Kiran Bettadapur is a sales specialist, business strategist and seasoned entrepreneur with over two decades of toil in hustling stuff and signing on dotted lines in markets on either side of the Pacific. Bruised, battered and, on occasion, beaten too, in sales battles galore, he has boot-strapped startups and beefed-up hi-tech companies. A quest for the holy grail of scholastic achievement driven perhaps more by confusion than clarity saw him graduate in industrial engineering; major in R&D management and energy management at B-school and then earn a master s degree in operations research. Those academic adventures (or, misadventures?) had him careen through the portals of elite institutions of national importance like IIT, Kharagpur and IISc, Bangalore.
His random-walk-like pursuits continued into the professional realm at HCL Limited veritably India s Big Blue. Early experiments in executive life had him put his nose to the grindstone in multifarious functions. Eventually, he meandered into a biz-development role with HCL Hewlett-Packard in Mumbai (then Bombay) and metamorphosed from a managerial generalist to a sales specialist. A Utopian quest for executive bliss made him jump jobs and geographies in the mid-90s to head operations in California for Birlasoft Inc., a GE Equity investment company. During his spell with the Birlas (arguably India s Rockefellers), he forged business ties with several blue-chip corporations and helped those bellwethers gain competitive mileage.
At the dawn of this millennium, he found his true calling in the wibbly-wobbly world of entrepreneurship. The blind leap of faith gave him a freewheeling, not necessarily free-falling, chance to flirt with a whole range of emergent technology areas such as Knowledge Management, Handheld Computing and RFID. While not quite hitting an El-Dorado-like jackpot, Kiran did make a pretty penny off his first venture, Kenware Inc. And, in the alluring world of startups, once bitten, always spry! To start all over again! Thus he turned sequent entrepreneur a self-description he prefers to serial entrepreneur, a term that does evoke feelings of being in a peccant profession. So he segued smoothly into the Californian Gold Rush of the Internet kind to co-found Cylive Corp., which is a stealth-mode company in the Web 2.0/3.0, Social Media, P2P Commerce and Enterprise 2.0 spaces.
Kiran has chalked out agile processes and astute strategies to address challenges of low-entry barriers, globalisation and cutthroat competition in not only enterprise segments, but also consumer markets. The bust-many-a-gut bustle in his gigs has spanned a gamut of activities from outbound and telephone sales to alliance and Internet marketing. He rabidly swears brand- and business-building are about casting intimate ties with and conveying value to clients a surefire recipe for boosting stake-holder wealth. For earning your spurs in sales, he prescribes MOSS - the mantra-of-smart-sweat, which revolves around the philosophy of: The harder and smarter you work, the keener and luckier you get.
He s championed high standards of personal integrity and professional ethics in an all-heart credo, which he calls Clean Conscience Selling. A blazed trail of excellence steering enterprises responsibly; contracting profitably; scaling operations predictably and sustainably bears ample testimony to not just salesmanship, but also his leadership traits. An intense and inspirational speaker on sales and marketing, Kiran presents ideas that are insightful; opinions considered. Blending youthful energy with plentiful acumen, he delivers talks that are provocative and entertaining. Footloose and on the move most of his life, Kiran has now set up shop in the Silicon Valley of India, Bangalore.
