Expert Interview with Paramdeep Singh Anand, CEO of FieldAssist

As field sales professionals are always on the go, it is crucial to help them understand their processes and automate parts of their deal-making process. Hence, to help the field sales force and maximize an organization’s ROI, FieldAssist came into the role.

Trusted by 350+ leading brands today, FieldAssist is fueling business growth at a rapid pace. Right from automating the sales processes to leveraging Business Intelligence for sales optimization, FieldAssist is helping organizations make smarter business decisions.

In Conversation with Paramdeep Singh Anand, CEO at FieldAssist

Are there any ideological principles that your organization follows to maintain the brand value?

As a brand, our goal is to deliver with sincerity and honesty. When we develop new products at FA, it is done with customer-centricity in mind. We keep our ears on the ground always and are ready to listen to feedback and demands. When we do so, we’ve noticed that we build customer-first, and that has so far helped us reach where we are today.

Additionally, as a brand, we are an enabler of success, so it is important for us to build a brand by building loyalty. For us, loyalty is not the number of years a customer has been with us, it’s about how they’ve come to us with problems and how we solved them with tech. It’s about communication, which we always encourage, as a two-way street.

What helps you stay updated, interested, and inspired?

Given that my time ‘not working’ is limited, I try to grasp information, whenever, wherever. That being said, I enjoy digitally consuming TEDx and blogs on relevant topics. Non-digitally, I enjoy reading books on leadership, entrepreneurship, spirituality, and problem-solving.

Considering the pace at which the SaaS market is growing, how important is it to keep innovating to stay in the game?

For FA, innovation is at the core of what we do. We solve problems using technology, and by that statement, we also have to constantly keep innovating. Innovation relies on two main things for us, firstly how fast can we correctly understand problem areas, and secondly, how rapidly can we solve those areas.

Understanding the problem is core to innovation, because being customer-centric, until we don’t correctly and fully understand a pain point, we can’t innovate or help solve.

Innovation in SaaS is also particularly important if we want to be/maintain a market leader status. It is imperative that we also think one step ahead of our competitors.

What is one thing that puts your product apart from the crowd?

If we were to figure out the reasons behind FieldAssist’s success, there are many factors that play into it. The first would be business understanding. FieldAssist today is 6 years of hard work put in continuous research and development. Our product started out with the realization of the need for this kind of product by talking to over 100s of industry veterans and mentors and then building it. Even today, we trust our customers to give us honest feedback – and they do. We are customer-first when thinking of developing a new edition of the product.

The second reason that has led to the FieldAssist story being what it is, is that we built the product with simplicity at its core. The people who’ll be using it are front-line salespeople, every day, and then, on the corporate side – the managers/VPs/ CXO’s. We built each side of the product with a lot of thought on how to make it the easiest to use while being user-friendly.

While the product has been very well appreciated, it is indeed because of our team of customer success individuals. They work with potential and current clients to ensure all their questions and queries are answered in record time. Without them being on their feet all day, we wouldn’t be where we are.

Lastly, we built the product for mobile usage. We understand that field sales representative aren’t on their computers; therefore, we wanted to enable them with an intelligent tool that moves with them. 

Our intelligent automation platform bridges the communication gap between market and brand and provides real-time analytics to the top management. By doing this, we have enabled better day-to-day decision-making leading to optimum resource utilization & faster response time to the market.

How would you define “a successful product”?

Success for me, and FieldAssist, is a feeling of knowing our product has succeeded in what it was set out to do. We built FA to solve a pain point, and if it is achieving that, and more, it’s doing its job. We are a catalyst to our customer’s success and every success for them is ours. For us, success is in numbers or the quality of decisions made. Additionally, we also acknowledge how hard sales, as a career is – therefore when we see targets being achieved, with our help, it’s a success for us. We enabled them to make better decisions or do something better. All of the above points summarize what a successful product is to us.

What is the most interesting thing about your job?

Being a CEO, I’ve realized it’s all about the people who you work with and the people that trust you. I believe I’m blessed to be working with passionate and innovative people who enjoy what they do. What excites me and I tell them every day, is that the impact of their work is far and wide. Every penny dropped in the hat, or, every decision made by a CXO somewhere because of our dashboard, is because of them.

At FieldAssist, I empower everyone with a voice, my office door is always open for conversation and with external parties, I’m a phone call away. I think allowing thoughts to flow and ideas to exchange and mingle – really gets all our creative juices going.

For me, no idea is not considered or too small, every idea comes from a place of being better and doing better – therefore, we heavily encourage idea sharing at our office premises.

The best part of my week is when I get to hear their stories. We all have a life outside work, and as much as we bring ourselves to work, we also should bring our passions.

What exciting is coming up from your side in 2020?

It is going to be a very exciting year. Apart from our core product, we are going to work towards releasing a couple of more products to help the ecosystem. So far, we’ve been primarily focused on India – 2020 is the year we plan to go aggressive for International business. Additionally, we want to expand our reach within the distribution management ecosystem too.

Our broad vision is to solve problems with technology, to accelerate growth. 2020 also marks 6 years of FA being in the market – we’re on a constant road to improvements, no matter how big or small – we are ready to take on new challenges. It’s surely going to be a year to look forward to, for our people, for our customers, and for our partners.