Score karo, India!

I am not a cricket fan, far from it. I may have attended a few matches as a child but woefully, I was never able to soak in the passion that pretty much the whole nation breathed in. So what was I doing cheering from the stands in a cricket stadium in not in one, not two but four different cities over a span of 10 days?

Circa sometime in early September, we at actyv.ai decided to reach out and understand the challenges faced by distributors and retailers. Afterall, we are India's largest enterprise SaaS platform that provides BNPL for distributors and retailers. So how could we stay relevant to our stakeholders? Quite simply, by listening and that’s exactly what we did!

Coinciding with the T20 India-Australia and the India-South Africa cricket series (as a company, we love cricket and if you need any further proof – look up our ads with Sunil Gavaskar), we set up distributor interactions in Nagpur, Hyderabad, Trivandrum and Guwahati. In a grand total of 10 days, we interacted with nearly 100 distributors.

img

During our interactions we observed that irrespective of the city or the sectors they operate in, some of the challenges faced by distributors are common – right from being discovered by enterprises to ease of getting credit to reducing risk exposure to visibility of credit worthiness. Which is where, actyv.ai steps in with its product categorisation of actyv Go, actyv Paylater and actyv Score. As an enterprise SaaS with embedded B2B BNPL and insurance, our mission at actyv.ai is to drive growth opportunities in the global B2B supply chain ecosystem through a single platform that leverages AI to promote business health reporting and assessment, digitises business transactions and gives access to relevant financial and insurance products.

img

Given this was the first time we were experimenting with this model, we were not quite sure what to expect. What we got in turn, was a goldmine of insights, candid feedback, an abundance of positive curiosity about products from actyv.ai, the start of some long term relationships, some truly fun moments watching the matches with the distributors in each city and of course, a variety of chants that had me in splits at every stadium - try saying the following out loud and you will know what I mean – Soda bottle, Pepsi… saksee!

img

So imagine my glee, when Suryakumar Yadav aka Sky from our Indian cricket team, who was fielding very close to the actyv.ai box, pointed to our tshirts (Score karo, India!) to kind of indicate that yes, India is going to score. I think I have a new favorite in the Indian team!

On a personal level, I was a bit apprehensive about how my first event with a new team would go – many of whom I was meeting for the first time. But what a blast I had! From the video crew who made it their life goal for those 10 days to capture every person who was wearing the actyv.ai tshirt to the core team working on the whole piece end-to-end (including celebrating one person’s birthday at 12 in between all the craziness), to local anecdotes that are best not to share, I couldn’t have asked for a better heads-up from my second month at actyv.ai!

img
img
img