Business

to Business Marketing: Session 3-4

Guest Speaker: Mr. Pratik Pashine

Mr. Pratik Pashine was invited as the guest speaker for discussing Creating A Successful
SME. Mr. Pashine, an Indian Institute of Management Bangalore Alumni is currently working
with Tata Teleservices Limited.
He talked about the following points which were related to Business perspective of SMEs.
The session was crafted well to cover important aspects for SME business. The
discussion started off with how SMEs are being classified being based on number of
employees, turnover or revenue, but the important factor is there are also companies
like watsapp which contradicts the numbers on basis of which SMEs are being
classified. He also reflected on how there has been a shift in the ownership,
demographics, influence of employees in the nature of business for SMEs, we are now
dealing with a much younger generation who are handling the companies.
Challenges on selling products to SMEs may be paramount due to sheer ROI due to
small ticket large expectation, unstructured decision making, geographical dispersion
of business.
How the information which was only limited when analyzing any competitor, product
or any company is available digitally.
As the company moves from small to medium to large how due to availability of
expertise the company is able to evaluate any product in a much better way.
Any Retail business or Large business cannot serve needs by tweaking their products
which needs to be fulfilled by SMEs due to SKUs, requirement, delivery, complexity,
service, financing, expertise, obsolesce etc.
Since the customers are spread geographically in a diverse location it is very important
for SMEs to have a partner model which can address a considerable share of
customers. SMEs success depends on how the channel partner are being managed.
SMEs not only needs to understand and cater to the needs for partners but also
provide them opportunity to grow and move ahead with their establishments.
One of the major point discussed was the acquisition vs retention of customer.

There were also number of questions from audience. Over all it has been a great learning
curve of getting to know business and marketing about SMEs in depth.