The key to this marketing startup? Getting personal

What’s it like running an up-and-coming startup? According to Nilesh Patel, one of the founders of Bangalore-based LeadSquared, it’s nothing too special. On a typical workday, Nilesh wakes up, eats breakfast, listens to music and takes his children to the bus stop for school. For a person involved with networking, he seems a little sheepish about the amount of time he spends on his smartphone catching up on what’s happened the day before. Then, it’s off to the office for a busy day – making sales, doing demos and being available for staff questions.

When I observe that’s hardly an easy day, he laughs.

“I don’t have much fun. I’m at work all the time,” he tells me.

Capture and nurture

LeadSquared, an automated software-as-a-service (SaaS) customer acquisition platform founded in the summer of 2012, is holding its own in an economy saturated with marketing firms. The software rating website G2 Crowd gave the three year-old company a “high performer” award this summer in the marketing automation category.

The startup has big plans, seeking to pull in US$1.5 million for the 2015-16 period and showing no signs of slowing down.

“I can see us considerably tripling every year for the next three years from where we are, with or without funding,” Nilesh said.

SaaS is a model through which software is centrally hosted and licensed, meaning a client – usually a business – can purchase a subscription and then access the software’s services on-demand. LeadSquared’s marketing services are split into four parts: “capturing” clients, “nurturing” clients, driving sales, and market analytics.

One example is a customer called Byju’s Classes. While the test preparation startup didn’t need help capturing clients, or “leads,” – they already did that through online and offline channels – they wanted LeadSquared to help them organize their leads in one place and to help keep track of them, or reduce “leakage.” LeadSquared then helped them efficiently nurture those, assigning leads to relevant sales representatives and identifying which clients were most likely to close deals. Those clients received emails and phone calls encouraging the deals. Finally, LeadSquared kept track of sales and marketing performances through analytics.

Marketing is a field constantly changing to support the newest networking technology. Nilesh and his fellow founders began the new startup with this in mind, designing the software as a one-stop marketing and sales instrument, focusing on businesses that develop personal relationships with their customers and concentrating the service on India.

LeadSquared joins other automated marketing companies such as Hubspot, Marketo, and Pardot in offering lead capture services, insights into potential customer activity, and user analytics.

Getting personal

Location, location, location