Becoming An Atron Franchisee Is A Rigorous But Valuable Process

Atron, incubated by Huddle, provides smart sanitisation technology, complete with IoT ready integration, to reduce cleaning related downtimes at industrial facilities. Atharva Sabnis, Co-Founder & CEO of Atron speaks to DQ Channels about the diverse marketing programmes of Atron

- Dr. Archana Verma

WHAT KIND OF MARKETING NETWORK DO YOU HAVE IN IN DIA? DO YOU SELL DIRECTLY TO THE CONSUMERS OR DO YOU UTILIZE CHANNEL PARTNERS, RETAILERS, ETC.?

For distribution in the pharmaceutical industry, we have a channel partnership with Parle Elizabeth, a large supplier of pharmaceutical drug-manufacturing equipment. They provide pharmaceutical manufacturers the category of machines we sanitise, so it’s a symbiotic partnership. This took a lot of effort and time for us to crack, but now that it’s here, we envisage this being expediting distribution across our core market. In addition to getting introduced to potential clients via Parle, we also do direct marketing, followed by on-site demonstrations to prove the effiacy of our technology.

For all other industries that make up our secondary and tertiary markets, we do direct B2B marketing. We’ve also amended the traditional channel partner structure to enable them become distributors of our technology in the hospitality industry – these channel partners are our franchisees. The franchisees invest in our technology, hire and train semi and unskilled labour to provide services to hotels which are our customers. Since we encourage franchisees to hire labour from underprivileged communities, this business model has the added benefit of creating jobs for those who need them the most, in addition to creating independent entrepreneurs (i.e. the franchisees).

While we have a very lean team, all the members of which wear multiple hats. We’re presently hiring to expand our marketing team to effiiently add new customers, as well as franchisees, to our pipeline.

HOW DO YOU MANAGE THEIR TRAINING PROGRAMME TO MAINTAIN THEIR SKILLS AND QUALITY OF SERVICE?