Ola

The Market Context: Category Creation in a High-Stakes EV Landscape

EV in India isn’t just a trend — it’s a transformation. With shifting policies, rising fuel costs, and climate-conscious consumers, electric mobility is no longer a niche play.

But category creation in EV comes with unique challenges:

No historical demand data for emerging categories like 2W B2B fleets or 4W electric sedans

Customers vary wildly — from tech-savvy urban riders to rural logistics partners

Sales cycles involve infrastructure, financing, and trust

Go-to-market efforts need speed, but also coordination across teams that move at different paces

That was the landscape Ola Electric was operating in. And they weren’t just launching a product — they were building a category.

The Challenge: Moving Fast, Without Breaking the System

Ola Electric was preparing to launch multiple EV categories across:

Two-wheelers (2W) for individual buyers

Four-wheelers (4W) in early development

B2B fleet vehicles, targeting logistics, last-mile delivery, and ride-hailing partners

Each vertical had its own buyer journey, sales motion, and operational complexity.

The GTM bottlenecks included:

Disconnected planning between product, sales, and marketing

No unified view of who the customer was across use cases

Lack of clear repeatable GTM templates for new rollouts

Sales enablement gaps at the regional and field team level

Ola needed a tight GTM system that could move as fast as the market — without compromising on message clarity or operational control.

What We Did: The Ola Electric x ScalePods GTM Engine

1. Cross-Functional Alignment: Getting Everyone in the Same Room (and Rhythm)

We kicked things off with alignment workshops across:

Product & category leads

Central and regional sales teams

Brand, growth, and CRM teams

Field ops and service delivery

These weren’t just syncs. They were working sprints focused on:

Defining shared KPIs

Mapping category-level launch calendars

Aligning brand narratives with frontline objections

Creating a fast feedback loop from market to product

This broke silos and created real-time visibility across GTM stakeholders.

2. Category-Specific GTM Charters

Each EV vertical was treated like its own business line — with its own GTM charter.

These charters defined:

Core user personas (riders, fleet managers, government buyers)

Primary and secondary acquisition channels

Value proposition variations by use case and geography

Launch milestones, success metrics, and ownership structure

Sales playbooks including objection handling, price anchoring, and financing hooks

We packaged this into a “Launch Ops Kit” — a modular GTM blueprint that the sales and category teams could run with.

3. Persona Definition + Trigger Mapping

EV isn’t a one-size-fits-all purchase. A student buying a 2W scooter behaves very differently from a last-mile fleet operator.

So we created a persona grid that included:

Demographic, psychographic, and behavioral traits

Key buying triggers and dealbreakers

Purchase timing patterns (seasonality, festivals, incentives)

Financing needs, channel preferences, and trust signals required

This shaped messaging, outreach cadences, and dealer/channel strategies — all built around real-world decision patterns, not assumptions.

4. Sprint-Based Funnel Ops

We brought in sprint discipline to GTM execution:

Each category rollout was structured into 2-4 week sprints

Every sprint tracked funnel metrics: lead volume, test drives booked, sales velocity, drop-off stages

Regional managers had real-time dashboards showing performance by cluster

Feedback loops were built into every sprint — so narratives, collaterals, and CRM flows could evolve on the fly

This created a repeatable launch model, without sacrificing responsiveness.

The Outcome: Operational GTM That Scaled With Speed

Faster category launches, with clear owner-metrics per vertical

Improved funnel efficiency — tighter messaging led to fewer drop-offs and better-qualified leads

Sales and brand teams worked in sync, not in sequence

GTM charters reused and adapted across 2W, 4W pilots, and B2B plays

Market-level insights fed directly back into product roadmaps — reducing rollout risk