Acing Customer Dev & Partnerships in the US - Kalyan Verma, Almabase | BTS E11 | SaaSBoomi Podcast

Kalyan Varma is the Co-Founder & CEO of Almabase. Before solving the alumni fundraising problem, Kalyan worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, just as he moved to start an online marketplace which couldn’t scale, yet he kept trying new things to eventually stumble upon the gap in the education system to eventually start Almabase. 

Kalyan is an alumnus of NIT Warangal and cites BITS Pilani as the foremost institution in the country with the strongest alumni relations. 

In this episode, as we dug deeper into the idea in this unconventional space, Kalyan breaks down the idea by sharing memorable experiences from some of the big institutions around the world; the challenges he faced in US trying to learn more about the disorganized space, in a bid to fix the broken relationship between the alumni and the colleges to create a win-win situation for both around the world. 

Tune in to watch an insightful conversation brew among the trio.

Key take aways

2:14 - A creative way of solving high college tuition fees

5:15 - Building blocks of a strong marketing structure

10:55 - How can sales empower marketing?

14:11 - Thought leadership marketing and category creation

17:27 - Getting the first US customers

18:34 - Cold emailing and customer development hack

21:30 - Going all out to understand your Customers

25:10 - Why now is a good time to sell to US?

27:20 - Customer agony to features

28:47 - The Power of a rock-solid CRM

30:38 - How CRM is set up differently for better?

33:30 - The CRM mantra that helped us

37:01 - 5x scale from ABM compared to Outbound

38:25 - The Win-Win-Win Strategy

39:44 - Partnering with a billion dollar company as a startup

44:31 - Disengagement of Alumni

48:12 - Starting up in 2023: What will you do differently?

49:33 - Kalyan’s biggest pet peeve

Happy listening!🎧