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Byju’s has made a key change in its sales strategy, moving away from a business practice that attracted the edtech giant criticism over the years.

The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, India’s most valuable, said on Monday its sales people no longer visit students’ homes to pitch to their parents. Instead, the entire sales workforce now works from inside the office and reaches out to those parents whose children have shown a clear interest in subscribing to the platform.

The firm, which employed its early practice in 2017, made the change in October last year and said that the transition brings more accountability and transparency to its workforce and it’s better for both sides of the equation.

The new sales tactic is also allowing Byju’s to expand its reach in the country and is already returning a higher conversion rate, said Mrinal Mohit, the chief executive of Byju’s India business, in an interview with TechCrunch.

“The Covid helped increase the category awareness of online education learning and brand awareness of Byju’s. Plus we now have multiple products. That’s why we are moving to ‘inside sales,’” he said.

“The sales journey now begins only after you have downloaded my app and used it multiple times and for long periods of time. If you don’t download the app, or like our product, we are not going to reach out.”

The Indian edtech has been criticized over the years for its aggressive sales tactic with allegations that some of its personnels made misleading pitches to the parents. Byju’s offers a range of learning platforms to students from free content and classes to hybrid lessons at its centres across the South Asian market.

Mohit, who took over the India chief position last year, said the revamp is bringing more transparency with the parents and what its sales people are telling them.

“I had 120 offices, my download comes from everywhere but I was able to reach only 20% of these users. With inside sales, location is not a barrier. All these calls are recorded, so we know what is being pitched to the parents. We have more transparency with parents,” he said.

If an individual doesn’t know how to precisely answer a parent’s questions, the startup is able to pull more experience and relevant personnels in real-time, he said.

Sales is a key part of Byju’s success. The startup’s classes operate on a two-teacher model, where the lessons are taught through a pre-recorded video while an on-site or live teacher tackles students’ questions.

The startup’s philosophy from the beginning has been to bring the best education to students and this means relying on lessons from certain teachers as the base of its offerings. Sales people are tasked with explaining the benefits of this model.

Indian edtech giant Byju’s changes sales strategy in key revamp by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

ShareChat, the Indian social media startup backed by Twitter, Google, Tiger Global and Temasek, has laid off 20% of its workforce — or over 400 employees — just a month after eliminating more than 100 roles.

The startup informed its employees about the decision on Monday morning. It deactivated access to accounts and wiped out all data of impacted employees, a person familiar with the development told TechCrunch.

In December, ShareChat laid off nearly 5% of its workforce of 2300 employees as a result of shutting down its fantasy sports platform Jeet11.

Informing the new decision to its employees, ShareChat CEO Ankush Sachdeva said in an internal note that the move was to “ensure the financial health and longevity” of the startup. The executive also noted that the startup “overestimated the market growth in the highs of 2021 and underestimated the duration and intensity of the global liquidity squeeze.” The note and layoff was first reported by Indian newspaper Economic Times.

In a statement emailed to TechCrunch, a ShareChat spokesperson confirmed the layoff and said that the decision was taken “after much deliberation and in light of the growing market consensus that investment sentiments will remain very cautious throughout this year.”

“Since our launch eight years ago, ShareChat and our short video app Moj have seen incredible growth. However, even as we continue to keep growing, there have been several external macro factors that impact the cost and availability of capital,” the spokesperson said.

“Keeping these factors in mind, we need to prepare the company to sustain through these headwinds. Therefore, we’ve had to take some of the most difficult and painful decisions in our history as a company and had to let go of around 20% of our incredibly talented employees who have been with us in this start-up journey.”

The spokesperson also claimed that the startup had “aggressively optimised costs across the board, including in marketing and infrastructure, among other cost heads and ramped up our monetisation efforts.”

Exact details on what roles are impacted were not disclosed.

The affected employees will receive the total salary for their notice period and two weeks pay as ex gratia for every year they served the startup. The employees will also get 100% of the variable pay until December 2022 and their health insurance policy cover will remain until the end of June, the startup confirmed.

The startup will also let ESOPs of its affected employees continue to vest per their schedule up until April 30.

“We are doubling down on our efforts behind advertising and live-streaming revenues. With these changes, we aim to sail through the uncertain global economic conditions over 2023 and 2024 and come out stronger,” the spokesperson said.

Google-backed ShareChat cuts 20% workforce to ‘sustain through headwinds’ by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

When Constantin Robertz was working at Zalora, he was involved in moving warehouses six times as the e-commerce company outgrew its logistics infrastructure. This inspired him to co-found Locad, a logistics provider for omnichannel e-commerce companies that connects its network of third-party warehouses and shipping carriers with a cloud-based platform referred to its “logistics engine.”

Founded in Singapore and Manila by Robertz, fellow Zalora alumni Jannis Dargel and former Grab lead product manager of maps Shrey Jain, Locad announced today it has raised $11 million in Series A funding led by Reefknot Investments, a joint venture between Temasek and logistics company Kuehne + Nagel. Returning investors Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s Surge, Febe Ventures and Antler also participated, along with new backers Access Ventures, JG Summit and WTI.

TechCrunch last covered Locad when it raised its $4.5 million seed round in 2021.

Locad can handle almost every part of the delivery process, from inventory storage and packing to shipping and tracking. So far, Locad has provided order fulfillment for 200 brands, including Havaians, Levi’s Reckitt Benckisder and Emma Sleep. Its customers are spread across Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong and Australia, and typically ship about 25 to 5,000 orders a day. Last year, Locad was used to ship more than two million orders and it claims a 99% same-day order fulfillment rate.

Its new funding will be used to add more warehouses and transport operators to Locad’s network and on hiring in Southeast Asia and Australia, with the goal of building the region’s largest network of warehouses over the next five years.

Robertz said helping Zalora scale up its logistics infrastructure “planted the seed of how a cloud approach to supply chain, with a scalable logistics infrastructure as a service, would be a better way.” During their time at Zalora, Robertz and Dargel also worked with brands that had to set up their own e-commerce fulfillment capabilities and tech stack in order to support multiple sales channels.

Legacy logistics infrastructure, originally created for B2B wholesale distribution, couldn’t keep up with direct-to-consumer brands as their sales channels multiplied. It also meant they could no longer rely on “walled garden” fulfillment networks run by e-commerce platforms, like Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), as they scaled up.

At the same time, consumers want faster and cheaper delivery, and offering multiple options like same day, next day or economy shipment is important for conversions at checkout. Robertz said that to deliver more quickly without paying more, retailers need to store products closer to customers to enable shorter and faster last-mile deliveries. This requires a network of warehouses and integration between sales channels, warehouses and shipping carriers. That is what Locad’s tech enables.

Locad’s logistics engine syncs inventory from multiple sales channels, including Shopify, Lazada, Shopee and TikTok Shops, and manages storage and delivery through its network of warehouses and shipping carriers. Many of Locad’s customers first approach the startup while phasing out their inhouse logistics operations. Brands often start with one warehouse to consolidate their inventory and order fulfillment across sales channels, before putting inventory into additional warehouses based where its customers are located.

As it expands across Southeast Asia and Australia, Locad also plans to increase the number of warehouses in Tier 1 to Tier 3 cities in the region, with the goal of enabling same-day delivery in all of them.

In a statement about the funding, Reefknot Investments vice president Ervin Lim said, “Locad’s unique operating model of localizing warehouses into the cities ensures that inventory is kept close to the customers thereby enabling significant cost and time savings for both brand and consumer. We believe that Locad’s logistics engine will spur greater participation in the digital economy as consumers outside of Tier-1 cities can now receive their orders 2-3x faster at a fraction of the usual cost.”

Locad lands Series A to expand its “logistics engine” across Southeast Asia and Australia by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch