SalesPanda was selected amongst the top 15 companies in the IBM GEP program in 2015
Tell us about your entrepreneurial journey. How did it all start ?
After 15 years in the corporate world with companies like PwC, SAS, HP, IBM, Cognizant we co-Founders wanted to take the entrepreneurial plunge. We decided to start a company focused on marketing and technology, these being our core strength. We finally succeeded in building a digital marketing agency with large MNC clients globally. With 4 years into the services business and deep understanding of technology and digital marketing, we decided to build a cloud product, which helps organisations automate their digital marketing. SalesPanda, a marketing automation tool was launched in April 2015 and has been growing by leaps and bounds from there on.
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Tell us more about the founding team
Our team has two co-founders- Samit Arora and Saubhik Mandal. Samit comes has consulting and sales background having worked in PwC, TCS and IBM over 15 years. An engineer from NIT Bhopal and MBA from NITIE Mumbai, his last role was as Country Manager, Public Sector for IBM Software. Saubhik comes from delivery and technology background having worked in Cognizant, HP, SAS as an architect. An engineer from IIT Kanpur and MBA from University of St. Thomas in Minnesota,USA, he was large deal architect in HP before taking the entrepreneurial plunge.
What is SalesPanda ?
SalesPanda is an inbound digital marketing software that helps to automate the digital marketing. With SalesPanda one can create customised marketing content using the custom content editor, put it on your website using our content showcase or share on social media and whatsapp to create inbound traffic. SalesPanda also provides an integrated campaign management system to run email campaigns with an editor to create customized landing pages for capturing leads. The leads then flow into and integrated lead management system. Detailed analytics in the dashboard help you in analyzing and optimizing the campaigns further.
How is your customer traction ?
We have multiple customers across different industry verticals. The focus verticals are technology, BFSI and professional services mix of enterprise and SMB clients. We have two different user cases for our customers. Some use it as a marketing automation platform for themselves whereas other use SalesPanda as a digital marketing platform for their channel partners with a content syndication engine.
Tell us about your experience with IBM Global Entrepreneur
Our IBM GEP relationship has been very fruitful. SalesPanda was selected amongst the top 15 companies in the IBM GEP program in 2015. Partnering with IBM gives us a strong infrastructure in the form of Softlayer and an enhanced reach to the market.
What is your take on IBM Cloud ? How is it helping your startup grow ?
IBM Softlayer gives us robust infrastructure. Being a SaaS product we need infrastructure that is scalable and reliable and softlayer completely fits the bill. Also the IBM partnership gives a lot of comfort to our customers in terms of security as our solution manages their important end customer as well as lead data.
What is the road ahead for your startup ?
Our road ahead is of two-fold. First, we need to scale up customer acquisition in BFSI, Retail, Tech and professional services verticals. Secondly, we are focusing on product enhancement in terms of deeper analytics and functionalities as per client inputs.
