A Project Report

on
Creation and Implementation of marketing strategies for different
products of the organization

Submitted in the partial fulfilment

for the award of a degree in

Master of Business Administration

by

Yaswanth Raghavendra Kumar Surapureddy

MBA/1172/07

Under the Guidance

of
Prof. Prabhat Ranjan
Assistant Professor, IIM Bodh Gaya

To

Indian Institute of Management Bodh Gaya

Bihar-824234
 Summer Internship Report| TalentServe| By Yaswanth Surapureddy

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I am indebted to many people who helped me in getting this internship. First and foremost, I
want to express my gratitude to Director Dr. Vinita Sahay for providing me with the
opportunity and turning it into a successful summer internship project.

I thank Dr. Archana Patro, PGP Chairperson, and Dr. Teena Bharti, Placement Chairperson,
for their kind support.

I want to take this time to thank Meghhaa Woraah & Nishay Katarina, who are my mentors at
Talent Serve, for their valuable support throughout my project. I am grateful to TalentServe
for selecting me for their Summer Internship Program as a Product Manager.

I adore Prof. Prabhat Ranjan's help and advice throughout my summer internship. I admire her
for her patience and motivation; without her, I would not have been able to finish this project.

Last but not least, I am very thankful to the Indian Institute of Management Bodh Gaya for
providing me the opportunity to do the summer internship program and making it a partial
requirement of the MBA program, which helped me know the corporate world better.

Thank You!

Name: Yaswanth Surapureddy

Reg. No: MBA/1172/07

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 Summer Internship Report| TalentServe| By Yaswanth Surapureddy

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The EdTech business is booming; by 2022, India's Edtech sector is forecasted to be valued at
$3.5 billion. According to LinkedIn's Career Pathway Survey, which polled more than 5000
professionals in 11 Indian cities, one out of every three people feels like they are "career
sleepwalking." Also, considering the pandemic caused by the outbreak of COVID-19, many
people are rendered unemployed. A shift was observed in professionals' mindsets where they
are now more open to switching jobs more frequently and finding the right match. Career
guidance can play a significant role in addressing these.
Moreover, many people have been made jobless due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Professional
perspectives have shifted, and they are now more willing to switch employment more regularly
to find the appropriate fit. To address these issues, career counselling can be quite helpful.

TalentServe was formed by IIT, IIM, and Symbiosis alumni, engaging with Millions of
Students worldwide to give a 360-degree solution to all the Career, Education, Work, and
corporate needs. The product of TalentServe consists of 3 main components: the START,
GROW, and PRO Plans. These come with varied market research and different target audience.
In START plan, it aims to reach out to students with various backgrounds and expertise through
LinkedIn and onboard them on the platform, which will help them get the placement assistance
based on the aptitude test. The methodology involves making the first touchpoint through
LinkedIn and then getting the students on call to pitch the offerings. The learnings involved are
varied. Some of these are negotiation, the art of selling, communication skills, customer
relationship management, documentation, and being a team player.
In GROW plan and PRO plan, the aim is the same as mentioned in the START plan but with a
different pricing and more options. The target audience for these plans is the people who are
looking for a job change or who are preparing for jobs. The unique selling point of the pro plan
is that it provides a 100 percent guarantee of job placement. This also has a scholarship program
for the people who are financially not stable, and it is entirely based on the merit of the aptitude
test, which is mandatory for every student during the onboarding process.
In the Product Management team, the project focused on improving and enhancing the already
existing product by adding an extra feature: the TalentServe Trainings section. The project
gave me good exposure to Edtech product management and development. The learnings
involved here are more inclined towards the technical aspect like tools for Balsamiq, Figma,
Excel, MSWord, JIRA, ASANA, etc.

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 Summer Internship Report| TalentServe| By Yaswanth Surapureddy

Table of Contents

Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 5
1.1 About the Company ..................................................................................................... 5
1.2 Product Offerings: .............................................................................................................. 5
Project work background: ................................................................................................. 6
Objective and Scope of the Business Development Project: ............................................... 6
Analysis of the Organisation: ............................................................................................ 7
Mission .................................................................................................................................... 7
Vision ...................................................................................................................................... 7
SWOT Analysis: ...................................................................................................................... 7
Implementation Strategies: .............................................................................................. 8
Conclusions .................................................................................................................... 10
Recommendations .......................................................................................................... 10
Contributions.................................................................................................................. 10
Learning from SIP ........................................................................................................... 11
References...................................................................................................................... 11

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 Summer Internship Report| TalentServe| By Yaswanth Surapureddy

Introduction
1.1 About the Company

IIT, IIM, and Symbiosis alumni found Talent Serve. The company's mission is to engage with
Millions of Students worldwide to give a 360-degree solution to all the Career, Education,
Work, and corporate needs. Meghaa Woraah is one of the Founders & CEO of the Ed-Tech
start-up Talent Serve, founded in 2019. The company's headquarters is in Mumbai. Almost
100+ employees are working for them.

Figure 1. Talent Serve Logo

We at the company provide career guidance to the students, graduates, and incoming
professionals or Aspirants by bringing career tips and knowledge from top-class educators who
have excellent experience in their respective domains to land their dream job. Any student or
professional looking for their dream career can be a user.

Figure 2. What we do at TalentServe

1.2 Product Offerings:

The company mainly offers three main products: Start, Grow, and Pro plans.
• Start
• Grow
• Pro

Start Plan:
• 15-day subscription plan
• 1200+ minutes of training videos
• Basic Resume guidance
• 2 Live Interactive sessions
• 1 Live project
• Job Interview preparation
• Certificate of completion

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 Summer Internship Report| TalentServe| By Yaswanth Surapureddy

Grow Plan:
• 60-day subscription plan
• 4000+ minutes of training videos
• Basic Resume guidance
• 10- Live Interactive sessions
• 3 Live project
• Pre-recorded videos
• Internship opportunity
• Job Interview preparation
• Certificate of completion

Pro plan:
• 120-day subscription plan
• 10000+ minutes of training videos
• Advanced Resume preparation
• 36 - Live Interactive sessions
• 6 Live project
• Pre-recorded videos
• Mock Interview
• Paid internship opportunity
• 1:1 Mentoring facility
• Job Interview preparation
• Certificate of completion

Project work background:

One issue that extends across businesses and locations is the growing distance between
companies and employees, which has hampered the hiring process. The extensive research
revealed that over 1.5 billion aspiring professionals worldwide, who change occupations 5 to
7 times in their lives, may benefit from the correct career coaching. It was also discovered that
career coaching is a somewhat fragmented field lacking innovation. In India alone, 30 million
young people complete their higher education and spend up to $5000 on it, all hoping to land
a dream job. The majority of these applicants are first-generation college graduates who have
no one in their group to help them make professional decisions. TalentServe was established
to address these issues. The project aligns with the company's objective of speeding
professional advancement by making all achievers' career hacks readily available through
technology.

Objective and Scope of the Business Development Project:

To boost the company's sales and expand the territory of sales while improving brand awareness
and company profit.
The project demands to utilize below resources to complete the objectives:
• Presence of Talent serve should be ensured on all the digital spaces, including LinkedIn, Quora,
YouTube, etc.
• Creation of a Marketing Strategy with proper distribution of allocated investment.
• Implementation of the above strategy to create evident changes in the sales figures.
• Expansion Strategy of Talent serve to other geographies of India.

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 Summer Internship Report| TalentServe| By Yaswanth Surapureddy

Analysis of the Organisation:

Mission:

The company's primary mission is to provide a convenient one-stop entrance to a door that
ends all the corporate requirements and satisfies the customer's needs.
We aim to end all your corporate requirements in just one convenient visit here. All you need
to do is focus on your goals. We share our best services to align our efforts by achieving your
trust and creating a social impact.

Vision:

Give Advanced quality education and job opportunities to the students and job seekers/
working professionals by providing the one-stop solution for all their educational and corporate
needs.

SWOT Analysis:

Strengths:
TalentServe is founded by the alumni of IIT, IIM, and Symbiosis. This is one of the Unique
selling points that help increase the product's credibility among the customers.

Weakness:
There is no basic structure in the company. The drawbacks of being a Start-up are visibly
seen. The product is much in the primary stages compared to other companies' products in the
ed-tech business.

Opportunities:
Edtech is a booming industry in India and worldwide after the pandemic. It is seen by many
studies that people are willing to move towards online learning and teachings to gain more
reach.

Threat:
The Ed-tech business is already very established in the market hence the existing market
leaders, and the new entrants are threats to the company. Many new firms are launching in
this sector because it is effortless to put up a company which makes it a threat due to the
increase in the market.

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 Summer Internship Report| TalentServe| By Yaswanth Surapureddy

Implementation Strategies:
During the first phase of the internship, the marketing and sales assignment was given to know
the customer and customer behaviour better—also, Revenue generation by onboarding
aspirants seeking job opportunities.

The following are the key responsibilities that I undertook as a part of this assignment.

• Tapping the assigned leads on a day-to-day basis

• Establishing a lead pipeline with the help of communication through Email, SMS
• I was talking to the consumer to know their pain points.
• Counselling and empathizing with the consumer and pitching a suitable product.
• We are requesting feedback from the consumers (Aspirants).
• I am collating the details into the report based on the assigned format.
• Sending Daily, Weekly, and Monthly reports to the Reporting Officer

Initially, I was made aware of the processes to be followed in the training period and sales pitch
training. Most of the leads I was given were taken from the already existing LinkedIn database.
For every lead, there is a remark to be given to know the pitched product and the reason for
follow-up. We had to call the leads and give our pitch in a given process, including the opening
statement, rapport building, probing, counseling, product pitching, negotiation, and sales
closure.

Email Marketing: Email Marketing is when you send a business email message to your
'email supporters' — contacts who have joined your email rundown and allowed express to get
email interchanges from you. Email showcasing is utilized to advise, drive deals, and construct a
local area around your image (for example, with a pamphlet). Current email advertising has
moved away from one-size-fits-every single mass mailing and instead centers around assent,
division, and personalization.

Methodology: To aware the parents through a series of emails that we're again on the framework
of AIDA. Our organization already has a database of potential parents who can be converted for
such courses. We will utilize these emails to create our content; the whole process will be divided
into three phases. The first two phases will take around two weeks, and the rest time can be
utilized for the webinars of the Parents.

The content of the email will focus on a few qualities of the product. The research that shows
how self-study improves the level of understanding and the pace at which students are searching
can be attained through this course.

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Affiliate marketing: One sort of marketing gives a high return on a minimum investment. The
affiliate creates a link between the two entities involved in the business, i.e., the Seller and the
Buyer, for which a commission is given to the companion. The thought behind it is that you advance
others' products regularly through an affiliate network, acquiring a commission if individuals wind
up purchasing because of your promotion. It depends on revenue sharing. If you have a product
and need to sell more, you can offer advertisers a monetary motivator through an associate program.
Assuming you have no effect and need to bring in cash, you can advance an item you feel has
esteem and acquire a pay from its as anything but an affiliate.

Methodology: We implemented affiliate marketing to associate all sorts of schools with us. This
would have given us a penetration across India and a few engineering schools in India. We started
with preparing a database for schools, and during the span of the internship, we achieved a database
of 5000+ schools across India. After the database, the next step was through the sales funnel and
making some deals with the schools. After the collaboration, revenue will start flowing
automatically and would increase the reach of Talent serve as well. As per our marketing strategy,

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 Summer Internship Report| TalentServe| By Yaswanth Surapureddy

we prepared emails to offer good deals to the school and justify a win-win situation for all the three
entities involved in the transaction. This helped us to establish a rapport with them.

Conclusions
Initially, there was a lack of clarity on what exactly needed to be done by the Interns. Also,
Due to a lack of transparency, many interns were hired that was not required for the task to
improvise the planning part. Instead of getting the database made by the interns, it could have
been purchased from known sites, which would have eventually fastened up the process. Also,
the per lead cost would have been minimized.
There should have been a proper scope of the project, and goals must have been given in the
first week so that the student understands the fundamental aim of the internship. The time
management of the teams and team segregation is not done correctly, which could significantly
impact the working style. Each product was given to an individual; instead, it must be given to
a team for effective results that improve the product efficiently.

Recommendations
While we learnt a lot during this small journey, we also could some areas of improvement.
Working in this area might help in growing at a better rate. However, in spite of such positives I
would like to come up with some recommendations that I have observed while working with the
firm:
• The organization has implemented extensive Instagram ads but there are not able
to engage their audience through the Instagram account. We have zero posts from the
Instagram handle which decreases the engagement of followers. We can start posting
from those handles to create an engaging audience.
• Absence of scholarship tests from the organization can become a barrier while
expanding to other geographies of India. Talentserve should try to work on the
scholarship strategy of acquiring students. It not only helps to get good students across
the nation but also helps to attract many potential leads.
• Talentserve can also work on a separate product that will focus on the ‘Test-
series’ of different competitive exams. This market has a lot of potentials and is yet not
explored by Talentserve. A quality test series can not only help students from different
institutes but also attract them to Talentserve.
• Presence of Talentserve is still missing and it is a platform that most of the
corporate people visit regularly. In these busy schedules, people tend to miss Instagram,
and here LinkedIn comes into the picture which may attract potential leads as well.
LinkedIn is growing at a fast pace and has started offering different features which
support sales and advertisement on its platform.

Contributions
Since we were part of the marketing, our work had a direct impact that could be quantified with the
sales team's numbers. As we started implementing the modified strategies, we realized increased
business revenue. The picture was quite evident in the monthly sales data shared by the sales team.
We could identify our efforts by dividing the leads based on their generation source as the platforms
were different. We have already applied different strategies for other platforms, as evident from
the numbers. Reached out to 75+ colleges in Telangana and pitched about the courses the
company offers.

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 Summer Internship Report| TalentServe| By Yaswanth Surapureddy

We created a database of 5000+ colleges offering undergraduate courses that covered most of
India's cities. This marked the success of the expansion strategy of Talent serve as now we started
approaching schools to consider us as a potential institute to be recommended to the students. Since
the data of warm leads were not disclosed, we are confident that this might lead to several
conversions.

Learning from SIP

I have learned how to build very efficient wireframes and how we need to create the course
content for the students keeping in mind the market strategy and goals. I interacted with many
of the IIM students, which improved my network and communication skills, and I learned a lot
of soft skills from them. I can understand how and what goes into building an entirely new
product, developing it, bringing it to market, and making it successful. During implementation,
I also learned about the concepts of the marketing funnel and laid our implementation strategy on
the same.

References:
1. TalentServe. (2019, April 1). Https://Www.Talentserve.Org/. Retrieved May 16,

2022, from https://www.talentserve.org

2. Kamath, A. (2021, June 29). [New] Industry Study: EdTech in India and How

Nonlinear Uses Data to Succeed. MO Engage Blog.

https://www.moengage.com/blog/industry-study-edtech-in-india-and-how-onlinetyari-

uses-data-to-succeed/

3. Banerjee, P. (2022, September 20). EdTech Market Is Booming In India. BW

Businessworld. https://www.businessworld.in/article/EdTech-Market-Is-Booming-In-

India-/20-09-2020-322696/

4. Balsamiq Wireframes - Industry Standard Low-Fidelity Wireframing Software |

Balsamiq. (n.d.). Balsamiq. Retrieved May 16, 2022, from

https://balsamiq.com/wireframes/?gclid=CjwKCAjw7IeUBhBbEiwADhiEMUFF9LQ

rrsJ6sVJlYexETkEyi0KqQr0ccjCGMTXb_qha2mgiW_5oFhoCNs4QAvD_BwE

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