For decades now, Indian software companies have built software for customers around the globe, but very little of that software is sold as an Indian product. A recent Zinnov study says that more foreign software is sold in India ($1.84 billion) than Indian products are sold worldwide ($1.42 billion). But that can change – and SaaS can be the game-changer. With SaaS, Indian software companies have a tremendous opportunity to gain mind and market-share worldwide. And, in my opinion, the way to do it is to begin in our own backyard. This is not new strategy, by the way – the Japanese did it in the 1950s, the Chinese in the 1990s. Build products that succeed locally, and then take them global. But honestly, will that work for India? Is India a good proving ground for ‘worldwide SaaS domination’, if I can arrogantly set that as the objective? And what internal strengths we have, which can be used to make it all happen? I’ll attempt to answer these questions in this article.

First, let’s look at what makes the Indian market a great option for selling SaaS in.
SaaS sells best in small and medium businesses (SMBs). And India has the second largest number of SMBs in the world (35 million, after China’s 44 million). Eight to ten million of these SMBs have five or more employees and are thus targets for business software apps in the next few years. Since SaaS mostly sells on a per-seat basis, that’s a market of over 40 million users in various roles. So, from a ‘total addressable market’ perspective, software marketers can’t ask for anything better.

* As large as the market is, it is as varied, too. As a growing economy, we’re throwing up all kinds of businesses every day. There are large, identifiable sectors like education and healthcare, as there are small segments like companies that store post-dated checks for their customers. And each of these businesses has something different about itself. As software designers, this works in two ways for us: it provides enough variety to identify patterns and design generic solutions, and it also provides lots of opportunities for domain-specific solutions.

* The market overall is fragmented, with no large players in most segments. And the fact that new businesses are appearing every day makes long-term projections very difficult to make. But, unlike in the West, the cost of sales is low enough for us to side-step – even leverage – this fragmentation. With a well-designed SaaS solution, software companies can provide local solutions on a national basis. Unlike in box-selling, SaaS offerings need only an Internet connection to deliver, so selling is all that is required, most of the time.

* Indian customers are tough negotiators, so making a ‘deal’ happen is time-consuming. But these negotiations are great opportunities to trot out all your value propositions and sales arguments, work through the best (and worst) sales-objection-handing techniques and identify those that work best – for the lowest sales cost possible. If you can convince that trader with centuries of ‘dhanda’ in his veins that your software is worth paying for every month, you’ve got a heck of a sales argument.