Acing Customer Dev & Partnerships in the US - Kalyan Verma, Almabase | BTS E11 | SaaSBoomi Podcast

Kalyan Varma is the Co-Founder & CEO of Almabase. Before solving the alumni fundraising problem, Kalyan worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, just as he moved to start an online marketplace which couldn’t scale, yet he kept trying new things to eventually stumble upon the gap in the education system to eventually start Almabase. Kalyan is an alumnus of NIT Warangal and cites BITS Pilani as the foremost institution in the country with the strongest alumni relations. In this episode, as we dug deeper into the idea in this unconventional space, Kalyan breaks down the idea by sharing memorable experiences from some of the big institutions around the world; the challenges he faced in US trying to learn more about the disorganized space, in a bid to fix the broken relationship between the alumni and the colleges to create a win-win situation for both around the world. Tune in to watch an insightful conversation brew among the trio.Key take aways2:14 - A creative way of solving high college tuition fees5:15 - Building blocks of a strong marketing structure10:55 - How can sales empower marketing?14:11 - Thought leadership marketing and category creation17:27 - Getting the first US customers18:34 - Cold emailing and customer development hack21:30 - Going all out to understand your Customers25:10 - Why now is a good time to sell to US?27:20 - Customer agony to features28:47 - The Power of a rock-solid CRM30:38 - How CRM is set up differently for better?33:30 - The CRM mantra that helped us37:01 - 5x scale from ABM compared to Outbound38:25 - The Win-Win-Win Strategy39:44 - Partnering with a billion dollar company as a startup44:31 - Disengagement of Alumni48:12 - Starting up in 2023: What will you do differently?49:33 - Kalyan’s biggest pet peeveHappy listening!🎧