Counsel, don't sell, Byju's Raveendran tells staff; does away with sales call targets, slashes course prices

This comes after the embattled company resorted to paying only a part of the salaries for February and March, after weeks of delay.

Embattled edtech Byju’s, earlier known for its aggressive sales practices, has switched gears to a more empathetic selling approach to revive revenues and boost sagging morale.

The company has also slashed prices for its courses by up to 30 percent and rolled out flexible working policies for sales staff, sources told Moneycontrol. This comes amid the peak sales quarter, April to June for test prep companies.

According to sources, the company’s founder and CEO, Byju Raveendran, held a meeting with about 1,500 sales associates urging them to take a more empathetic approach to selling courses. This stands in stark contrast to Byju's in the last few years, where aggressive selling became par for the course.

"Byju's has completed its transition from a push-based to a pull-based sales model, which is driven by love for learning rather than the fear of missing out. Managers will now act as coaches, focused on supporting and enabling the sales team rather than enforcing strict call quotas," said a source aware of the discussions.

"Your job is not to sell, but to counsel. You are not sales people; you are education counsellors, empowering students to become better learners,” Raveendran is learnt to have said during the meeting.

Further, associates will have the flexibility to work on their own terms, with no tracking of the number of hours spent on calls. “If you can get results by spending just half an hour a day, please do that. Want to only work on the weekends? Why not?” he added, in the meeting.

Business Standard was the first to report on the development.

The company is offering the annual subscription of the BYJU'S Learning App at Rs 12,000, inclusive of taxes, while BYJU'S Classes and BYJU'S Tuition Centres (BTC) are priced at Rs 24,000 and Rs 36,000. The new pricing is at least 30 percent lower and came into effect in the last week of April.

The incentives have also been tailored differently.

“In the first month, they are offered 100 percent of the revenue they generate while the managers will get a 20 percent of the revenue from the company,” the source said.

This comes days after Moneycontrol reported that the company has linked its sales staff salaries to revenue generated by them, suspending fixed pay for them at least for the next month.

Raveendran also told employees that through this model they can recover their salary and arrears. This comes at a time when the company has held back up to two months' salary due to the employees amid liquidity issues.

Byju’s chief also promised that after clearing arrears, associates will continue to receive 50 percent of sales closed, while managers will receive 10 percent. In the meeting, Raveendran added that this “four week experiment” has the potential to become a “forever model.”

Raveendran also told employees to report any ill-treatment, forced-sales or rude behaviour of managers directly to him. To top that, Byju’s CEO urged employees to ask their “friends” to join the company to sell and act as their managers, sharing a desire to build a 50,000-strong sales force again within the next year.

Byju's has laid off over 10,000 employees in the last 12 months as it battled a double blow of drying venture capital funding and slowing demand for online learning services.

The development in sales strategy also comes amid wider changes at Byju's, where Raveendran is back in the driving seat as CEO, taking the helm from Arjun Mohan, who stepped down on April 15.

Meanwhile, the funds raised from the recently concluded rights issue is tied up in an escrow account as per orders from NCLT, till the disposal of the above mentioned case. At least seven vendors have sued Byju's at NCLT to recover their dues.

The company has tried to fix some of the problems since then. Its early investor Ranjan Pai ploughed in the capital, it set up an advisory council with veterans such as Mohandas Pai and Rajnish Kumar and elevated Arjun Mohan as CEO. In the latest development, however, both Kumar and Mohan decided to step down to pursue other opportunities. It is also in talks to divest assets such as Great Learning and Epic.