00:00
Veena
So, hi, I’m Veena I’m co-founder and CEO of Salesbeat. I’ve been in the retail and the fast moving consumer goods sector. Basically anything that you can buy in a supermarket for about 20 years now, starting in Subsaharan Africa, and eventually working in the UK, but for international markets, as well as direct.
00:20
Samuel
That sounds incredible. Tell us about sales beat, then that’s the platform you’ve you run you own or that you’re part of right now.
00:28
Veena
We, I get owners, so I founded a startup along with Alex. My co-founder who’s the brains behind the actual platform. I’m the person with the industry experience and the know how on, how things work in the sector, what problem you’re solving, because I used to work very closely with salespeople strategy procurement. I’m sort of linking them all together.
00:54
Samuel
This is a, an artificial intelligence driven platform I’m reading right now, right?
01:00
Veena
Yes. We use machine learning to be able to understand how much people want to buy of any particular product in the next four to six weeks. For example, we will tell the likes of a, a Pepsi, how much Pepsi, not diet Pepsi or any other forms of Patsy, but how much of a normal kind of Pepsi or a six pack of Pepsi people are expecting to buy in the next six weeks based on things like historical sales, of course, and then are people having parties during Christmas? What events are happening out there? Is there a music festival going on? We can also tell them things like which store the demand is going to be out of the morsels of the Tesco store in Maida Vale, or is it the Tesco store in Paddington and that thing.
01:49
Samuel
Wow, that sounds, I think that’s going to be a very interesting thing to get involved with, but this go right back to kind of, you mentioned you started sales in Africa, right?
02:01
Veena
Well, I started my career in Africa in Botswana to be exact. Yes,
02:06
Samuel
It was that directly in sales as you arrived, or how did that kind of come around there? Cause I assume, are you’re not traditionally from Africa, right?
02:17
Veena
No, I’m not. No. I’m actually a very boring accountant by profession and started working in Sub-Saharan Africa and consulting, working with retail in the FMCG sector as well, advising companies on things like turnarounds, financial management also help them with things like counting that was very early in my career and that thing.
02:40
Samuel
Yeah. What, so you moved into the sales side of stuff just from that or within the same company, or is it a jump from a career change? Right?
02:51
Veena
The career change. I moved from Botswana to France, lived there for a year at business school and then came to the UK, started at Pepsi initially in finance because that’s my background. Spent a good part of my life in finance strategy. Eventually moved to the agile where I was setting up companies for them in Sub-Saharan Africa, which included finance strategy, sales, helping with marketing and a whole bunch of other things which are super interesting. Move from that particular role into the wine sales function within the agile, where I was helping them sell into international markets, because I’ve lived in enough countries that I know what people want, how people behave, how to position products best in that sense.
03:32
Samuel
So this is so strange. W what is it with Y we’ve had two, we have a two previous guests who naked wines and palette.
03:41
Chris
Club. I think mine’s just very popular. Isn’t it? Well,
03:44
Samuel
Yeah, it’s not hard to find wine in tech I’m sure. You were working as part of the, what was the name of the company? Sorry,
03:52
Veena
The agile. So they met Johnny Walker and Guinness. They used to have a fairly big wine function, which they sold off a treasury wine estates maybe about well into 2015.
04:02
Chris
Actually. You’re not familiar with the,
04:06
Samuel
It sounds like a parent brand to me is, yeah. So.
04:10
Veena
That’s usually it doesn’t get no better. I need to go to the brands that they own. So.
04:16
Chris
Yes, I’m familiar with it because I’ve used, I’ve worked in bars and things like that in the past, actually through the national union of students. You’re engaging with the way you’re going to get your beer from, for all the students, the angio, we’re pretty close to the top of the list. They’ve got everything,
04:34
Samuel
They must’ve bought sound Guinness then. All right. And they didn’t,
04:37
Veena
The agile was a manager of the company that owned Guinness and the company that owned Johnny Walker. So UDV at IDD. I can never keep track of which one UDV wasn’t which one it was, but the two of them must a couple of decades ago and became the agile.
04:55
Chris
You’ve certainly, picked up a couple of cool brands along the way. They’re working with Pepsi and the angio and worked around the world as well. Like you seem to w I don’t know, what, where are you from originally? Are you from India originally? How many other countries have you taken in along your way?
05:13
Veena
I’ve lived in five, three countries, but I’ve worked with a lot more than that. I used to traveling very frequently to Mozambique to set up the agile subsidiary that used to travel into European markets. Southeast Natalee, Eastern Europe, I’m also into Southeast Asia to set up companies for my clients, as well as customers, user traveled into a lot of Subsaharan Africa markets, pretty much same thing.
05:41
Chris
Was that something you always wanted to do that the traveling?
05:46
Veena
Yes and no. I like traveling. Something comes up, but it has a potential of travel and meeting new people. I never say no. I think it’s interesting because you meet people that you would never have met. If you are just doing what you were doing at your desk all day long,
06:07
Samuel
Hey, we’ve got excuse now is COVID right? Absolutely.
06:10
Chris
Absolutely. No, I think that’s incredible though. So you said five different countries. This is still quite a lot. Obviously flying out to two others to try and well not to try, but to actually go and set that these are the businesses. It’s quite incredible, really. I suppose that gives you a really wide view of what people are actually looking for in each of these different locations.
06:31
Veena
Yeah. You’d realize that culture influences consumer preferences a lot more than people think us and the way they buy. When you do consumer sampling groups and people tell you, oh, we’d buy it. If you launch that, you tend to start understanding exactly what they mean. Does it mean they’ll actually go into the store and pick up, pick it up from the shelf? Or is it one of those things that they tell you because they know that’s what you want to hear and everything in between,
06:58
Samuel
What year was this then working for the RGO?
07:02
Veena
I, the spanking DRG back in 2016 and then freelanced for a bit. I was an independent consultant for companies through my own company for awhile, helping them with sales, new market entry strategy for new product development. That’s another thing. Found that sales beat in 2019 with my co-founder Alex,
07:24
Samuel
How did you find the freelance life, the contractor life?
07:30
Veena
It was all right. It was fun in the fact that I met a lot of new people and met a lot of new companies and there was a real variety in what I was doing. I quite enjoyed that because it gives you an opportunity to work on different projects and different places. I traveled a lot, Jerry. Well, what I didn’t so much enjoy was the entire process of men that came along with it that I had to do myself. I guess it’s just part and parcel of the whole thing that if you’re on your own and working for yourself, you have all the fun stuff, like the variety and the interesting clients and all of that. Each to balance out the not very fun stuff, like filing your own accounts and all of the companies, how’s that. Yeah. Not very fun stuff.
08:19
Samuel
I hate to do that by the way, just to prefect. I hate doing all that, but I like, and I like understanding it because, you might know this from running your own company. Like, I don’t want to hand something off to someone without first kind of understanding it. Yeah. I still haven’t got an account and I could hand that off, but I’m adamant that I want to understand it and learn it before handing off. Chris will tell me, I need to get an accountant. Probably need.
08:43
Chris
An accountant.
08:46
Veena
Well, I guess it makes it easy that I am an accountant and I’m a qualified UK tax at UK financials accountant, even though I might not be able to pack them anymore because I’m severely out of stocks I can do what’s needed for my own company.
09:02
Chris
That’s a good question. Do you rely on accounts and for you’re on a company or do you do it yourself?
09:06
Veena
No, I do it all myself now. Wow.
09:10
Chris
Yeah. Gum sound. Why are you saying why you’re doing it yourself as well?
09:13
Samuel
Because I’m one person I’m presuming sales B is much bigger than just one person. I’m a sole director of my own limited company and then kind of outsource it and all the rest of it. I mean, how big is sales beat?
09:26
Veena
The development side of the company is big. The non-development side of the company is me. Yes, I do it all myself. We just decided to go very lean because one of the things that Alex and I were very keen not to do is raised a lot of money in the initial stages when we are likely to get super diluted. It just doesn’t make sense eventually.
09:53
Chris
That’s cool. So, I mean, this is the hard part of starting a startup, right. Figuring out how you’re gonna compensate people, how you’re gonna not dilute as much as possible. I mean, talk me through of that journey of like, where did the sales beat idea come from first? Let’s let’s do that.
10:12
Veena
Yeah. Sales speed actually had a very different incarnation when we started in 2019. I’d applied to an CLA, which was starting in Sweden at that time. They had their first cohort in Singapore and they’d done particularly well. Antlers, it started generator that invest interesting startups that they think have potential. They are in the business of putting people together to form companies. If it makes sense for them to invest, they do. We were part of the first cohort in Sweden, or even in Europe at that point, met Alex through that. We found a sales beat, which back then was a marketplace that connected fast moving consumer goods and freelancers because Alex and I were both freelancers Alex, on the tech side, I was on the fast moving consumer goods side, nice little things like finance, freelancing stops you freelancing sales, corporate development, and that thing. People don’t know that it exists in the sector when they think freelancer, they think design marketing or tech.
11:16
Veena
They never think finance strategy.
11:20
Chris
Yeah. That’s quite, that’s quite unique. I think the other many of you out there, or are you an extremely rare breed?
11:25
Veena
No, that’s enough of that. We find it difficult to find new customers, speakers. There’s no marketplace facilitating that, which is why this was the initial product that we had. When COVID hit done 2020, we found that company started focusing on people that they have internally because they were sitting on too many people who weren’t able to work because they were working from home. They started parceling out all the work that needed to be done to existing resources who aren’t coming into work on a regular basis.
12:00
Chris
I think the role as a consultant though, it gives you a unique perspective. I mean, this is a role that Sam and I have played, as well, because you’re in so many different places, as we’ve just talked about your extensive traveling around the world gives you a very unique perspective on what’s required in each area, I guess. So, so that puts you in quite a unique place, I guess, to come up with the idea, but what was the actual trigger when you’d met Alex?
12:25
Veena
The fact that were both freelancers at that point, there was also the fact that I already had a nugget of this idea. When I started with, I knew this was a problem that I was facing on a regular basis. I would have loved to have the marketplace, to find clients to work with or to find willing people. Because a lot of the times what you do is you meet someone, you develop a relationship, they don’t need any help at that particular point. And then you keep that relationship warm. I’m flooding someone. It’s, it’s a long time gamble because a lot of the times they may not have a call you back. At that point you need something to work on. A market just marketplace just makes it easier,
13:06
Chris
The marketplace is a huge thing to go about building. I mean, I think it sounds very daunting to me. I mean, if you’re getting together with the new co-founder through a startup accelerator, how did you go from having the idea of, we would like to build a marketplace to actually going okay, w when we have it live, who do we need to have involved in this? How are we going to actually do this thing?
13:31
Veena
Well, if you think about it in very simple terms, it’s not that complex. What you need is a pool of people who have a need one side for freelancers in this case. On the other hand, you need freelancers. Even if you’re working off Excel, you just need the two lists and look at what skills each of them have. Look at what the need of the companies are and map them. I think that’s in effect a marketplace. That’s how we started.
13:59
Chris
Right. I see. I think this is the difference from having a sales and strategy brain to having a tech brain, because immediately I’m processing this and going, oh, my word, how am I going to string all this together? What, what sorts of services am I going to need? What’s the front end gonna look like? What’s the database structure gonna look like? I’m trying to design the architecture in my head. Actually you’ve just simplified that and cut straight through to, well, we just need a spreadsheet that way. That how you actually connected with Alex then? Did, were you able to say, okay, well, this is how we’re going to get this off the ground. This is the platform we’re going to build in the background to support it. Is that the approach you took.
14:36
Veena
Sort of, yes. We did this and Alex basically wanted to observe what, how the interaction was happening and what emails were going back and forth, what the communication needs to be, whether there needs to be a contract. We literally took the Excel model or the Google sheets model and looked up, what are the different options or the steps that needed to be taken. That Alex literally translated that into work, that plan from a tech solution perspective.
15:07
Chris
See, I like that. I think that’s a really good approach. That’s about,
15:11
Samuel
That’s surely that’s MVP. That’s, you know, just getting something. Cause I was often I maybe it’s in the lean startup or something. I, it’s like so many companies are literally just doing it behind the scenes. It looks like a tech platform from the surface. I’m not saying that’s what you guys were making it appear to be, but there are examples where it looks like a tech platform on the surface, but really it’s just few miles being flown that flown around and then people behind the scenes filling in their Excel database then just building on top of that. That’s yeah.
15:43
Chris
Yep. Well, I think the example in the lean startup, if I remember rightly was Dropbox, was it when it was just a video, I think like they just sold the concept and actually didn’t work. I think they raised millions off the back of a,
15:57
Veena
They did. Yes. Yeah. Alex is a great fan of the whole lean startup methodology as well. Whenever we are looking at new features, launching a new product, he basically looks at validation for us. It’s all about, do we know what’s actually needed before we build it? He basically said some let’s breed for using a wine analogy before he started building it to make sure he knows for absolute sure that it is needed, that we are not just building something for the sake of building something.
16:31
Chris
I mean, I’m curious as well. I mean, the, you, we talked before about dilution as well. So the idea was your idea here. I mean, I don’t know how much you want to divulge this, but how did you decide to split up the equity in the business setup behind it?
16:47
Veena
For me, it was important not I work with someone who had athlete’s best, other than that, as I did, when you have unequal splits of equity, you start having issues around control and decision-making and one person feels like they aren’t listened to, it just creates issues that none of us wanted to face going forward and someone didn’t need to build the marketplace. It wasn’t like I could do something with this myself. So we just went 50.
17:20
Chris
Right. Okay. That’s interesting. With the idea of bringing on other people into that startup, how are you going about that? You rewarding them. Are they working on sweat equity? Have you, have you actually created some equity pool for Lam or are they just getting compensated in a normal way? I mean, that’s that growth bit of I’m going to start bringing people on. I I’m incredibly curious about.
17:45
Veena
Yep. Were lucky we got some investment from Angela and then we actually did an accelerator in the west called XRC labs who specialized in consumer goods, tech, retail, tech, and that area, some consumer tech as well. He raised a pre-seed round early this year, actually. We’ve been one of the lucky ones where we could afford to recruit people. You basically did a combination of salary and equity, but not equity auction pools.
18:21
Chris
That’s interesting. How much do you set aside for an option pool and how did you come to that conclusion where I presume antler and the other accelerator were quite fundamental in guiding you on, so this as well.
18:31
Veena
Oh yeah. I’m, Claire has a policy that we need to set aside 8% for equity goals.
18:37
Chris
Okay. How much did antler once at that site for themselves?
18:43
Veena
It’s been changing over the past few years, but in the first cohort in Sweden, it was a 12% equity stake.
18:51
Chris
Right. And, and in return for what was that a different amount for different companies and different values or no.
18:56
Veena
It was the same amount for all the companies in that particular cohort. This was a thought a member that was $110,000.
19:06
Chris
Okay. I mean, how far does 110,000 take you on the journey With an accountant and someone needs lean startup. It’s going to get you very far by the sounds of things.
19:20
Veena
Yeah. Plus Alex, and I want to really paying ourselves properly in that first year. It was, well, when we say pay ourselves properly as a little one taking salaries, and then we started paying ourselves in the second year when we couldn’t sustain the, not being ourselves for quite a long time, if you go that way.
19:41
Chris
Yeah. I think these are the hard things to go through. Right. Actually trying to get it off the ground, not burn through all the cash, try and make the sales. So, I mean, did you have some specific targets you were trying to achieve sales wise as you’ve gone through these three funding rounds, essentially you’ve gone through with two antler and accelerator and the pre-seed.
20:04
Veena
Yes. I wouldn’t necessarily call them rounds for alarms because the ones with an implant, the accelerator were basically part of the programs themselves, but yes, essentially.
20:16
Chris
Did you have like a specific art we’ve got to get this many sales calls to make sure that the sales are starting to balance out on the company starting to generate income and we’re not just burning through the cash.
20:28
Veena
Yeah. So we have metrics for those. We basically want to be generating at least 5,000 to $10,000 a month and that thing. You set back when your targets for each of the rounds that you’re going with it, because if you don’t have revenues and you’re still raising, or you raise a large amount, you’re basically diluting yourself massively, and that’s not going to be an, a client or prospect when you’re growing and you’re scaling up and you need that for moving to different markets or employing a much larger team. That thing, because investors are not going to want to invest in a company where founders don’t have as much of a stake.
21:05
Chris
How are you actually going and getting these clients at the moment is they’re still based on your network from 20 years of experience in doing this at the moment,
21:12
Veena
It’s a combination of network, as well as social media. Basically Tom’s picking LinkedIn for us as well as a lot of cold emails. The thing is we just happen to live during times when stockouts spoken about a lot. We are currently in the process of eliminating stock-outs, that’s what we have in the business of doing.
21:37
Chris
You say stock-outs just unpack that term for us. Cause I think I might’ve, you never know what you mean, but I’m sure that some of our listeners may be, might be confused as well, or they all know it. And I’m just an idiot.
21:48
Veena
It’s the stock-outs that you see into markets at the moment. You go to a grocery store to buy your skim milk or your Christmas gifts, or even things like Turkey for Christmas, for example, it’s the whole fact that a lot of them aren’t available at the moment. That’s a real shortage of products on the shelf. Walker’s crisps. It’s not like the UK doesn’t have enough potatoes. It does. What’s stopping them from making them.
22:16
Chris
Yeah. The supply chain issues, I suppose. We’re talking about the empty shelves side of things. That’s.
22:21
Veena
Yeah. That’s what we are in the business of eliminating. So.
22:24
Chris
How do you eliminate that.
22:26
Veena
By making sure that retailers know exactly how much sales to expect in the next few weeks and salespeople are completely in the loop. A lot of the times what happens is retailers place, these orders and salespeople will just take them in a lot of the times, depending on how good they are. Sometimes the sales people go in and challenge that and say, Hey, you want me to place an order for 3000 cases, sales volume is expected in five in the next few weeks, you need to place a bigger order. Most of the time it doesn’t happen.
22:58
Samuel
Yeah. Can I just bridge a gap here? Cause I’m, I’ve missed some things. You, with an CLA sounded like you were building a recruitment platform and you getting funding for that. Now we’re starting to talk about what I’m assuming is sales B H w maybe I missed something there. What happened in between?
23:17
Veena
Oh,
23:19
Samuel
Interesting. It wasn’t like your idea, it didn’t have legs or whatever, it was just circumstances that change. So, okay. Do you want to talk about this bridge and then we can jump into sales beat?
23:32
Veena
Sure. We have just been accepted into an accelerator in the us, Alex and I moved to the west initially. This is when things are falling apart because COVID hit, it became a big thing. Customers stopped using Salesforce because they were having huge issues, getting raw materials from whichever part of the world they were in to come into the manufacturing entities, freelancers that are looking for jobs because they wanted income, security, medical, insurance benefits, and that thing. It sort of just started falling apart. That’s when Alex and I have been talking about doing a tool for sales freelancers to be able to speak with companies or communicate with them, which included for example, how they are selling what orders they received and being able to tell this to the companies directly, without having to actually send them an email and using it going through the platform.
24:32
Veena
We looked at that and we thought this could actually work in the current scenario where people are working from home. They are not going to be able to attend sales meetings to discuss this in person. This would still be relevant for companies to use as a sales process tool or some a communication tool within companies. We spoke to a lot of different customers and they went, this is interesting, but what would be even more interesting is to understand how much to sell. I knew from my experience at Viaggio that typically companies use last year sales. So they will basically go in 2019. I saw so much, let’s say Pepsi to my customers, and this year I need to sell last year. Plus I have a 2% uplift to achieve, to hit my targets. I’m just going to factor that in and sell 2% extra for the, but customers.
25:24
Veena
We never think of it that way. When we go into a store, I need this. We don’t go. I bought X last year during this week and I need X plus 2% this year, or it just doesn’t work that way with us. We started looking at how the consumers think about buying stock at store. What influences them, why do people go into a store during summer and buy a lot of white wine? That thing, lets us know what triggers action, how many people do it. That’s, and we distill that into machine learning algorithms to be able to predict how much demand is expected. We quickly figured out that sales people don’t want to be looking at lots of numbers and drawing the conclusions because back now what their strong point is, the best phone point is relationships and selling, not necessarily analyzing data, even though there are some exceptionally good salespeople who are great at analyzing data.
26:26
Veena
We started delivering those information in a much more concise manner and telling sales people how much to sell and what actions they need to take along with it. That’s basically how we launched sales fleet, the new lesson anyway,
26:43
Samuel
Just staying on that transitional period. Then. Obviously these factors were brought about by COVID. You obviously came to realize bringing your histories and experiences into play and realizing there’s potentially a need for this. What was that conversation like then? How did you go about validating this new idea? Which again, presumably antler don’t have any part of how I am tied to this now. Cause this sounds like a brand new idea,
27:10
Veena
Brand new idea about because it’s still operating under sales speech. So we basically just change that. There’s.
27:19
Samuel
Got you. Your previous one was still called sales beat this new. Okay. Okay.
27:25
Veena
We decided to keep the name because people liked the name in the fact that we basically say you beat sales targets. There was a period of time where we actually have the marketplace and we had our current product and it just made sense for us to have both. Eventually we faced out of the marketplace completely. It’s now just the sales intelligence tool.
27:49
Chris
I think that’s a really interesting pivot though. Isn’t it to go to decide to switch and with COVID being a forcing factor of it,
27:57
Veena
I’m assuming a lot of other tech companies have been through exactly the same thing. COVID.
28:03
Chris
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’m really interested in where you’ve landed because my background, we many years ago I was at Tesco and I’m in an engineering role and it was quite insightful because we, they.
28:17
Samuel
Did lightly,
28:20
Chris
We would do certain things where we had an initiative at the time called feet on the floor. The idea that was that they would send people from head office back to the stores so that they could see how things behaved in the stores. And, I was focused generally on the new technology part. This was when, back in the time when Tesco were making tablets that looked like the Amazon fire and selling them as the huddle, which was a great tablet, actually really good tablet and a good team. I digress, we handle, we have mainframes, we had a lot of mainframes and the mainframes were able to do things like we would do this stuff that you were talking about in terms of like predictions, so, if it’s going to be sunny, then you don’t know, maybe stock more ice creams, things like that. I was quite fascinated and this is like, we’re talking to 2013.
29:12
Chris
I think something like that. I’d have to check my CV when were actually in the stores and the word gaps on shelves. Cause we talked about the gaps on shelves before they had tools in the stores to say, right, well actually I’ve run out of Pepsi. Let’s just use perhaps as an example, they seemed to be getting a free advert today, they’d run a Pepsi. The store manager, we would place the thing on his little tablet to order some more Pepsi. And he did not know. I say here, because it was a fellow I was working with, he did not know where, whether that truck that was going to arrive that morning had the Pepsi on it until all of the car, all of the trolleys, the cages had been taken off the truck and packed and then they would, the staff would go into the tech, enter the cages and they would take all the cages out to the store and they’d stackable the store.
30:02
Chris
And once they’d start, they go, right. Well, which gaps if we still got, cause they didn’t actually have a connection between making the order, knowing what was actually arriving on the lorry, which I was fascinated by because that mainframe element that I mentioned before, I think was part of the element for why Tesco grew so big and so fast in the nineties. I was amazed that gap had not been filled in the I suppose, 20 years or so between, the big boom of Tesco in the nineties. In 2013, we’re talking about of knowing what was actually going to be put on the stores to fill the gaps. I think it’s a fascinating area that you’re going. As you seen that scenario in other places you’d worked or does that seem unique to Tesco?
30:50
Veena
Well, a Tesco is actually a lot more advanced than other places as a matter of fact. A lot of them still go on the basis of the joint business plan. They will give you the field person at the beginning of the year. They just stick to it to your point. What they do is the store managers to keep an eye on the stock on a regular basis. They basically order them stock from the DC. There’s no predictive elements to what a lot of the others use Tesco’s is quite unique. I think there’s a couple of other goals. MNS is starting to use AI as well within the areas. They’ve been doing a lot of work in this area before with their own data scientists, but they are now starting to use a tool which can help them with this, but it doesn’t provide full connectivity to the whole space.
31:39
Veena
You need to have your DC aligned with your stores. If all these dots are not connected, it doesn’t matter if let’s say the DC has a lot of stock and the store manager doesn’t know what they need. Most opportune model broken link, all the store managers, local laws, they need to talk but model, but the BC doesn’t have any thing to place an order and then wait for Pepsi. We seem to be using them a lot to send that stock into the DC and it’s broken all the way to,
32:07
Chris
Yeah, I think it’s that connection of how do you bridge that gap? You’re, you’re bridging into that mainframe space, I suppose. Aren’t you really saying, this is the, this is what you’re selling. This is the trends we’re seeing in the market. This is probably the, do you use the weather as a factor.
32:22
Veena
Well? That’s an important one. Yeah.
32:26
Chris
Taking in all of those different data points to try and say like, we, this is what we think you’re going to need, but it’s certainly not helping with that distribution center, the supply chain within the company, I suppose.
32:37
Veena
We actually provide this to the supplier. The Pepsis of the world is the ones that we actually provide the stoop. Mainly because if you look at the retail side of the sector, they are very certain that waste. They already currently use a pool or have a system on a pool and they don’t want to change. They never do changes that are good for them. We bridge that gap between the consumer and the supplier and tell them exactly how the consumer ads and when they are likely to buy the product so that they have ready.
33:12
Chris
Well, where are your data points then for the customer’s data points? Because obviously you can take in things like the weather and all of that stuff. You’ve got presumably some historic data and other information from suppliers, but where are all those other data points to say that this is what the consumer wants at this particular moment in.
33:29
Veena
Time, when you stay aware at all of the other data points,
33:32
Chris
What are those data points? I mean, where’d you get the data from, do I’m so curious as to where, how do you get your sales numbers? Like, how’d you, I mean, I don’t know. I don’t want to unravel your secret sauce here, but I, how do you get the data? Well,
33:48
Veena
That is part of our secret sauce box. What I can say is that we basically map what happens when consumers decide to buy starting product or starting capitalism products and map that translate that into what that means from a data perspective, what influences that institutions and them that data.
34:08
Chris
You make a connection with a new business, you’ve got a new client, do you say we need your data as well to be able to give you better data?
34:18
Veena
We know, because like I said, just creates the next level of friction. What we basically go with us, it’s a plug and play solution. We can start anytime they want, because it’s point of sale data that you can get from Nielsen or IRI or any of those people. All the other data points are off because that’s what our secret sauce is. If they would like to make this a lot more precise and get to within 5% of actual sales, they can provide us with some internal data as well, which includes the advertising, spend what they’re spending the money on the channels and that thing. In which case, it just becomes a lot better.
35:03
Chris
Yeah. It, are there any data points you don’t have that you want?
35:07
Veena
Not at this moment, we just wish that the point of sale data were freely shared by retailers rather than they sometimes get very precious about this batch and reasons why we need to go to Nielsen’s. What would be really cool if is if it’s one of those things like game theory, where if Tesco once great sales or Pepsi, they need to treat Pepsi as the partner, rather than as someone type of power struggle with and share the data they have feeling with Pepsi with, they don’t have a moment. There’s a lot of data points. They don’t get Pepsi, like brings out the common stock or they said they’re not available and they don’t share it.
35:50
Chris
I mean, I think that’s that side of it is fascinating as well. That’s another element of Tesco that I was so surprised by. I mean, obviously Tescos come on, leaps and bounds since I was there. So, don’t, listen, don’t go away from this core thing and the Tesco don’t have information. The one thing is that always surprised me was everybody always talks about how powerful Tesco club card was, because obviously you have the club cards, how much people are spending in, they’ve got all of your data and everyone should be terrified. When I started there, they were working with Dunnhumby. I’m not sure what they was founded through Tesco or what I think at one point it was owned by them. The, we clarified that afterwards fact check, please. The, but what was actually happening was that the stores were sending like batches of receipts to Dunnhumby.
36:38
Chris
It was like three months worth of data. Dunnhumby would work through that and basically type it into workout. What was actually going on and what had actually been sailed. So, but what it meant was that the data was always three months out of date and it all been done on paper. I was absolutely amazed that none of this was actually linked up. They didn’t, they just did not have that facility to know quickly what was happening in the stores, what was, what had been sold and when it had been sold and what the demand was, all of their data was at least three months out of date and on paper.
37:13
Veena
Yeah. I think that’s where Nielsen’s that really well. They had a connected system, but the point of sales interface that would just send the data to Nielsen. Usually Nielsen’s data as a week out of date. And that’s it.
37:27
Chris
So, I mean, talk to me a bit, more about this, the suppliers then if we’re trying to prevent empty shelves in the supermarket, what’s happening there is that other suppliers not predicting their own demand for their own product in certain areas. That, is that where the gaps arrive.
37:44
Veena
In a nutshell? Yes, that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s because of this whole way that sales gets forecast in companies, it’s all based on historical data. It’s not really based on what consumers want. They are using last year sales data to guide the CSA sales, which is never a good way to do this. For example, last year, during this time, you might have had a really core 16th of December or the second week of December. This year we are having a reasonably one line and the first week was totally corn. Both of those things that they wouldn’t have taken into account and they wouldn’t have either sold enough or they would have sold too much. If you look at COVID, it’s just changed the way people have behaved or are behaving. For example, people are cooking a lot more at home now, so you need to be selling a lot more salt, a lot more oil, a lot more rice, pasta, wheat flour, and that thing in the supermarket rather than selling them into restaurants.
38:48
Chris
Well, yeah, I mean, I suppose, this last couple of years, your historical data means nothing.
38:56
Samuel
I’m, I’m super like interested because I guess we just try to dig into your secret. We’ll set because again, like how can you respond that quick? I mean, typically like a supply chain that can’t ramp up and like that, I mean, it probably ramp up pretty quickly, but there’s still a delay that needs to happen. If you’re talking about, the weather affecting people’s buying behaviors, that sounds like an incredible insight to have, like how,
39:25
Chris
Like you need a prediction model, don’t you? Yeah. You need to be able to predict what’s going to happen. Yeah. How’d you do that without revealing it. How do you do it?
39:37
Samuel
The website obviously shows a lot of tweets kind of coming up and things like that. I, I presume there is some social gathering of data, but again, this is not predicting that’s responsive, which is probably it’s way better than just going off of last year’s data for sure. But, or.
39:56
Chris
Even three months of receipts.
39:58
Samuel
Oh yeah. So, I mean maybe we start with the social side of things, like how that also obviously something that’s public on your website, how are you gathering social data then? Using that to retroactively respond to social and climate kind of changes.
40:18
Veena
Yeah. Definitely look at a retroactive as well as predictive data that is when you’ve sold a lot more at stores, which is, I guess, gathered from the social data. You also know how much to sell into because you need to replenish that stock. The problem that’s happening is that replenishment is not about, so it’s equally important to get attractive. The way we look at if people are talking a lot more about a particular brand or product, especially in the beauty industry, this influences sales quite significantly. For example, a few months ago, there was a campaign by L’Oreal tick-tock of the infallible link events vital. It went out of stocks in places like Sephora and Ulta, and the worst consumers were left, really frustrated that they were basically going on saying, why do I campaign? If you don’t have enough stocks in stores and that publicity you don’t want, that’s the thing that we can track and tell L’Oreal, for example, Hey, you need to be selling X cases of stock into Sephora and alter to be able to demand based on how we think this campaign could go.
41:37
Samuel
More of a, more of a marketing question. Again, the social stuff is front and center on your website. Why do you think that’s appealing to your clients when it comes to trying to promote and sell your products? Because quite rightly your product is all about proactive action made against, supply chain issues or whatever it might be. Do you think people respond to the idea that your gathering social data and that you’re current with social trends? Do you think that’s an appealing factor to your clients?
42:12
Veena
Yes. In again, an actual, mainly because this is information that they don’t currently, well, they have access to it, but it’s not something that they’re actively looking at and interpreting, and we are doing that. We do talk about that and that’s very appealing to them because when they have marketing teams who look at that, they look at this on, when they need to launch a new product onto a new marketing campaign, they look at how that social media has gone, how it’s appealed to concealers, how people have been talking about it, and then come up with a new campaign. It’s not being used in sales before.
42:49
Samuel
My only worry, because I, I’m not sure whether you’ve potentially more of a tech question or whatever. I’m not sure if you’ve encountered this Chris yourself, but a lot of the tech platforms they’re locking themselves down from the data. Instagram was one of them where you could kind of just skim through all their, all the comments and from their APIs and things like that. They’re locking them down, which is an unfortunate thing for products that bank on, well, not necessarily bank, because we’ve talked about future-proofing and all the rest of it from you. It’s not just, this is not just your only avenue of information, but are you finding that there’s your app is having to kind of shift and change with APIs that are changing or the, changes within the ecosystem that you’re so heavily reliant upon.
43:40
Veena
We are still new enough that’s not being a huge blocker or something that we need to keep up with quite significantly. Having said that, yes, we feel figure that going forward, that is something that we need to keep an eye on, or at least have a study source from an existing scraper or a provider who actually scrapes data, because then we can just focus on interpreting what that means and translating that into sales.
44:09
Chris
The, the interesting thing you mentioned there before about Tik TOK with it, was it Lori? Ellie mentioned? Yes. Yeah. You said they’d run out in a couple of different places. How would your product be able to say actually it’s these places you’re like more likely to run out? Are you able to do that?
44:26
Veena
Yes, we can. Based on the people who are commenting on it, liking it a lot thing.
44:34
Chris
That’s an, that’s pretty powerful, right? To be able to say, it’s these parts of the country that you’re going to be, or world, I suppose, these parts of the country or world that you are going to be struggling, people are going to be struggling to find your product.
44:47
Veena
For international campaigns.
44:50
Samuel
I’ve had parts of the world that are more in tune with this type of proactive supply chain stuff. Or are your clients from all over the world basically? Or are you finding that UK is more interested in this thing?
45:03
Veena
The only enough it’s the Amazon markets that have shown a lot of interest in this, but then if you look at tech adoption, usually they are the ones who adopt technology a lot faster because they just don’t have a solution for this versus other developed markets where there are solutions and there’s some way to do it. They just don’t have any way to do it. They attempt to leap frog in terms of adopting technology. We find that Southeast Asia Africa, these are markets, we find we get a lot of interest from,
45:36
Samuel
You can obviously, you obviously know the culture there and be about, you’re able to onboard them a lot quicker because of your past. So that’s good.
45:45
Chris
So, well, what’s the future then for sales to be once the direction you’re in you’re taking the company or your plans.
45:53
Veena
We, like I said, the accounting focusing on the supplier side of the business, and one of the things that we are exploring at the moment is how to partner with retail, provide them with similar data that they can basically use and work off the same thing as the salespeople. Either by providing similar service to retailers, for them to use instead of the current demand planning tools, or, but providing them with an interface for any, and all brands that use us, we basically provide them with a free access to it. The two-pronged thing that we are exploring at them,
46:35
Samuel
What, what time scale are we looking at? There is your goal to have that up and running or,
46:40
Veena
Yeah, the report up and running already. We are actually testing this with this wholesaler that we are going to work with fairly shortly. Yeah, it’s in motion and we want to test it, see how it goes, how much demand we get from retailers and then scale this out, or provide this as an additional service to brands to provide that either partners with our customers with.
47:05
Samuel
True in true lean startup fashion, as we did earlier, the just in time thing was one of those things that I wanted to dig into more. Do you want to describe what just in time being obviously immediate response, and then we can dig into how that’s been messed up?
47:21
Veena
Yes. Just in time was a concept that came up a couple of decades ago, more than a couple of decades ago to do with inventory holding and stock holding at different companies. It helped them minimize their working capital by holding less stock. They will then manufacture to the demand. So as close to demand as possible. They don’t have stock sitting in the warehouse costs as well as financing because they spent all the money on keeping stock. Now it’s being challenged because you have supply chain constraints, which is preventing you from getting our materials on time. Which means that if you don’t have enough stock on your floor, you can’t sell enough stock job retailers and retailers internally, they don’t hold enough stock. You might actually run out of stock before you get your new batch of orders from your supplier. It’s just not a space you want to be in because it’s not worth the lots of sales.
48:19
Veena
There was a study done by university of Colorado, maybe about 10 years ago on this. According to them, the entire industry loses up to 30% of sales because of other stocks. Right now it’s a lot more than what were seeing at that point. We are probably losing anywhere between 14, 50% of sales, because the brand’s not available in store at the right time when consumers walk into buy it.
48:50
Samuel
Okay. I’ve just had a thought and this might be too small fish for you because you’re talking about Tesco two might be huge brands, but a lot of these, I don’t know whether you call them start, but there’s a lot of these services that you can order your food and within 30 minutes, and it’s not unforeseen, and it doesn’t enter into exists with prime now and all the rest of it. Do you think that’s going to affect buying habits or any, sales B or anything at all? Do you have any thoughts around this kind of instant shopping, not just your convenience store type of shopping more. I’m going to do my whole thing and I need it in half an hour. Do you have any predictions or thoughts around that?
49:37
Veena
I’m assuming you’re talking about the likes of Getson and Jiffy and Dasia and those guys.
49:44
Samuel
Exactly. Yeah. It’s,
49:46
Veena
It’s one of those that’s actually been in existence for awhile in the west. GoPuff is the first one that started this whole instant development thing. This was the, actually about maybe a good five years ago. At least if I remember it, maybe even more actually, and then they skyrocketed during COVID because people read that groceries, couldn’t go to the stores and this was a great way to get it general, the pandemic. Now it’s taken off because we find that people like the convenience of getting it delivered at home and getting it delivered quickly. Now, if you look at the future of the space, it’s a really interesting add there that these guys play because they are basically catering to on the one side, a market that you used to instant gratification in 15, 20 minutes is great. We did a future of retail survey, a sales up at the beginning of 2020, to understand how to pivot where to do the two and that thing.
50:48
Veena
We found that at that time, it’s the older generation that were interested in getting close to home because they were not mobile or they were in a particular area, which is hard to get to emerging markets, a lot more interested in delivery because of chocolate constraints than developed markets. Because traffic wasn’t a massive issue there because we have public transport and that thing, younger people at that point where I’m really interested in this because they liked going into the store, touching it, looking at what else is out there and having the field they experiment. Maybe when COVID happened, it’s all just changed. The younger generation has gotten used to getting deliveries immediately because that was the same experience of going to the supermarket and buying it. There’s also the fact that there was a certain element of fatigue looking Chinese fatigue. So there’s 20 miles on supermarket shelf.
51:42
Veena
Now you have three brands that are available at your instant delivery store app, and that’s what you buy. And they quite like that. And that’s what they’re going for. Best a lot of change happening in this space. The question I have, and I think this is a question that many people have is this sustainable or is this one of those things where you have 20 different providers and each of them get a tiny portion of sales because there’s bound to be consolidation. They have like 10 different providers doing exactly the same thing. Are you going to see consolidation along the lines of what we see in retail, where you have the big grocery stores, which have taken up a majority of the market?
52:27
Samuel
One of the questions I was already thinking about before we started this call that I wanted to get, and it might not be an issue, but it’s kind of outside of this just in time, kind of instant delivery thing. Excuse the slight side track, but it came up last night, basically an issue around relying on artificial intelligence will be the in proportionate representation of certain demographics, right? That’s because we’re looking internally when it comes to our data and our assumptions, like what, for instance, the bias in the data, exactly a bias in the data. It sounds like you guys are going out and looking at actual social trends and going out there and naturally getting that data. It doesn’t sound like an issue that you are going to encounter, but do you have any thoughts or anticipations on how you’re going to avoid that bias with regards to your artificial intelligence system?
53:25
Samuel
Yep.
53:25
Veena
One of the things we actively do is we look at data of demographics around consumers to basically the move this bias, because we know that different people from different parts of society buy differently. If you take a simple case of promotions, a really deep discount is likely to fly really well in demography areas where, or in areas in the UK where the social economics economic status is not very high. People are not earning a very high per capita income versus other areas. Like, for example, if you go into Mayfair in London, you might not want to do a very deep discount because they might buy the product anyway. That thing that we actively look up, because we know that the majority of the data is what’s going to influence the decisions that get taken and the smaller social economic groups might get swallowed up within the bigger w***e.
54:29
Veena
We actively look at locations versus the entirety of the UK or the entirety of London or the entirety of Yorkshire or the entire of Edinburgh.
54:41
Samuel
Being careful not to generalize basically. And, you mentioned that you say Mayfair, those people may not want a discount, but that could be an assumption that we’re making right there. And, and how are you going about then actually confirming that information and that data like we can make, it’s fair to say based on historical data, that to make that assumption, but as we know where the London, every where’s the next shortage, for some reason, different areas of being gentrified, that’d be, changing all the time. How are you then validating that is indeed a valid assumption.
55:18
Veena
We basically look at changes all the time. We map the changes with changes in the socioeconomic structure as well.
55:28
Samuel
That like boots on the ground work or is that focus groups or anything like this?
55:34
Veena
We don’t do that primarily because those are a lot more time taking class. They are just one-off points in time. It doesn’t keep you updates about what’s happening now as an, it could be that this week things are going great with one particular area next week. There’s something happening there that could change the way people as an it’s not just about social economic groups, but it’s just about, let’s say that’s a roadblock in a particular area. Are people still going to shop at the same Tesco or are they going to the same Springs? That’s around the corner from them, but it’s easier to get into because the road blocks for Tesco. We use live data to look at things like that. We use, we use the data to tell us how people are behaving rather than going in and driving by asking people what they do, because that is also the fact that when you ask people how they are likely to act that they like you to tell you what to expect to hear rather than what they’re actually going to do.
56:36
Veena
And you don’t want that bias. The check in overcoming this is to know that you do have a cognitive bias and that is bias and data. Once you know that you know what to do with it, how to get around and how to remove it. If you assume that any data you get doesn’t have bias, then you’re likely to work with a really biased set of data and get bifocals.
56:59
Chris
I think that was really important. We, I think we’ve talked on this show before about how that’s influencing like decisions, hiring decisions in Microsoft or Amazon or various of the places. Actually a colleague I worked with mentioned one to me the other day, where he was talking about hiring within an orchestra and actually that the orchestra were having a cognitive bias and we’re tending to hire more male musicians and female musicians. They put a curtain up for the audition process and then they could hear the footsteps as the person walked onto the stage. They still knew whether they were male or female. They asked them to all come on barefoot. I think that’s fantastic, to be aware that you are going to have a bias and that, I think you only have to look at the AI bots that have been released into the world, that our data will naturally bias a bot as well.
57:50
Chris
It will naturally bias an algorithm. I think it’s insightful to know that you’re taking that into account.
57:58
Veena
Yep. As Alex keeps telling me whatever data you put in is what you get out. If you’re putting in Bi-State they going to get biased.
58:07
Chris
Cool. Well, thank you very much for being on the show. It’s been a pleasure talking to you this morning. I think I’ve learned a lot and I’m inspired by all of this, the sales data. I’m curious to see how this is going to change and affect the world. Hopefully we’ll see fewer gaps on the shelves, I suppose. Cause that’s a, that’s the bane of everybody’s life and in the UK at the moment, I guess,
58:28
Veena
I think pretty much anywhere around the world, as we hear things happening in the us, in Australia, in Amazon market as well about stock-outs.
58:38
Chris
Well, again, thank you for being on the show.
58:40
Veena
No problem. Thank you for having me.
