With a few years of content selling experience in India to both academic and corporate I thought this is a good time to pen some of my thoughts and experience of selling scientific literature and tools in India. In this blog I wanted to capture some of my experience and challenges in selling content, specially to corporate in India. These are my experiences purely based on interactions with the companies that we have been working and trying to capture. In my role today I manage corporate sales across India selling into pharma, semiconductor, IT & Manufacturing companies. From PSUs to contract research companies. In my contact rolodex you would find Product Engineers, Scientist, Solution architects, HR L&D, Training heads & CTOs.
Let me present my perspective of Research by Corporates in India? Who is research in Corporate India? What does research mean in India?
In India Corporate research can easily be compared with re-engineering, Low cost engineering, reduce cost engineering. If its pharma except for a couple of pharma companies most pharma companies are API, Bulk drug or doing contract research. When it comes to selling content to them its a story to tell and I hope I am able to do justice to this.
For starters lets look at life in a day of an Engineer at a R&D Centre, this is a typical captive R&D in India, these guys work on projects with a very specific task assigned and leaving very little to his imagination except for doing what he is told. This though is changing as Engineers are not willing to give in to the tasks alone, you see increasing number of patents filed from India as a testament to this but a lot more is desired. The other end of the spectrum is Indian Engineers are very happy doing what they are doing and not really worried about reading or staying update, most people not willing to invest in themselves to keep themselves updated and often ending up doing job below their skill level. People seem to become so comfortable with the 10-15% hikes they get every year that they dont want to even look beyond. At the far end of the spectrum is the Management, so what do they want. They want people to take initiative yet they dont want to give them any freedom. For every idea to be selected you have an internal bureaucracy to win and there is very little scope for failure. They want to maintain the control on who is doing what without cutting any slack. Cant blame them we are not very disciplined when we are left free ?
What happens in Pharma is even more fun to highlight, I like to quote a very senior chemist/scientist once who said "When you mix two chemicals the reaction will automatically happen whether you know chemistry or not. We really dont need to read a lot but know what we shouldn't do. And to do this we look at who else has done it and how. Hence we rely on patents and molecules that we have been told to identify and work". I understand this do what sells dont worry about the unknown someone will find a solution we will try to find an alternate and do it cheap.
There are many other such examples of what are we researching and to produce what. From most of my interactions I hear very similar lines. I have only 12 hrs of work time and in that most of the time goes in fire fighting where is the time to read? So then how do we sell content?? Is no one reading? I would very wrong if i remotely indicate this. We are..and if we have to go by footfalls on website and number of unique visits to publishers website I am confident that India ranks among the top 3. But what needs to be understood is that numbers do not mean anything in India. We are a 100 Billion plus and counting so numbers dont matter to me. What matters is out of the number of visits how many finally continue to return and bring more with them. I am sure that the returning numbers to website would be a relatively smaller number and in that if we are looking at regular visits that number might still be the smallest (as it would be in any other country as well but when you look at the ratio it would certainly be smaller than all others). What I am trying to get is the model in which most content is being sold in India to corporates. Buy pick n choose or buy collection of articles with minimum spend or enhanced licenses. If you ask any Content sales person in the industry today he/she would simply say corporate selling is challenging.
Why this view, yes it is challenging but the selling model is also questionable. For an engineer on the ground he has cost pressure and asking for any resource that will help him in his work would also mean adding cost to the product which neither his manager or his management is very keen on. Why spend on a notebook if you have give an ROI on every page utilized by the end user. People will start find new places to write if you ask them to explain the ROI on every page used. We cant ration everything if we do that people will find ways to steal and thats exactly what happens in content sales. My understanding of the industry and academia collaboration is my engineer will come to your library let him use the resources. My engineer friend is doing Mtech i will take his help to get the paper. Lets find if they have individual membership one of the team leads will become member and if we need one or two papers we will use his ID. All manifestation of a wrong model. We cannot have an ROI on a notebook.
So what do we do ??? Apart from the fact that most of the content, like this blog is becoming free, open source and that people are unwilling to buy new content whatever be the reason. While there must be millions of discussion out there on open source and not so open source I strongly believe that the sales model has to evolve.
Here is what I think may be the future sales model for most STM publishers. Tools to deliver tangible research or Sell reusable content at premium (similar to Standards/compliance reports). I have to believe that the content itself will become irrelevant but the outcome from the content would be Gold and that has to be charged. You cannot use all open source content and make millions from others. Just like in software if you make money you have to share the fruits with others (Android). If I am publishing and the company wants an affiliation sure why not.. The fees for company affiliation will be different and will be defined by the technology in question. I want to file a patent and the patent refers my papers, the patent is owned by the company so the company has to pay for the referral. What will be the pricing model ? How will you identify the opportunity and demand money from companies? This is the next billion dollar answer
Let me present my perspective of Research by Corporates in India? Who is research in Corporate India? What does research mean in India?
In India Corporate research can easily be compared with re-engineering, Low cost engineering, reduce cost engineering. If its pharma except for a couple of pharma companies most pharma companies are API, Bulk drug or doing contract research. When it comes to selling content to them its a story to tell and I hope I am able to do justice to this.
For starters lets look at life in a day of an Engineer at a R&D Centre, this is a typical captive R&D in India, these guys work on projects with a very specific task assigned and leaving very little to his imagination except for doing what he is told. This though is changing as Engineers are not willing to give in to the tasks alone, you see increasing number of patents filed from India as a testament to this but a lot more is desired. The other end of the spectrum is Indian Engineers are very happy doing what they are doing and not really worried about reading or staying update, most people not willing to invest in themselves to keep themselves updated and often ending up doing job below their skill level. People seem to become so comfortable with the 10-15% hikes they get every year that they dont want to even look beyond. At the far end of the spectrum is the Management, so what do they want. They want people to take initiative yet they dont want to give them any freedom. For every idea to be selected you have an internal bureaucracy to win and there is very little scope for failure. They want to maintain the control on who is doing what without cutting any slack. Cant blame them we are not very disciplined when we are left free ?
What happens in Pharma is even more fun to highlight, I like to quote a very senior chemist/scientist once who said "When you mix two chemicals the reaction will automatically happen whether you know chemistry or not. We really dont need to read a lot but know what we shouldn't do. And to do this we look at who else has done it and how. Hence we rely on patents and molecules that we have been told to identify and work". I understand this do what sells dont worry about the unknown someone will find a solution we will try to find an alternate and do it cheap.
There are many other such examples of what are we researching and to produce what. From most of my interactions I hear very similar lines. I have only 12 hrs of work time and in that most of the time goes in fire fighting where is the time to read? So then how do we sell content?? Is no one reading? I would very wrong if i remotely indicate this. We are..and if we have to go by footfalls on website and number of unique visits to publishers website I am confident that India ranks among the top 3. But what needs to be understood is that numbers do not mean anything in India. We are a 100 Billion plus and counting so numbers dont matter to me. What matters is out of the number of visits how many finally continue to return and bring more with them. I am sure that the returning numbers to website would be a relatively smaller number and in that if we are looking at regular visits that number might still be the smallest (as it would be in any other country as well but when you look at the ratio it would certainly be smaller than all others). What I am trying to get is the model in which most content is being sold in India to corporates. Buy pick n choose or buy collection of articles with minimum spend or enhanced licenses. If you ask any Content sales person in the industry today he/she would simply say corporate selling is challenging.
Why this view, yes it is challenging but the selling model is also questionable. For an engineer on the ground he has cost pressure and asking for any resource that will help him in his work would also mean adding cost to the product which neither his manager or his management is very keen on. Why spend on a notebook if you have give an ROI on every page utilized by the end user. People will start find new places to write if you ask them to explain the ROI on every page used. We cant ration everything if we do that people will find ways to steal and thats exactly what happens in content sales. My understanding of the industry and academia collaboration is my engineer will come to your library let him use the resources. My engineer friend is doing Mtech i will take his help to get the paper. Lets find if they have individual membership one of the team leads will become member and if we need one or two papers we will use his ID. All manifestation of a wrong model. We cannot have an ROI on a notebook.
So what do we do ??? Apart from the fact that most of the content, like this blog is becoming free, open source and that people are unwilling to buy new content whatever be the reason. While there must be millions of discussion out there on open source and not so open source I strongly believe that the sales model has to evolve.
Here is what I think may be the future sales model for most STM publishers. Tools to deliver tangible research or Sell reusable content at premium (similar to Standards/compliance reports). I have to believe that the content itself will become irrelevant but the outcome from the content would be Gold and that has to be charged. You cannot use all open source content and make millions from others. Just like in software if you make money you have to share the fruits with others (Android). If I am publishing and the company wants an affiliation sure why not.. The fees for company affiliation will be different and will be defined by the technology in question. I want to file a patent and the patent refers my papers, the patent is owned by the company so the company has to pay for the referral. What will be the pricing model ? How will you identify the opportunity and demand money from companies? This is the next billion dollar answer
