“Our end goal is to automate and create efficiencies across different teams that’s being the major objective,” says Murali Krishna, Vice President (Sales), Leadsquared in an interview with Chandan Anand, CEO & Group Editor, ArdorComm Media Group at the ‘ArdorComm New Normal – Education Leadership Summit & Awards 2022’ #ELSAJaipur #ELSARajasthan How does certain forums help when we see the EdTech partners, academicians and even the government stakeholders at a common platform? All the institutes are going digital, that’s the current scenario right in India and events like this help them to understand more about the ongoing technologies, tools like Leadsquared and various other tools in the market and digital transformation has been buzzword now and how Leadsquared kind of a tools can help in the transformation across admission processes and I think events like this helps them to get that information more handy. Can you tell us more about Leadsquared? We are a 10-year-old company, we focus on application management and CRM and overall automation processes for schools, colleges, universities. As a business we are into multiple domains but education remains our key focus area so we have about 600 odd customers in education across different spectrum of clients starting from large colleges like Amity, BML and we have universities in different categories in different cities. Being said that our core focus area is to help colleges to efficiently run the admission process and automate as much as possible in terms of the student journey. As we have already seen there is the flood of EdTech companies and in the same domain there are many players big and small, what has been the USP of Leadsquared? That’s a good question, so at the outset the basic technology for most of the companies remains the same, everybody is a CRM or a lead management company so the focus is in three important parameters, one is what is the end goal of the product, what is that it wants to solve. In Leadsquared our end goal is to automate and create efficiencies across different teams that’s being the major objective. So, every feature we launch goes around automating the counselling process, automating the admission journey, that’s number one, number two is how you serve that customer and understand the market so education is a very different market compared to other segments like BFSI or marketplaces or any other segments which are there. So, this is more of a nascent market in terms of technological adaption so the core in this particular area is to have a better service and better user adaption so we may have a beautiful software, very robust features but if the end customer is not using it is as good as not helping them solve the problem. So, we focus on driving adaption at multiple levels starting from the marketing teams the counselling teams, admission teams. So, these are the key differentiators and we are pocket friendly also so that may help customers to not burn a lot of money on having tools in place. Any specific reason as in, compared with say tier one, rural or say the tier 2 cities which as per your experience responds better to you? Tire one obviously, because tire one colleges understand the potential of technology, so they are definitely ahead on the curve. Tire two is catching up, tire three colleges they respect technology but they may not need the robust technology because their admissions are more driven by the locality so even if they have technology they may not have enough resources to use the technology to the full potential. So, yeah tire two response better, tire one is always best. As we have all gathered at New Normal Education Leadership Summit, what is the word new normal for you stands? So, the New Normal is colleges adapting technology for me, like five years back people were using pen and paper for admissions now that move to Excel sheet in the last two three years probably and now people are looking for tools which can help them with just not a tool for automation for application but tools across the college it may be an LMS it can be overall digital classrooms, it can be ERP. So, they are looking to adapt to multiple tools which can ease the manual work, so I think from the technology perspective that’s the new normal for us and the education policies and whatever the initiatives government is taking, skill learning and all of that, all of them will add up in the curve in terms of the education as an industry and it will evolve from here and I think there should be no looking back from her. I’m glad to share with you that we have successfully completed one and a half years as a media startup, we have entered into many markets, region, entire geography we are trying to cover, any message or advice would you like to give to ArdorComm Media Group? All the very best for the whole team of ArdorComm Media and looking for many more events like this. From our perspective the events are decent and if you can get more targeted crowd that would help all the participants as well the partners who are participating. I wish you a very happy journey going forward and all the best for your future.
