Sales learnings from Ankur Pandey

Conversations · Self-Management, Startups

This summary was largely done for my own note-taking, sharing it just in case it adds more value to other people.

This is a summary largely taken for my own reference, and may contain errors of translation. Mistakes are mine, credit for the good stuff is entirely Ankur’s

Context

Why is it important: Ankur highlighted the importance of letting go of the scarcity mindset as an entrepreneur, and also exhorted me to think much bigger

Keywords

Scarcity Mindset, Thinking Bigger, Problem Statements

Highlights

Ankur’s background

Well worth reading if you have the time. Click on the arrow to expand. Just keep reading if you’re here for the insights

Grew up in a very small town called Ranikhet, in Uttarakhand. Came to Delhi to try and find a job in software in the early nineties — which he found difficult because he didn’t go to a fancy college. Eventually got a company to hire him by telling them that he would work for free for a few months

His work was good, and he managed to attract the attention of someone who was visiting and worked at a Japanese firm. This person invited him to work in Singapore, and he flew over to SG at the age of 20

Afterwards, just did really good work as a programmer and kept going up. Was eventually hired by Motorola. In 2000, went back to India to set up a company that didn’t quite work out. Came back to Motorola in a business role

Kept going up from there. Was headhunted by IBM in 2008 where he managed the Public Sector services unit in Singapore, the Malaysia market of IBM Services, and the Telco, Media and Services business in ASEAN

Eventually joined AWS as the Head of Strategic Partnerships for AWS Professional Services in 2020

Career choices

The drawbacks of only working for yourself — you can be more limited in your learning. And sometimes, you don’t get to see the scale and best practices of well-run companies

But working for yourself is a great learning ground for picking up a wide array of skills quickly

On picking up new skills for personal growth

You may be a really good coder, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll make for a really good marketer

Capitalise on your strengths — the things you’re great at. Don’t worry about covering your weaknesses. For those, just build a network and capitalise on it (by either hiring great people, or leaning on them for advice)

Great companies are never a one man show. You have to build it together

On letting go of the scarcity mindset

A lot of the people who do not come from money (like me, and many other people from India) can find it difficult to make long-term commitments around paying other people once they find a modicum of success. This is the scarcity mindset. Let go of it

Don’t optimise short-term costs by doing everything yourself. Instead, optimise for long-term opportunities by hiring the best people for the job

When you’re creating a product, be very clear about the following

What exactly is the problem you’re trying to solve?
Is the market big enough for it?
What is your product?
Is the product scalable? Having a bunch of modularizable components doesn’t mean scalability if you’re the one helping clients put them together
What is the differentiation of your product? It can’t just be a cheaper version of X. You have to be radically better at something (think more about Clay Christensen’s disruption theory here — what are you much better at the status quo at?)
The value is not in the solution. It’s in the customer perception of how big the problem being solved is

If you can’t define the problem succinctly, you either don’t understand it well enough, or it’s a problem not worth solving (because it’s too spaghetti like — hard to solve with scalable products)

Building is not enough. What problem as you solving?

For data businesses

Are you in the business of selling insights (consulting), or are you truly a product platform?

Do you need a large team of engineers to scale, or can you do it with few engineers building a large core product?