Shifting from the traditional focus of selling services to IT heads of leading customers such as Citigroup and General Electric, Indian top IT firms including Wipro, TCS and Infosys plan to follow Accenture’s sales model.
These companies plan to hire senior partners who have a vast experience and are capable of having a dialogue with chief executives of the organizations.
Wipro, which serves customers such as British Petroleum (BP) and Citi, has hired around a dozen senior partners from rivals Accenture, Ernst & Young and Deloitte over the past few months. Girish S Paranjpe, the companys joint chief executive, told ET in an interview that his company would hire another 30 such partners in 2010.
Some senior professionals who have joined Wipro during the past few months as part of the companys new sales strategy include Kirk Strawser, managing partner and global head, Wipro Consulting Services; Chris Rooney, global practice head, business transformation; and Roger Camrass, senior practice partner, business transformation.
“We often lost because of having pure CIO-level dialogues, we got hurt and even lost some deals,’ he said. “We will hire another 30-40 such professionals who will be responsible for growing our client relationships to $30-40 million in revenues,” he added.
For many years, TCS, Infosys and Wipro have been focused on software application development and maintenance, getting new business from CIOs of large customers such as Citi, GE and many others. As they now seek bigger, multi-year transformational deals, they need to penetrate boardrooms of Fortune-500 companies.
“Client partners think and breathe business problems of customers who seek advise and guidancethey are people with a few decades of experience,” Mr Paranjpe added.
In a year when business was hard to come by, Wipro managed to penetrate large customers such as BP, helped by the new approach. Camrass, who joined Wipro as senior practice partner a few months ago, is respected by many decisionmakers within BP. With over 35 years of experience, Mr Camrass has worked with top consulting firms such as Ernst & Young.
Indias biggest software exporter, TCS, once perceived as a slow-moving IT behemoth, is also recruiting these partner-profile people, according to an industry analyst who wished to remain anonymous.
According to R Suresh, MD of executive search firm Stanton Chase, all top IT firms are looking at hiring partner-level people. “One of the reasons is they are winning huge long-term IT outsourcing contracts. These are annuity-based contracts and the client needs to see the same face when hes interacting with the service provider,” he said.
Unlike the traditional Accenture model, Indian companies are hiring these professionals more as ‘client partners’, and not necessarily ‘equity partners’, added Mr Suresh.
Experts such as John C McCarthy, vice-president and principal analyst of Forrester Research, say Indian firms need to shift from having pure technology-based dialogues and work on their sales and marketing efforts. “This will be one of the biggest cultural shiftsthese companies need to intensify their sales and marketing efforts,” he said.
Indeed, by engaging with top business leaders at a customer organisation, Accenture creates entry barriers for other suppliers. “Accentures partner-driven sales model is the ultimate form of client engagement,” Edelweiss analysts Viju George, Kunal Sangoi and Pratik Gandhi noted in their September report. Today, the common sales structure of the big three Indian tech firms is typically three-tieredoverall vertical head, client director in overall charge of client relationship, and multiple account managers handling different facets of the relationship.
Whats missing is a supreme partner who the client can look to as a trusted advisor. The profile of such a partner is not easy to findtypically he has spent decades in consulting at the partner level or has hard-to-match industry experience with significant P&L responsibility in a company, the Edelweiss analysts said.
Source : http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Indian_IT_majors_to_follow_Accentures_sales_model-nid-64006.html
