• StartUps

How often have we, having seen the ad of that fancy, gleaming new gadget out in the market, wanted to lay our hands on it? That’s the power of ads—it convinces us that we have to possess a particular thing, never mind if we really need it or not. Understandably, the services of advertising agencies in the country are highly sought after and creative hotshops are popping up a dime a dozen to cater to the increasing need.

Thirty-one-year-old Sundeep Holani, along with two of his friends Tushar Chauhan and Suhas Mishra, realized the opportunity to create a dent lay in not making mass-media ads but in below-the-line advertising or retail marketing. “Consumers often change their buying decisions at the retail store. Companies have begun recognizing this fact and started to shift a large percentage of their budgets towards retail marketing. But this was a very unorganized and unprofessional space in India,” explains Holani. Recognizing the potential, in 2006, Holani and his friends set up Channelplay, which has quickly grown to be one of India’s largest retail marketing companies. Their clients include some of the global leaders in the telecom and IT industry.

An MBA graduate from IIM Calcutta, Holani was working with Cognizant Technology Solutions as a retail consultant when he decided it was now or never. Having worked in the U.S. for three years and in China for six months, he had a fair idea of how retail marketing worked outside India. Soon enough, his two colleagues who had a grasp of the market in India, were comparing notes and a business plan was thrashed out. “At the time we started, we didn’t have a solid idea as to what we would do within retail marketing. So, when we made presentations, we talked about the general idea we had—what was wrong and how it could be fixed, our backgrounds and how we could add value,” relates Holani. Clearly, they did something right because within three months of being operational full-time, they bagged their first client.

In the beginning, Channelplay was all about the selling aspect or sales but they have since branched out into marketing as well. After months of trials and errors, Channelplay zeroed in on the line of services they would offer clients. With retail itself being dependent on availability, visibility and advocacy of the products, Holani and his colleagues decided to offer services for the latter two (since availability is a distribution issue). Within visibility, Channelplay offers visual merchandising and retail audit. While one ensures that the clients’ products have maximum visibility in stores, the other measures how effectively it has been done (even if the visual merchandising hasn’t been done by the company).

The company also does direct advocacy for its clients. This essentially means that sales and marketing staff are deployed inside stores on behalf of the brands. The next time you go to an electronics store, notice the guy wearing a T-shirt with a particular brand’s logo, trying his best to sell you the product. There’s a chance he has been deployed by Channelplay.

The company also trains and develops the skills of shopkeepers and their staff on behalf of a particular brand. The other vertical where Channelplay operates is in events and promotions. So, what is the value proposition that the company offers vis-a-vis what brands can do in-house? “Most of our clients are big MNCs who want to establish a wide retail footprint but do not have the reach or scale to do their own activities in India. That is what we offer; the capability to sell in any corner of India and the ability to hire hundreds of people to do work on their behalf,” says Holani.

Technology is a strong point of Channelplay and what, Holani says, sets them apart from competitors. “We have an Enterprise Resource Planning software system—whether it’s in recruitment, HR management system, sales, visual merchandising etc,” says Holani. So a brand manager in Gurgaon can get up-to-minute visibility of what’s happening across his 40 stores in Madurai.
It may be smooth sailing today but there was a time when Holani harboured serious doubts about the venture. The doubts, as he says, were two-fold. The trio had collectively taken personal loans worth Rs.10 lakh to start up Channelplay. And with the company growing rapidly, all the revenue earned was being put back into it, which effectively meant that Holani and his colleagues weren’t taking any home. Apart from challenges on the personal finance front, Holani also found himself questioning whether the venture was intellectually stimulating enough. “There was a point where we thought this might not be the best industry for us to be in. In retrospect, though, that was rather shortsighted,” he says.

And true to the spirit of an entrepreneur, Holani has a big dream. Five years from now, he hopes that Channelplay will be considered the O&M of retail marketing. In revenue terms, he is predicting that the company will increase from the current Rs.45 crore to about Rs.300 crore-Rs.400 crore. “A lot of people say that selling is an art that one is born with and can’t be taught. We have proven that that art can be converted into science—it can be taught and it can be practised,” says Holani.

©Entrepreneur May 2011

Tags:
ad, Channelplay, IIM, IT industry, MBA, suhas mishra, sundeep holani, telecom