Selling in a SMAC World What should Indian IT Services companies do ?

Marutish Varanasi
Market Consultant (Marutish@gmail.com) June 18th 2013

Introduction In the last two decades, Indian IT companies have been selling to CIOs across fortune 500 organizations and have has strong relationships with CIOs and the technology function, but they dont have and posses the same strong relationships and reach across the CXO level at the organization, particularly the CEOs and other functional heads. Focus beyond the CIO Indian IT companies need to unlock and undertake client mining new opportunities within their existing client base by creating capabilities for a new generation of IT buyers from chief executive officer, chief marketing officer, chief procurement officer to chief financial officer to the head of human resources in the existing client organization.

Focus on building senior business relationships Indian IT companies need to bet for growth on services which are focused on solutions especially those bridging the CMO & CIO business needs and beyond. Selling to the CEO and the board Currently, Indian IT companies have been seen as more technology focused and less business focused. Moving forward, a key priority for Indian companies if they intend to make their presence felt in the SMAC world is to building strong relationships with senior business leaders beyond the technology function across their client organizations and prospects. For this, they need to learn selling to the CEO and the board of the client.

Selling to the CEO calls for new skills and capabilities Indian IT companies for selling to CEO and the board of a client need to add new capabilities beyond the current technology solutions. They need to have transformational capabilities to help the client in taking business decisions and implement these decisions.

Focus on functional capabilities too

Focusing on human resources function Leaders of human resources are increasing investments in social and mobile analytics to build smarter work forces and social enterprises. Focus on procurement As global supply chains are reshaping with the new changing world, Chief procurement officers of corporate are increasing their annual IT investments in gaining supplier intelligence.

Focus on marketing function Marketing in the new connected Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud (SMAC) world is changing. The impact of SMAC world is far-reaching than that of internet era. The most active among the Chief Marketing officers are reinventing the practice of marketing and are analyzing customer behaviour and preferences in the era of big data and analytics. Understand and enable customer needs From a marketing perspective in this new world the positioning that made the IT firm successful in the past wont necessarily work in the future. In this new world, the key challenge for IT firms is to understand and enable customer needs.

Indian IT companies should acquire new capabilities? An ideal way forward for Indian IT companies to build stronger CEO and CxO relationships is to expand their competencies in business consulting. Inorganic route The easier route for building capabilities Indian IT companies can take over a global/boutique business consulting firm with strong credentials in specific horizontal markets for building skills in business transformation and change management. The acquisition of a global/boutique business consulting firm will provide Indian IT companies competencies to drive business change and transformation among their clients and it will also help them get recognized for thought leadership among peers.