Dhruvso Services

Dhruvsoft Services Build. Deploy. Support

Dhruvsoft is a Salesforce.com CRM Consulting, Salesforce Implementation, Force.com Development, CRM Deployment & Support Services Provider. Dhruvsoft provides Salesforce.com Offshore outsourcing services from its offices in India to customers worldwide.

In an Interview with The Enterprise World, Sunil Khanna, CEO of the company describes the journey of Dhruvsoft, from a mere idea to a company providing best services to its customers.

Tell us about the company.

Dhruvsoft started its journey in year 2010 with two founders at the helm. We are one of the earliest partners of Salesforce.com in India. There was no looking back since then – on the way we have also entered into partnerships with Google, Microsoft,Zoho and more recently with Oracle NetSuite.

With a humble start in 2010 – we have grown organically with a healthy growth rate and now have a strong team of young, dynamic ERP and CRM professionals. We pride ourselves in providing innovative solutions to our clients in ERP and CRM space. Our strength lies in the hard work and disciplined approach of our team to provide optimal solutions on time and in budget.

We have completed more than 250 successful ERP and CRM engagements till date and we are among the top players of Salesforce solution providers in India.

What were the initial challenges you faced?

our share of challenges in the initial days. When we started in 2010 - that was the time when ‘Cloud’ was looked upon with lot of suspicion. All enterprise companies were very apprehensive of security of the cloud. In such time Dhruvsoft focused on educating the customers and building a market for Salesforce.com and other cloud applications.

Which was that point that triggered the growth of the company?

Around 2014-15 was this inflection point when we started doing the product development for Salesforce.com ISV partners. From a mere implementation and consulting company – we have now become a product development company. We started developing products of Salesforce platform for ISV vendors and have successfully help development and launch of over ten applications. Around the same time we also became partners of Zoho which enabled us to cater to CRM needs of SMB organizations.

How have the company graphs changed since the foundation? Can you share a few statistics?

Here is a timeline of our partnerships.

Here is a timeline of our growth in terms of number of consultants

What is the reason behind your company’s longstanding success?

Our people – our consultants – are the reason for our success. Even when we were very small we never compromised on quality of resources we hire. With the poor quality of resources who were available laterally – we have focussed on hiring the fresh and bright talent from colleges and trained them. We have rigorous processes to train and coach our people and make a fresher into a bright consultant. The experience based learning makes them productive very fast.

Our culture of persistence and hard work with strong processes ensure the long standing success of Dhruvsoft.

The Products/Services

What are the products/services the company focuses on? How are your services different from those in the market?

We provide ERP and CRM consulting services – and Salesforce.com CRM is one of our dominant practice. Our offerings include ERP/CRM strategy & process consulting, ERP/CRM implementation and customization, System integration, training, migrations, and ongoing support. The ERP / CRM products we focus on include Salesforce.com, Zoho and Oracle NetSuite. We are consulting partners of these companies.

Sunil Khanna

CEO

Development Services on Salesforce.com, Zoho and Oracle NetSuite – these are targeted towards Independent Software Vendors (ISVs).

In addition to this we have two of our own products. One is SIVIO a solution for Admission Management for Universities and Education Institutes. Another is Propelty – which is a CRM solution for Property brokers and agents. SIVIO is a product developed on Salesforce.com platform.

We have a long-term perspective for the company. We remained bootstrapped over the years – to ensure that we have independence of decision making and focus of customer success. This might have curtailed our growth to some extent – but we believe in slow but steady growth. We believe in growing with clients – some of our clients are with us for years. We are

continuously working to enhance capability and building accelerator solutions to bring more value to the table.

Companies of all sizes from all over the world have taken advantage of services delivered by Dhruvsoft. We believe that new business and repeat business is achieved through a total commitment in providing the best value for our clients. In any assignment we become a trusted partner of client that truly understands their business process and technology needs.

How do you decide to take the company a step further in terms of your products/services?

The penetration of CRM solutions is very limited in India. Most of the companies still use primitive on paper, excel based methods for Sales, Marketing and Service. Even those who use technology – have silos and ineffective solutions.

Some of them still use the legacy solutions of client server era. We see this market to grow and mature in the next five years as more and more businesses will be leveraging technology to become competitive.

We are building more industry specific frameworks – we have solutions for Pharmaceutical/API business, Real estate / property Business, Software / IT companies, and Start-ups and VCs. We will be building more industry specific accelerator solutions.

We believe that technologies like AI and ML will surely add an extra plus to the CRM segment. We are working on developing new AI/ML offerings for our customers.

Is there any new addition to the list of products/services? Anything exciting you would like to share?

We have added Salesforce CPQ, Salesforce Field Services, Pardot and Marketing Cloud implementation capability to our services and are now doing multiple engagements for same. We will be launching two new products in 2021 on Salesforce platform. We will also be launching our services for Salesforce.com Commerce Cloud and Industry Clouds in 2021.

Leadership

What do you think are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur?

As an entrepreneur we are responsible for our stakeholders - customers, employees and investors. We are responsible for creating value for our customers – giving them value for the money that they spend on our product or service. We are responsible for creating value for our employees – ensuring them success in their career. And of course our investors and shareholders – we have to generate value for them to give

them the returns on their investment.

As an entrepreneur we have to balance the needs of all these stakeholders and ensure that this file balance is maintained.

Can you please brief us about your professional experience?

I come with over two-and-a-half decades of experience in the IT industry. I am an Electrical Engineer, MBA and CFA. I started my career working as a lab assistant in an engineering college. Then joined a leading private steel maker – where for over four years worked in various functions of large organization where we were setting up of a Greenfield plant. I left the organization to complete my MBA. After that joined one of the leading IT services firm and started my journey in software industry. I worked as a Consultant with some of the leading organizations across in India, UK and USA. I took the flight to my entrepreneurial journey in 2004. After laying the foundations of two successful ventures, a medical equipment company and a recruitment process outsourcing business, I founded Dhruvsoft with a vision to provide cloud based products and services.

What are the key achievements of your entrepreneurial journey?

Having founded three successful ventures gives me great satisfaction. In the process we have given employment to over 400 persons and contributed to the Make in India initiative. In a previous venture we have developed medical equipment in India while reducing the dependency on costly imports. At Dhruvsoft also we are developing world class products for clients from all over the world.

How do you look after your employees? What makes your team unique?

Most of our employees will vouch for this – Dhruvsoft is a great learning ground. Learning and constantly reskilling is a way of life here. Having worked at a leading IT company before I can confidently say that – what our consultants learn and experience in two years, it will take four to five years in a large IT services companies for them to learn. We look after employees by giving them a highly learning and creative environment.

Is there any special experience with your clients you would like to highlight?

For me all client engagements and experiences are very special. My most special experiences were while working with several Non Profit organizations and implementing Salesforce form them. As a part of our commitment to community we have worked with several not profits. Some of them are doing excellent work for the community and we are proud to be associated with them.

Personal Questions

One person who you admire the most?

I admire the contemporary businessmen - Marc Benioff – Founder of Salesforce.com. He has created a great company from scratch and has pioneered the concepts like 1:1:1 program. In additional to that I admire JRD Tata for his business acumen and vision.

Whose business story do you find the most inspiring?

The story of Tata group in India is very inspiring and also their values had a deep impact on me from my initial years.

Which is the most inspiring quote you have read?

One must forever strive for excellence, or even perfection, in any task, however small, and never be satisfied with the second best—JRD Tata.

Constant vigilance- a need or a strategy? Please share your views.

I would say that constant vigilance is a need for businesses. As business grow – we have to maintain some checks and balances. We have to maintain constant vigilance to ensure that everything is under control.

It’s a rat-race out there. How do you cope with that?

Of course it is a competitive world – not only for us but for everyone. We have to maintain our balance and keep efforts to achieve what we are set out to. Our values are the guiding lamps for us and help us cope with uncertainties and competition.

A Chameleon Leader

A Leader in Disguise

Surely you must have seen a chameleon in real life. What incredible creatures they are! As children we have all waited for so long to see the miracle of a chameleon changing its colors. But why do they change colors? What most of us know is that they change colors to hide from the predators and hunters, a classic example of camouflage. But the fact is that they change colors for temperature regulation and communication.

When the surroundings get hot, the chameleon will change its color to something lighter so as to reflect the sun’s rays, thus cooling down its body. And on the other hand, when the temperatures are colder, it changes into a darker color so as to

absorb the sun’s rays for the warmth.

Apart from the homeostasis, communication is another reason why chameleons change colors. Females will show off yellow spots on their body to indicate to the males their desire to mate. But when she changes the color of her spots to something darker, it means that the interested males better keep walking.

The same applies for the males. They convey their feelings and emotions by changing the color of their skins. When they are competing with another male, they will tell him to surrender by changing to a pale complexion and displaying many spots on their bodies. Or sometimes they might change to something brighter.

So as leaders, we need to think, do we practice anything like this? Do we ever modify our behavior so as to communicate with the teams in a better way? Do we ever change our approach, maybe soften it a little bit, or put energy in it based on our mental temperature? Let us understand the concept of chameleon leadership!

What is Chameleon Leadership?

Chameleon leadership is an approach to leadership where we, as leaders, change our behavior, our style of communication, and our approach to a person or a situation to influence desired outcomes.

For example, if there is someone on the team who you observed responds better to data and objective facts, then as a leader, we must leverage the information. If someone else responds better to emotion, passion and excitement, then we must be able to change our behavior and communication accordingly.

This is a simple rule of the chameleon leadership. It is where you meet people where they are, instead of them coming to you.

To simplify this, you must be on an even level with everyone. Every person has a different understanding capacity, and to get the best out of them, we have to meet them there, explain them things the way they understand. This is a rather flexible leadership.

There are many leaders who are quite concrete with their ways of leadership. Which means, the team has to go to them. The team has to make extra efforts to understand what they mean. This is an unrealistic expectation, and this is where the communication has gone wrong.

If you realize that the people aren’t listening to you simply because of your approach, then you might want to pause there a bit and think about this

Instead of getting people to work the way that suits you, you need to change your colors. Change it in a way the team understands. Put the data in a way that your team understands. If you need to break it down then be it! But make sure your communication is not oneway.

You can’t go taking about the problems in your own way and expect them to find the solutions to it all. You have to explain them in a way that they understand.

This is the key to great leadership. What you always need to remember is the fact that not one size fits all. So what you say and how you say it depends completely on who you are speaking with. When you do this, you give the team what ‘they’ need.

At the end of the day, communication is the most important thing that matters. And if you are able to communicate in a way your team understands you, then you don’t need to worry about the performances and outcomes.

So, are you a chameleon leader or one in the process?