An end to end video production venture to help professors / creators / tutors facilitate their online classes during pandemic
Note : Please read my redo story on desktop / laptop for best website experience.
Author : Rutuja Kelkar
Published on : 22nd Feb 2022
Project quality, depth & content : High
Let’s connect : rutujakelkar.tech@gmail.com | Twitter | Linkedln | Behance | Github | Youtube | Medium
Aug 2020 - jan 2021
Take a look at what we offered click here to watch redo video
Two months after I started working on digi_info four of my curious friends and me decided to team up & venture end to end video production services for college professors/ tutors to facililate their online classes during pandemic.
I insisted to take up sale since I was already in the loop of giving presentations and figuring marketing tactics due to digi_info. At that point sales seemed an interesting opportunity. So during this period I visited almost 30+ schools and colleges in belgaum (my native in karanataka, India) to pitch our idea. We managed to wire in 6 professors and got them on board. We shooted their videos, edited them and handed over their bundled videos.
I fondly remember one insulting pitch from a known dental college in belgaum.
So we went to this dental college and requested for a meeting with the principal. The principal was unavailable so we were requested to meet the HOD, head of department, she was a lady professor. We carried a laptop, pamplate and sample video’s + pitch video’s that we were to present. The peon was kind enough to show us the way to HOD mam’s cabin. We went inside and explained why we were here. On hearing this, she immediately busted on me and my friend (we were 2 of us) shouting at us and saying “Who sent you ?, where are you from, we don’t entertain such non-sense stuff, our college is not for people like you” etc etc
We were dressed really smart and looked professional, but this HOD mam, had no slightest audacity to even offer us little humanity and insulted us in front of five of her other colleagues. She busted on us as if we had commited a serious crime. But later, one of her colleague adviced her to take a look at our pitch. We immediately presented, swollowed our prides, wished their college good luck and headed our way out.
That day I realised, not everyone perceives the way you persive yourself plus I started finding better ways to reach out to people.
The best method I found so far is to do it gracefully ! On the first pitch call never sell, instead understand the pain points of the other party, be geneuine friends with them, ultimately sales involves people and when people are involved a lot of things can go wrong. But if you play this game well, it can turn you into a profit making machiene.
In todays’s world “sales” and “coding / building” are the only two things that can grow you and your money in a compounded rather exponential way.
I’ve observed a lot of people making direct pitches, which is good in some cases, but worst in other cases. Sales is all about listening carefully to people, creating a word of mouth network and then introducing your product / services as a value add asset to them. Marketing helps largely in touch points, but marketing might not always give you correct data. On the 1st pitch your always validating the match of marketing data you collected about a prospect and accordingly adjusting your negotiation deal. It’s acctually fun if you do it the way !
Anyway, we got an opportunity to meet the top educators/ professors / principals in the city and head on understood the level of questions + rejections we need to be prepared for.
During redo I did not have in depth info about sales, but we managed to get in few professors who paid us. Today I have few frameworks and sales processess ready to roll and saved for future use.
Thank you for visiting and scrolling through my redo venture. If you’d like to talk about this project or just chat, I’d love to hear from you :)
Let’s connect : rutujakelkar.tech@gmail.com | Twitter | Linkedln | Behance | Github | Youtube | Medium
-Rutuja Kelkar