Bangladesh market.

In offering the solutions, we have come into value chain partnership with different organizations ranging from ERP solution providers, AI service providers, insurance platforms, digital service providers who work as our sales channels and vice versa. We have tied up with other technical teams who work on project basis.

As the solution is developed by my team from scratch, it is highly customizable and we are developing this solution based on individual industry value chain analysis. 

Over the last few years, we have created value chain partnerships with a number of organizations with a target is to increase our footprint in the local market. Depending on the market need, we are partnering with different type of organizations primarily on revenue sharing basis.

As ours is a system that adds great value as the last mile connectivity of ERP solutions, we have partnered up with different enterprise solution providers (i.e. Advanced ERP, Leads Corporation, KIU ERP, Business Automation). We have tied up with Reve Secure to offer better security to our clients.

We have partnered up with digital marketing agencies (i.e. Zanala Banlgadesh, Geeky Solcial) as for their wide sales network across different industries. Recently we have teamed up with Carnival Assure to provide us customized insurance packages for our user base. We are also partnering with different software development firms who work as our outsourced production houses in time of need and we also offer services to our customers based on their strength areas.

In addition to that we are also in discussion with handset providers, different hardware providers, and mobile operators to come up with win-win business propositions. 

Selliscope primarily works in SaaS model where we charge based on number of users per month, which is affordable and economical for most of the organizations. Apart from that we are also open to go for one-time sales platform followed by Annual Maintenance Agreement. In both this model, we also charge customization fee (if any) and implementation fee as a source of revenue.

Apart from direct sales of Selliscope platform, we have other sources of income. We also offer different package-based solutions to our customers with the help of our partners. For example, we offer handset package for smooth operations, insurance package for better financial security of the users. We also offer different other software as per client requirement (e.g. accounting module, HR module etc.).

In future we look forward to add more value and bring in more revenue by making our customers happy. 

Right now, we are working on a tight budget but more or less meeting operating expenses with the generated revenue. However, our target is to hack into growth by taking investor fund and go for strong sales & marketing drive as well as technological stability and security enhancement.

Upon receiving the required investment fund, we plan to generate around BDT 103 crore/ USD 12.25 million in revenue over the next five years. In such a case we will go for break-even and become fully sustainable with our own revenue in Q7. Over the next five years, we look forward to attain an overall ROI of 162%. We plan to spend around BDT 4 crore/ USD 421K over the next 18 months with a burn rate of BDT 2 million/ USD 23.5K per month.   

We estimate that Bangladesh alone will soon become a USD 183 million per year market for this product only. we have a gross estimate of USD 62 billion total available market for Selliscope worldwide.

As a strategy, we look forward to develop direct revenue from our enterprise software along with become a channel to other product to the target market. In future, we want to become an intermediary sales channel of different utilities as well as a vehicle for financial inclusion to the low-income segment target market. 

We are in search to raise around USD 400K investment to Selliscope to the next level. Along with this investment, we are also looking for mentorship, connection with local and international growth partners, as well as matchmaking opportunity with large potential customers. Winning this challenge will significantly help us to move closer to this target.

Apart from that, winning in this challenge will give us a significant opportunity to get in touch with Tiger IT which is a highly successful organization in itself. As an entrepreneur, it will be a great opportunity to get coaching and mentoring from the experts that will help me to increase my skills, knowledge, and attitude.

So, we are applying in this challenge to open a new horizon of both personal as well as institutional opportunities. 

We are partnering with organizations having complementary strengths to close the gap to the path of Selliscope success. Right now, we are looking for the following type of partners:

• Technical partners: we are a small organization and lacking in technical capabilities like expert software architects, developers, testers, BI and AI analysts etc. This is why we are tying up with different organizations that can help to improve our technical offerings and offer better value-added services to our customers. These partnerships will directly help us to improve our capacity.
• Complementary products: We are tying up with organizations having products with value-added benefits to Selliscope customers. That’s why, we are tying up with ISPs, mobile device manufacturers, hardware solution and insurance providers etc. to package our product and give more attractive proposal to Selliscope customers. With a comprehensive offering, it becomes easier for the customers to choose us. It helps us to create up-sales opportunities and earn better profit.
• Forward/backward linkage products: As digitally enabled organizations, Selliscope customers have different solution requirements (e.g. ERP software or independent HR/accounting module etc.). Helping them with those requirements and getting them integrated with Selliscope not only gives us an opportunity to earn from cross-sales revenue but also create more exit barrier for our customers.
• Business development partners: Selliscope dreams to be the leader in Bangladesh and the developing world market. For this we need strong partners who will help us to promote, sell, and strengthen our position outside Bangladesh.