How Kraftshala prepares FMCG, SaaS, and marketing professionals, for industry challenges ?
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Varun Satia, Founder & CEO, Kraftshala
Q1. How does Kraftshala tailor its programs to meet the unique needs of different sectors within the FMCG industry?
FMCG is a large industry and within that, understanding of the entire ecosystem, how margins work, what are the KPIs of each person in the entire value chain, how to manage teams, how to drive up revenues across offline retail, online retail, quick commerce partners and other channel partners is very crucial. For the programs to work, students have to be well acquainted with not just how each part functions but also experience it practically. That is what is unique to our program.
We do this by firstly creating the program in partnership with large FMCGs with a widespread network across the country, i.e. Nestle and a few others. The program curriculum itself was made based on insights received from interviewing a lot of managers on what young professionals lacked in skills, what tools they needed, what kind of tasks they failed at. E.g. One of the pieces which came repeatedly was that students took time to start delivering on the job. We’ve used this insight to make our students do a full 100 hour project where they are delivering revenue targets mapped to various area sales managers of a company. they apply all that they have learnt in the classes, get feedback on their work and iterate. This makes them much more ready to start delivering from Day 1. Sales anyways can’t be learnt in classrooms and thus projects are a huge part of our learning experience, especially in our PG program in Sales and Business Leadership. Lastly, because they are working with the managers of the companies, we are also collecting constant feedback of students’ work from the manager’s and using the output of the students as a measure of success of the training of the program and making improvements very quickly.
Q2. What are some of the latest technological tools and platforms Kraftshala integrates into its training programs to keep up with industry advancements?
Kraftshala is focused on making students ready to deliver on the job from Day 1. So integrating tools and technologies which are being used in the industry forms a big part of that.
Let me take the example of our PGP in Sales and Business Leadership here.
So for different use cases within B2B SaaS sales, be it Intel gathering, data enrichment, outreach, calling, automation, CRM, AI tools, across the value chain, there are multiple tools that are coming up which are helping sales executives do their job faster, better.
Our approach is 3 fold – getting our students to work on these tools during their projects, learn by observing experts, get feedback from experts on the specific challenges they are facing in using the tools, and lastly, learn how to build a frugal and curious muscle which will help them work across organizations for solving the problem at hand.
Students get access to multiple tools either through the direct partnerships we’ve made or indirectly through free subscriptions. E.g. we have a tie up with Lead Squared, where students will have access to the platform and some dummy leads so that they can understand how decisions are taken using CRM, how does one really leverage a CRM to take data driven decisions and really manage their entire pipeline in the most effective way possible.
How these tools are taught is that we have experts who have led the SDR, BDR teams across organizations and they show students a live demo of how exactly they use these tools, and how do all these systems talk to each other? And then students apply and do it for their own projects. And every week, they have sessions with different experts where they talk about where they are struggling with the tools and how better they can leverage the tools.
The programs are also fully integrated with AI. So e.g. we’re teaching Gemini and within that prompt engineering which is what kind of prompts you should put in so that you get specific helpful outputs for doing research, editing emails and a lot more.
But across all the sales and marketing programs, while we are introducing them to a few tools, just learning tools is not enough, because these tools are changing literally every month. What students really need to build is that muscle to be jugaadu and explore new tools. They cannot go to a recruiter and say, oh, you know, I learned apollo.io and you don’t have that so I don’t know what to do. They need to figure it out. So our programs are focused on building that frugal muscle, that curious muscle, that comfort with using new tools, finding new tools, even finding a hack around it, because not every organization would have these expensive subscriptions.
Q3. How does Kraftshala ensure its students are proficient in modern sales techniques, such as social selling and consultative selling?
This is literally the heart of the PG program in Sales and Business Leadership
Earlier, there was a lot of information asymmetry, where the seller had an enormous amount of information that a buyer, a regular buyer, did not have. So for example, if you’re looking at car sales, or even say, a loan, the seller had a lot of information where and therefore then their role was to disseminate that information to you and whoever did a better job at, you know, wowing you with their proposition and that information would typically be the one that buyers would gravitate towards. But given the onset of mobile media, a lot of information is available online, so you don’t want people who are pushing features or value propositions down your throat. The role of the seller has changed to that being a problem solver.
Once they understand that, the second critical piece is to get students to learn by doing. So, whether it is their B2B SaaS sales project or core persuasion sales project, the question that we constantly start with is, what is the problem you are solving? What is the key need that you are then trying to cater towards and therefore, we also teach them techniques like spin selling, right, which starts off with just coming up with questions that one would ask to understand the situation, to understand the needs, to understand the implications of the buyer, and then end up pitching the most relevant value proposition in that situation for them. Students actually record their calls with potential buyers. And then they’re given feedback on this very piece that you were being too pushy? Were you sharing only value propositions without even understanding the need? How did you start your conversation? Did it come across as a trusted consultant?
Third piece, in order to be able to consult you need to know the industry, the product and the competitive landscape really well. So that’s another really important piece. So we have this intelligence gathering worksheet for the industry and for the company that we have developed along with consultants, because consultants have to understand industries, very quickly and in depth.
Lastly, all our sessions are planned, based on expert experiences and what recruiters feel is critical to have.
Q4. In what ways does Kraftshala’s training address the increasing importance of content marketing and storytelling in today’s digital landscape?
Regardless of if one is a performance marketer that runs ads, or a content creator that handles social media for brands, it is incredibly important for everyone to understand the power of content and storytelling.
In Kraftshala programs the first learning objective is for the students to simply Become comfortable with putting their own thoughts out there. From week 1 itself they start posting their work, questions, learning, tagging brands, shooting vlogs of their day, on platforms like Linkedin, Instagram and Youtube. This helps them to gain not only execution skills like copywriting, creating infographics using Canva, text to image AI tools, video editing, but also critical confidence very early in their journey by adding value to people and connecting to other like-minded individuals.
The second learning objective is to Imbibe a brand’s perspective and propagate the brand’s story online. In our Content and Social Media Launchpad cohort, where students are training to become content marketers, students work on live projects and learn to identify what could this brand want to be in the user’s mind. They explore the brand’s competition, its attributes, benefits, key influencers and cultural stakeholders, its purpose and personality to essentially chart out, “Which stories should this brand choose to tell?”
The third learning objective is to Stop the user’s thumb. Of course it is critical for the content to be interesting to the user, otherwise it is as good as dead. We learn to find the TG’s Passion Points that could align with the brand’s personality and hence could be used in their content to make it engaging: gossip, humor, puppy videos, sensuality, travel, curiosity, etc. everything is on the cards depending upon the brand.
The entire program is spent generating real work for our partner brands on mediums like Instagram stories, YouTube shorts, long form videos, blogs, vlogs, influencer marketing, guest blogging, email/whatsapp marketing, etc.
