The Hindu Business Line : IT services moving up the value chain

The Indian IT services industry has matured greatly over the last five years. Top tier companies are increasingly positioning themselves as ‘partners’ who can be relied upon to develop solutions to solve specific business problems, instea d of being just software ‘service providers’ or ‘vendors’ who can convert specifications to quality code.

This repositioning is not easy – especially for Indian IT services companies, whose expertise has mainly been in providing high quality execution services in scenarios where the project scope is well-defined. For these companies, their traditional target audience has been IT directors and sourcing managers who are focused on performance parameters such as cost, speed of ramp-up and service levels. But as they seek to evolve into trusted advisors, these IT services companies are faced with a new reality.

New decision makers

The way client organisations select advisors is changing, with new decision-makers such as business heads and often, even C-level executives, influencing the process and choice. These decision-makers look for very different attributes and capabilities in their advisors and use very different criteria to evaluate their competence and cultural fit.

For Indian IT services players, coping with these market dynamics is a huge challenge in terms of capability, mindset, selling approach and market perception. It is naïve to expect that client companies used to engaging with Indian companies in their capacity as reliable IT service providers will easily trust them with the task of assisting them on business-critical strategic or operational work that has traditionally been the domain of ‘management consultants’. To become trusted business advisors and effective solution providers, Indian IT services companies need to demonstrate their understanding of business problems and their manifestation and impact in the context of various industries and individual companies. They must be bold enough to envision and articulate the way entire industries are likely to evolve in the future. But perhaps most importantly, they must acquire the capability to persuade their clients to share their vision of the future and get them to prepare for that future by making appropriate changes to processes, technology, organisation structure and even performance measures.

Many companies have already begun their journey on this path of transition. Indeed, several players now offer solutions to address industry-specific problems. But offerings alone will not suffice. It is critical for Indian IT service companies to communicate credibly to the marketplace that they possess such capabilities. Limited experience in executing transformational work for their clients is inherent in the way Indian IT services companies have evolved. Therefore, by definition, they will have only a small number of proof points to demonstrate track record or capability vis-À-vis competitors with a longer history of delivering such work for the ‘C suite’. Competing head-to-head based on the number of ‘case studies’ is, therefore, not a viable option, at least in the short term.

So what can an Indian IT services company do when it does not have enough case studies to showcase? In this situation, the marketing challenge becomes one of repositioning the company in a way that is credible in the marketplace. The role of the company’s marketing team is to help different parts of the organisation convey to the client the following message: This is what the future of your business will look like (and here’s why); here’s how you can transform yourself to succeed in that new environment; here’s how you measure the success of the change and this is why we’re best equipped to help you accomplish the desired change. Both existing clients and prospects will need to be convinced about the partner’s ability to solve problems that may not be fully understood or diagnosed even within the client or prospect organisation.

Competitive discontinuity

One way to achieve the repositioning lies in moving from credentials-based marketing to opinion-based marketing. This involves leveraging knowledge of the specific industry and technology to develop and communicate credible visions of how a certain technology can transform the way a process is delivered, and therefore, create a competitive discontinuity in the industry. For Indian IT services companies, such expertise may not exist internally on the scale that is needed. And hiring such expertise is both time-consuming and expensive. This is where building ‘communities’ can be a useful and a low-cost alternative. Indeed, the entire notion of Web 2.0 is predicated on interactive and collaborative content creation and distribution. Savvy marketers will use their companies’ Web sites to bring together like-minded people (and even people who vehemently disagree) from around the world. And if the Web site can become the hub for such debates, discussions and idea exchanges, your company can benefit in the following tangible ways:

Awareness of your company goes up, as more and more people visit the Web site (and more importantly, recommend it to their peers who are also an important target audience for your marketing communication). To drive traffic to the Web site, the notion of integrated marketing and communication is useful. Of course, a robust CRM programme needs to be in place, supported by PPC campaigns and microsites.

Your company will get new perspectives and ideas on the topic under discussion; and your marketing database will keep growing.

The idea is to ‘pull’ people by offering them something they will value – ideas, best practices, different views. In a nutshell, ‘content’. Content syndication is frequently used, but to build and sustain credibility among community members, the organisation needs content generated by ‘thought leaders’ from inside the organisation.

Content need not only be white papers or viewpoints; even a four-line blog that raises a provocative question or attempts to answer a burning question can be just as effective. And the community must encourage participation even by competition – for that suggests that they are learning from your company. You may even be able to attract talent this way.

But a word of caution: Such community-building programmes must not be confused with or morph into lead generation campaigns or as a way to openly promote your offerings. Do so and your community will collapse in no time, for members will view it as another unwelcome sales pitch. People will simply stop coming to your site. The key is to use communities as a source of ideas. The packaging and dissemination of such thoughts into ‘thought leadership’ should happen through other channels. It is, of course, quite legitimate to use permission-based interactions with community members – for example, including them in your e-newsletter mailing list or inviting them to Webinars.

Walking the talk is just as important. It is not sufficient for the marketing department to do its job of repositioning the company if the rest of the organisation does not live up to the positioning. This requires companies to educate and train their sales and account management teams so that each member thinks about the client’s business and not just about the underlying technology, service level agreements or how many people will be needed to deliver the project.

Delivery too needs to start looking at how individual projects will impact the client’s business. All this is easier said than done, with all the hurly-burly of deadlines, people shortage and escalations. But then, whoever said becoming a trusted advisor to the executives at the C-suite of the world’s largest corporations is easy?

(The writer is Group Manager, Corporate Marketing, Infosys Technologies.)

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‘ITeS sector evolving beyond maintenance, processing’
‘India will reinvent the way marketing is done globally’

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