Defining The Right GTM Strategy For Your Start Up w/ Supriya Dev-Purkaystha | Microsoft

00:00
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
When I was doing go to market strategy, I didn't even realise I was.

00:03
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
doing go to market strategy, right.

00:05
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
I was thinking very much about common sense, like what makes sense to me.

00:09
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So I'd look at my products and.

00:11
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
go, well, actually, who is this aimed for? Is this aimed for a small to medium sized enterprise? Are we looking at particular verticals? So really identifying the customer, that would be the first thing that I would do. I then start to compile my target list. But that target list really helped me understand actually a bit more about the companies who they may be working with. Already starting to understand that competitor landscape.

00:34
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
You know, I think it's really important.

00:35
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
to understand who the competitors are in.

00:38
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
your industry, but also what are the.

00:40
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
market dynamics that are at play in the industry.

00:48
Anshika Arora
Today we're talking all about defining the right go to market strategy for your business. We'll be talking about everything from how to get the right messaging, the right pricing and the ideal consumer profile. I'm so excited to have Supriya on the podcast today who's the head of media and ad tech solutions at Microsoft. She's also a growth strategist for numerous different businesses and enterprises. I'm Anshika, founder of Eternity, a software designed for businesses operating in the wedding and events sector. And I'm so excited to be hosting the BAE LAB podcast today. Let's get into it. So let's start off with what are the core components that should comprise a go to market strategy?

01:29
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And actually one of the things that were mentioning is when I was doing go to market strategy, I didn't even realise I was doing good to market strategy, right. I was thinking very much about common sense, like what makes sense to me. So for example, I'd start by looking at my product and looking at.

01:47
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
You know, who is it that this.

01:48
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
product is aimed for?

01:50
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And, and I'm talking about when I worked for agencies, for example, that's where.

01:54
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
I really picked up my skills.

01:57
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So I'd look at my products and.

01:58
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
go, well actually, who is this aimed for? Is this aimed for a small to medium sized enterprise? Is it, you know, what size are we looking at? Are we looking at particular verticals? So really identifying the customer, that would.

02:09
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Be the first thing that I would do.

02:10
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
I then start to compile my target list, right.

02:14
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And I, and I moved on from.

02:16
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
those strategies quite quickly. But that target list really helped me understand actually a bit more about the companies who they may be working with. Already starting to understand that competitor landscape.

02:29
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
You know, I think it's really Important.

02:30
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
to understand who the competitors are in.

02:33
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
your industry, but also what are the.

02:35
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
market dynamics that are at play in the industry.

02:38
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And there was some really good resources that we had access to which would give you kind of the pitches that.

02:43
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
were coming up, who the incumbent agencies were.

02:46
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So that was a really good way of understanding who we should be researching, what are the products that they have, you know, what is the portfolio that they're offering. And then the other things that we had to really think about was our pricing strategy. I think when you're in a services industry, which is where my marketing career started off, it is quite difficult because it's really easy to underprice and overprice. So getting that balance right can be quite. Can be quite difficult. So there's a little bit of testing that we did in our commercial negotiations, making sure that we understood, you know, budgets up front so that we understood what were playing with and what we could, you know, bring in a profitable way. And then, of course, there is sales collaterals, sales case studies.

03:36
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
There's also playbooks and training for your sales people as well. So as you grow as a organisation, making sure that not only do they have understanding of the products, understanding of, you know, the. The great case studies you have, but also actually how you've ended up where you are, what was the beginning of that product, what was the beginning of the company even, how does the product fit into the company? And then actually, why are you a good fit for the customer would be part of that storytelling. So I think it's, you know, ensuring you've got all of that to bring in the sale. But then also really important is once you've got the sale in, is. Is then the operational and operations and execution then making sure that you already have processes in place.

04:27
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
As growing companies, you also have to be mindful of how a new product could change existing processes that may have worked. So how do you pivot the team that you have, the tools that you have, the process that you have to be able to accommodate new products coming in and also the impact that they're going to have as well on other existing products from a revenue standpoint, from, you know, they could be taking revenue away from one to another. Yeah, sometimes that happens. So cannibalization on your revenue is really important to understand. And then essentially, what are your targets and how realistic are your targets? I think is really good. But if you've done all that homework beforehand, and I would say a lot of that should actually be done while you're developing Your product.

05:15
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Yeah, because otherwise you've got a product and then you find that actually there's a lot of tweaks that you need to bring to your product.

05:21
Anshika Arora
Absolutely.

05:22
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So it's an iterative process until you get to that end stage and then, you know, as you go to market continuously, I'm getting the feedback. Looking at your KPIs, are you hitting your KPIs? You're not hitting KPIs. And iterating and then reviewing the GTM process, I think is really important.

05:41
Anshika Arora
Amazing. Okay, so with core components, we're obviously starting off with the ICP and your ideal consumer profile. What really goes into determining that? Because for startups, like you said at the first instance, it's okay, am I going to individuals, am I going to small businesses, am I going to enterprises? But beyond that, how does a business and a startup really begin to determine that?

06:03
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
I think if we're talking from a product rather than a company perspective, and of course we're startup staff with a product idea.

06:09
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

06:10
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
You would have understood your, or most of you should have understood who your ideal customer is and their profile is in that product development stage. Because really when we're looking at products, we're trying to fulfil a need or we're trying to solve a challenge or a problem. Often they're challenges and problems that we have of our own.

06:31
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

06:32
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And so you'd start off with maybe you know yourself as, as the ideal customer profile, but really look into the market and doing some market research. There are, there are lots of research tools out there. As a marketing agency, we used to use things like global web index as well as similar web and a few others as well to understand what are the trends going on. There's a lot of tools that you can, you have access to that you may not necessarily realise can give you more insight. So search trends, you know, if you have a, an account for PPC marketing, for example, you can look up one of the trending keywords, for example.

07:13
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

07:14
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And start to understand actually what are people looking for and then drill down into customer profiles. So there's, it's a mix of, you know, doing the productization process. Actually what was the problem statement you were trying to solve and who were you thinking of at that moment? And then it's branching out from there to understand who the other customer profiles could be. Because often there's more than one.

07:41
Anshika Arora
Absolutely. And like you said, there you want to be doing all of this when you're in Your development days. So what are some of the techniques and strategies that startups can use to actually validate that ICP is correct or segment them? Knowing that there may be two or three different profiles, how can they really validate the ICPs?

07:57
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So, I find focus groups are really good and useful to have if you can, if you have access to your audiences and you can perform focus groups yourself. Brilliant. There are also companies that do that for you. They can cost a bit of money. What I do know a lot of startups do is that they tend to start off with friends and family and their own network. Yeah. And then build out from there and start to understand through panels and discussions and focus groups and then you have pilots. So really kind of looking at whether or not you can start to gather feedback through pilot processes in the early stages to understand actually is, does this, is this going in the right direction?

08:42
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Does this fulfil the needs that you were hoping for it to fulfil of the customers that you were hoping for it to, or setting as a target for your product? Those are some things that you could do. And then of course there's standard desk research.

08:56
Anshika Arora
Yeah, absolutely. And I guess all of those elements you've mentioned, there's an element which is going to be paid and then some that be free, like your friends and family who hopefully won't charge you. How do you think a startup should actually prioritise their spend in those early stages when they're trying to validate either their go to market strategy or who their profiling is or if their product is correct for this audience when it comes to, for example, the paid side or the organic side.

09:22
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So I would always recommend starting off.

09:25
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
with organic to begin with and to start to get traction because you can get a lot of data from who is naturally looking for you. That, hence why I mentioned search trends. If you look at search is the one tool which acts almost like the largest focus group that you could ever have. Right?

09:43
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

09:43
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
This is people that are looking for a product, that are looking for a service, that are actively in that space of this is what I want and this is what I need right now. And that could be anything from, I don't know, pain relief to booking a holiday to weddings. Yeah, you know, there's, this is what my focus is for today and this is what I am, you know, intently looking at. So having a look at search trends and SEO is a really good tool for that. You could start to dabble into paid search in highly targeted keywords to be able to understand actually what is the uptake of your product. So we used to do a lot of CTR testing. You could do that around product features. So which product features would get you more clicks.

10:37
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
The challenge you have there is you have to make sure that the pages that they land on then don't deter them from the brand. So you have to make sure that it's very clear that you are in the stages of building out. And you know, sign up here for a newsletter for example, have something they could do but be very clear that there is no product right now.

10:55
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

10:56
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And we're in the processes. So there are some things that you can do there using search, which would be your largest focus group because that's someone that is intently looking at. Now there are also social tools that you could use as well so that a lot of people are taking to LinkedIn, they're taking to Instagram, to TikTok X, to crowdsource information and followers. So I know someone that's been in the making for a few years now and they're looking for the right moment. But what they've been doing intently is organically building their profile and their products profile through regular thought leadership discussions, polls, really understanding actually what is it that consumers are looking for in this space. It is, it is a finance tech space, so it kind of makes sense.

11:52
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And really understanding actually what is it that they're looking for. So that, and I've seen them iterate on their product as they've got now. You can fall prey to iterating too much.

12:01
Anshika Arora
Yes.

12:02
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Because you can end up in an echo chamber. So you have to be clear that you diversify your sources of truth. Right. So having multiple platforms where your consumers could be in and of course we know what the profiles are of consumers in TikTok, in Snap, instagram. And you would hope that you're, as long as you are staying true to your product and your value and your mission, that you would create a following that is relevant for your product.

12:36
Anshika Arora
Yeah, And I think that's so true because nowadays so many businesses grow based off of community and authenticity and that's where the social side is actually a free tool that plays a really big part.

12:47
Amardeep Parmar
Hello. Hello, Quick interruption to let you know a bit more about BAE HQ. We're the community for high growth Asian heritage entrepreneurs, operators and investors in the UK. You can join us totally free@thebae.hq.com join there. You'll get our CEO structure in your inbox every week, which is content, events and opportunities. You can also get access to a free startup fundamentals course by joining. Let's get back to the show.

13:20
Anshika Arora
Yeah, I know that you touched upon pricing. I wanted to talk more about that because with pricing specifically, when you're in that perhaps development phase or even post product and you're launching it's so right you can overprice or underprice. What kind of strategies can startups do in the early stages to make sure that they're hitting the nail on the. Because I've definitely fallen prey of speaking to people and saying, this is our product. How much would you be willing to pay? And there's never an accurate answer. And you also fall into that trap that everyone will say, yes, I'll pay for this price. But when it comes to it, when the product's developed, often it's too expensive for them again. So how do you think startups can balance that?

13:57
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So I think I'm going to give you an example. From a services standpoint to not tech, there's no kind of development charges there.

14:05
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

14:06
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And that's probably the easiest space to start off in my go to was to firstly understand what resources would I need. So what was the cost to the business in terms of the headcount that I was going to need, in terms of the levels of headcount I was going to need. So not just the time, but also the experience that I was going to need on those accounts. And then of course, you know, looking at what that looked like from a salary perspective, looking at what that looked like from a tax and national insurance. Very basic.

14:36
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

14:36
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
But looking at that, then overlaying on top of that, training needs and everything else that comes with running a business. And then depending on how big were, I, I already had some guidance on margins, for example, that I could easily go in with and justify for a small business would be anything that was, you know, between 30 to 50% that was quite easy to justify because it's growing business. Our overheads are much greater than our revenue is coming in. So we need, and we need to be able to recruit so that we can continue to grow. Most businesses understand that because they've been through it themselves. And if you're speaking to the right teams, procurement tend to try and haggle down. But of course it's the value piece that you bring.

15:26
Anshika Arora
Positioning.

15:26
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Yeah, the positioning and the value piece. But as you grow, you then have to understand that the tolerance margin comes down.

15:34
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

15:34
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Because obviously, you know, you're a much larger entity and your proper margins don't.

15:39
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
need to be that high.

15:39
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
There was always a starting point for me and I would run with that. And then I would periodically test a slightly different threshold within my negotiations, but they would be marginally up just to understand. And a lot of it would be based on market conditions as well.

15:57
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

15:58
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So I'd always have a way to justify my pricing.

16:01
Anshika Arora
Fine.

16:03
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
I would very, very rarely ask until were in negotiations.

16:09
Anshika Arora
Fine.

16:09
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And they were very clear on intent to buy it. Then be okay. Tell me where you are and why you're there and we can then look at how we find the middle ground. It's not that I would set a price and it would be that.

16:23
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

16:23
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
It would be more about do we want to work together as businesses? Do we want to work together as a service provider and do we have the opportunity to grow together? So there was often times when I was happy to negotiate and actually accept a very challenging negotiation if I saw there was opportunities for case studies, opportunities for innovation. You know, often to innovate you need a client that's willing to test.

16:52
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

16:52
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So you could come up with a brilliant product. But in order for you to be able to take that to market, you know you're going to need a case study and you know that it's going to be difficult for you to get that case study because it's, you know, first of its kind.

17:04
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

17:05
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So. So there are many reasons why you would negotiate your prices and different in different ways. So it's really important in those stages to understand who the customer is and the value that they bring to your business. Not just the value that you bring to your business. Because it's a two way negotiation. It's what. Especially when it's B2B. When it's B2C. I think it's a lot. Well, depending on the product. If you're in a market where you do have other providers, market research will tell you.

17:35
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

17:35
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
What the differences are and you'll understand what the quality of your product is in relation to your competitors. And that will enable you to set pricing. Often offer pricing is really good to.

17:49
Anshika Arora
Give you the son at length.

17:51
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Yeah.

17:51
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
To give you market tolerances and understand actually how do you gain traction and a user base quickly but with an understanding that these are introductory rates, for example, or these are pilot rates.

18:08
Anshika Arora
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's that competitor piece which is really important when you are setting it because like you said, you can do your entire analysis. You know what your spend is specifically, if you're perhaps a tech startup. But you really do need to look at the competitive landscape and who's around and what they're doing to make sure that you're pricing it correctly. Do you have any other tips and tricks and tools when it comes to actually analysing your competitors? And kind of how in depth do you go? Because sometimes you have direct competitors, sometimes you have indirect competitors.

18:37
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
I think so. I've always been someone that went on gut.

18:41
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

18:41
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And I would, I, when I felt that I had enough information and comfortable and confident enough to have the conversations.

18:53
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

18:53
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
I would go and normally that would be my immediate. So you could. You have spheres of competitors. Right. It would be. I'd start off with my immediate sphere of competitors. So those that were direct competitors to me and then I might look at one or two outliers if I was thinking about my product set expanding beyond my immediate competitors. So I look at my immediate competitors and get a feel for where we positioned in relationship in relation to them. It's actually, it was actually harder in our, in the marketing world because you don't get readily available pricing. It's all done on a one to one basis.

19:30
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

19:30
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So I, I was, I didn't have the ability to look at the market. I just had the ability to look at competitors and what they were offering. So from pricing perspective, I couldn't do that. From an offering perspective, I would look at their value proposition, I would look at their mission, I'd look at how we differed. I'd also. Anything I could find in terms of processes.

19:50
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

19:50
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
My previous clients were also a really good source of information because they'd often come to us and we take a case history in terms of, you know, what have you been doing? How have you. How has it been working for you? What are the challenges that you had? You'd often know who they were working with before. So you could put two and two together in terms of what challenges they were having. Some clients would tell you quite outright.

20:16
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

20:16
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
What the problems were and why they were leaving. Often if there was a review of an agency, it was because there were challenges.

20:22
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

20:23
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And that was really insightful in terms of a. How did we need to position ourselves and the strategy that we would deploy for them. But also, you know, things like the team that we had to put in there, the seniority we had to put on there, and also any products and services that we would need to add that usually we would think we could get away with not having to keep the pricing down. You'd actually go, no, actually you need this because you've had this and this issue. So, for example, we started with no client service layers and then we built in client service layers because as we built, we bought in new products. Actually the teams were working, started to work in different silos for each product. Right.

21:06
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
But the client was one and trying to navigate three or four different teams was becoming challenging. And the feedback from them, you know, enabled me to then go to the T, to go to the company and go, we need to bring in a client service layer.

21:21
Anshika Arora
Fine. And I think that's really powerful what you said there because we often forget that, yes, you want to understand your competitors of what you see of them, but actually hearing it from the clients themselves and I guess it's that objection handling piece and they're not objecting you, but it's your competitors to really understand and get into the psychology of why they're leaving or what they've enjoyed about that product. You'll probably learn so much about your own positioning as well, which plays a part in that go to market strategy.

21:47
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Yeah.

21:47
Anshika Arora
What would you say are some of the biggest mistakes that you see startups or businesses making when it comes to their go to market strategy?

21:54
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
I think it's in the product stage actually. And it's not identifying the customer in the product stage or the actual purpose of the product and the value that it's bringing to the market. And I think that's why I can't remember what the stats are. But there are so many ideas that people come up with, but not all of them should be taken to market. And it is because there's enough products in the market or enough services in the market already. Yes. You may get one or two customers, but actually are you going to be able to scale it? So we actually had a, I've had situations where we had a product and took it to market actually pricing wise, because of our own internal dynamics, weren't able to scale it and so we had to can it.

22:48
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And it's really important to understand when to can it.

22:50
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

22:51
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And there were. And it. And it's difficult because when you've gone to market, you're speaking to clients, you've got sales teams that are going, hang on a minute, my client wants to buy this.

23:00
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

23:01
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
You have to be strong enough to go. Yes. But it's not right for the business.

23:05
Anshika Arora
What are the indicators of that? So knowing when your go to market strategy is well, it needs to change and pivot or actually just needs to be shelved.

23:13
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Pipeline, that's the biggest thing. And anyone that doesn't pipeline, especially in a B2B sector is going to really struggle because you get all of your stats from there. So everything from. So I used to do rigorous pipelining and you have different stages. Right. So you've got RFI, RFP, you've got contract negotiation and then you've got so R5 RFP pitch.

23:36
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

23:37
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Contract negotiation and then you've got contract signing and then you've got. Actually it's gone live.

23:43
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

23:44
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
In marketing, those are six stages. I used to ask my team and they hate it.

23:49
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Absolutely.

23:50
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
I used to ask them to track every single stage. And after you won't see it in the first six months, you probably only see it in the first year. But after gathering two to three years worth of data, you can actually see your sales cycle really clearly. You can start to understand the lag times by product. So if you have it segmented by product, you can see the lag times by product, you can start to see where your drop off points are. So we got really good at pitching, right? Yeah. And we had brilliant teams that we put our A team on pitching. But then no one had time for RFIs. Absolutely no time for RFIs. And I was like, no, we're not. Oh, I think there's one quarter when weren't hitting numbers and I just don't get it. Yeah, that doesn't make sense.

24:32
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Why have we suddenly started to slow down? And I looked back at my numbers and it was R5s. Right. Our R5 pit win rate had gone from 90 to 70, massive drop. And of course that is the largest part that was feeding the funnel.

24:49
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

24:50
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So we then started to reshape the team and said, right, okay, we're going to now we change compensation actually. And went from compensating on win to compensating on every stage of the funnel so that they would be incentivized just as much to work on the RFI as they were on the rfp, as they were on the pitch, they were on the contract negotiation. Actually, after contract negotiation, it kind of all went into my hands. But that enabled them to get really focused on each and every stage and making sure that they have the right people. Yeah. Feeding into it. And you could see the shift in the team. They enjoyed every part because they were, they knew they were going to get payout at this stage.

25:30
Anshika Arora
Okay. One thing I've definitely taken on this is that you want to be building a solution, not just a product.

25:34
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Yes.

25:34
Anshika Arora
Because there's too many products that exist. Well, thank you so much, Supriya, for being on today's episode of the BAE LAB podcast. As with anyone who comes on the podcast, we ask them the Sun a few questions, the first of which is, who are three British Asians doing incredible pieces of work that you think the audience should check out?

25:50
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So there is one that I've recently come across is Shefali Bohra. I think I've said her name right. So she has. She's co founder of Dotplot and it's a handheld device that is used for catching breast cancer early. Right. Which I, I think, I don't know. As a female, I'm terrible at checking for those things. And I'm always sitting there going, I don't know if I'm taking the right thing. I don't know what I'm looking for. Unfortunately, there's been a number of people that I know that have had breast cancer and I think, you know, being able to check these things early is really important. But we're women who are growing and our bodies are changing regularly. So having a tool that can map out your chest, that can, you know, on a monthly basis, you can do this. It's. It's coming.

26:39
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
It's not coming yet. But, you know, the prospect of being able to have a tool that says to me something's changed.

26:45
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

26:46
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Is I think more comforting than me trying to figure out actually, you know, is there something that I need to get checked out? So that's one person that I think is doing a great thing. Then there is Naren Patel and Nikki Sehgal. I'm putting them two together because they both. So Naran is founder of MEFA, Media for All and Nikki Sehgal is the general manager. Now Media for All is actually my first, the first network that I joined after being in the industry for I think 15 years at that point.

27:19
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And it's been created for black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals within the advertising space, supporting us with kind of, you know, recruiting in more talent, helping existing talent to stay because there's a lot of us that want to leave, unfortunately, because we don't feel represented because we don't feel like we've got the opportunities that we should have and also to help us, you know, rise. My first mentors were through MEFA and they got me into mentoring and now I mentor anyone that wants to time. Yeah, but it was so rewarding and it's so rewarding to do mentoring and being a mentee. So they're doing great things. We've done a lot of work in terms of. We've done a census.

28:04
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
I think it's a third census in association with the AD association, which is really deep dived into the experience of black people, black women, Asian people. And actually we've really started to unpick that because we are quite a mixed bag and it's not a one size fits all. And actually the work that me find associated with doing have actually helped to enable a lot of conversations and also enable me and given me a voice as well as how I started a lot of my speaking as well.

28:39
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

28:39
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Doing panels on my own experience because I have massive imposter syndrome. So, you know, my experiences were one thing that I thought no one could take away from me. So that was one thing. The final person that I had in my mind. Oh,  Radhi , Devlukia. So I, I used to listen to Jay Shetty during COVID and I thought it was great. But my daughter introduced me to Radhi.

29:05
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

29:05
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
And she's got a podcast called A Really Good Cry and she just brings, as a female, a lot of kind of just day to day things that I'm probably not thinking about because I'm too busy and just brings them to the surface for me in a really simple way. Like this morning I was listening to one about just how inflammatory foods could really just affect your mood and you know, inflammation can cause depression. Actually, again, being Asian, when I listen to her voice, I recognise that she's Asian.

29:37
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

29:38
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Sounds like someone that I know and it's really comforting. And also, like I said, a lot of things that she talks about are things that I should know. Just don't have the time to maybe read or look up. And so I think that's a really important part.

29:55
Anshika Arora
Amazing. Thank you so much. I've definitely checked them out. And how can the audience find out a bit more about you?

30:00
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So I think LinkedIn's a really good way. I'm really responsive on LinkedIn. I love meeting people and so I don't tend to post as much there. I'll kind of just give a few updates. So don't expect too much thought leadership. But I definitely use it as a way to. For people to find me, for me to find people.

30:20
Anshika Arora
And is there anything that our audience can do to help you?

30:23
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Yeah, connect. I love connecting with people. I love hearing stories. It helps me grow as an individual. I think it's really important for us to have diverse experiences but also diverse voices around us. Like I said earlier, you can fall prey to having a echo chamber and. And believing just what you hear. And our social spaces can very much become that because of the algorithms.

30:47
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

30:48
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
So I tend to want to meet people and actually that's. Have you ever read the book Language of Love? Love Languages. I can't remember the exact title. I'll find it for you. But it talks about the different ways in which people like to be appreciated.

31:01
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

31:01
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Mine, I realised after reading the book and doing the exercises is actually time. So people that spend time with me, I really value and I have a lot of time for them.

31:11
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

31:12
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Because I know how much it takes to a. Put the time in the diary, make it there and, you know, and be in person. So. In person. Virtual call.

31:21
Anshika Arora
Just being present.

31:22
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Yeah, being present.

31:24
Anshika Arora
Perfect. Any final words from you?

31:26
Supriya Dev-Purkaystha
Think about your customer and your product together. And think about what solution you're creating, not what you can take to market.

31:34
Amardeep Parmar
Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe. See you next time. 

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