GST is the biggest tax reform so far in our country which has created a uniform tax ecosystem to boost growth of all sizes if businesses in India. This also opened enormous opportunity for ICT players in India as IT has to play bigger role in its success. Marg ERP Ltd., the leader in offering accounting solutions to Indian business, has worked as crusader in this transition phase. To know more about company’s overall achievement and growth, DT interacted with Sudhir Singh, Managing Director, Marg ERP Ltd. Mr. Singh shared his side of growth story and the plans for him in the pipeline.
DT: What have been the crucial milestones of your company during year 2017?
Mr. Singh: The GST roll-out from July 1st was a major milestone for the company as it gave Marg ERP Ltd. opportunity to create a new path of development in the accounting and inventory software. A major reformation in the history of taxes where all the businesses had a compulsion to get registered under the new GST regime. This created a brilliant opportunity for Marg to redesign a GST ready software which could fulfill the major need of the SMEs and MSMEs across India. From July 1st the company which was serving only five to six industry segments of the market came up with a newly developed GST ready software which entered in more than 21 different segments of industry. This not only helped the company to raise its overall revenue but also captured a much bigger market.
DT: What were the major challenges for your company? How do you fought those challenges?
Mr. Singh: The GST came into existence to help businesses have ease of doing business and promote efficiency and productivity growth. Some of the major challenges faced with the GST roll-out, included preparation of an adequate IT support and system, which is GST compliant in nature. Another major need was to create GST awareness & subject knowledge so that the market has GST skilled resources to ensure swift implementation. Post GST, Marg was prepared with its GST ready software and was one of the first few companies to make all its customer base GST compliant in the first month of GST roll-out.
The company’s customer care and special GST suvidhakendras were serving the customers day in and out to sort any queries related to the software implementation ensuring easy GST transition. The company organized various webinars to avail online GST information at their level. The company collaborated with various hardware and IT Infrastructure organization so that the customer could be offered best packages and one stop software hardware solution. We also conducted door-to door activities, group discussions and face-to-face interaction with MSMEs and SMEs.
DT: How do you support Government of India's 'Make-in-India' program?
Mr. Singh: Make in India program by Shri Narendra Modi Ji was an initiative to give boost to entrepreneurship in India, not only in manufacturing but also other sectors. Marg ERP a pioneer in inventory and accounting software market supported the Make in India program by helping millions of SMEs and MSMEs across India in ease of doing business by making accounting software available at the most affordable rates. As SMEs were the most effected but with the intervention of Marg ERP and then new GST ready software has helped SMEs and new start up in ease of starting business. Marg has also reached the rural India and have opened various academies to enrich and pass on the GST knowledge. This has helped in creating new job opportunities for rural India.
DT: What's your channel strength currently in India? How do you plan to boost channel strength in year 2018?
Mr. Singh: Currently our strength lies around 14,000 channel partners across the country. In that the first tier partners are around 1000 partners, second tier partner is approx 13000 plus partners across the country. This year we are actually trying to build three layer of partners. The top most tier which is closely connected with (MSP) Marg Strategic Partner is expected to be 100 in number, the (MMP) Marg Master Partner is expected to be between 1600 to 2000 in numbers. The entire tier two partner is expected to be around 25000. Out of that we want to sell licenses to around 10,000 partners. So the people who will join us as tier two partners as MPs will be around 25,000 to 30,000 approx. This plan will continue and we will be building our strategy around this. The company is targeting to achieve 25000 partners connected to Marg.
DT: How do you assure your customer excellent service support?
Mr. Singh: We have put in a lot of efforts into providing the best customer support services and we are constantly trying to improve them on regular basis. We have been preparing videos and running on Youtube for our product users to make them more and more aware about the usage and support. We have a strong service support team and we are making them more enabled so as to be able to support our huge customer base in every possible way. We have distributed the zones of our country into four divisions, North, West, South and East and we have partner and customer help centers. Customer desk was already functioning but we have also created partner support help desks. We keep providing GST awareness along with different business booster tools to ensure maximum benefits to our partners as well as customers.
DT: What will be your key Go-To-Market Strategy for year 2018?
Mr. Singh: Our efforts and strategy will remain in three layers one is expanding our channel base which we expect will add a great value to us by ensuring a major connect to the market i.e to the prospect base.Our second part is to ensure our partner have been made competent and skilled enough with the product knowledge and the way our product has been sold in the market.The third major strategy will be to boost our local operations. We are presently having seven to eight offices and will be soon adding three to four new offices soon, so that the operations become profitable to all our customers. The customer as well as our partners in that local area should feel the impact of our local offices. Currently, we are having our regional offices located in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad and soon we will be adding Jaipur, Guwahati, Lucknow and Bhopal also. Additionally, we will also be looking to make our global presence in SAARC countries. Apart from that, we are already focusing on Africa as we have our office in Kenya and we plan to open one in Saudi Arabia soon.
DT: Please share your current revenue and market growth rate.
Mr. Singh: The company has registered a 300 per cent growth this quarter compared to the same quarter last year. To begin with, Marg was a slow starter because of the languid pace of business computerization. However, from 2001 the company has had a consistent growth of 20 to 30 per cent year after year with a sudden jump in 2007 with VAT transition when the customer base just doubled.
