2yrs of Building A Software Sales Team in the Diamond City

When I first set out to build a sales team for Refrens in Surat, I assumed I’d be competing with other software companies for talent. After all, The city is brimming with 1000s of software services firms. However, to my surprise, I quickly discovered that my real competition wasn’t in tech at all—it was in diamonds. The top sales talent in the city was busy selling diamonds and diamond jewellery, not software.

These salespeople were exceptionally polished—fluent in English, with a natural charisma over the phone. They were selling high-value commodities, managing complex sales cycles lasting anywhere from 7 to 60 days, and dealing with clients from all over the world. In short, they had the exact skill set I was looking for to drive sales at Refrens. Around the same time, a slowdown hit the global diamond market, leading to layoffs across Surat. I saw this as a golden (or should I say - Diamond?) opportunity to recruit these talented diamond salesmen into software sales. However, as soon as we got to the salary discussions, I realized I was up against a different kind of challenge: the battle of incentives.

Until that point, I had been focused on the traditional fixed salary plus modest commission model that’s standard in software sales. But diamond sellers operate under a different paradigm. One candidate mentioned that just the previous month, he had sold $50,000 worth of jewellery and earned a commission that more than doubled his fixed salary. I quickly realized that our typical salary structure wasn’t going to cut it.

In the software world, a 70:30 split between fixed and variable pay is common. But here I was - facing candidates used to earning 2-3 times their base pay through commissions. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to reward high performance, but our sales environment was different. We were selling software at an average price of $50 to SMEs, with little brand recognition - nothing close to the allure of selling well-cut diamonds.

So, we pivoted. We turned to other industries and hired people from customer support backgrounds, as well as fresh college graduates. Only 2 of the first 10 members of our sales team had any prior sales experience. We invested heavily in their training, with guidance from Ajay Pal Singh Sethi from CUR8 Labs and Kuldeep Dhankar . We brought in the industry’s top trainers to transform our “rough diamonds” into well-polished gems.

Fast forward to last month: 6 members of the Refrens sales team took home more than double their monthly salary. People who had dropped out of college during the pandemic are now buying homes and cars in their 20s. 

Every time someone comes in with a box of ladoos saying, “I bought a house” or “I bought a car,” I feel both proud and pressured to keep this momentum going.

We believe Refrens has created a perpetual machine: a strong sales team that drives revenue and brings strong feedback to our product team, allowing us to continue shipping better and bigger products. As we keep increasing our product prices every few months, the incentives grow, and so do the conversion rates, leading to even greater rewards for the team. Here’s to more houses, more cars, and more dreams fulfilled.

P.S.: We’re expanding our sales team and looking for both rough and well-cut diamonds who are ready to go through the grind:)