The presentation talks about how Indian IT Services companies should be selling in a SMAC world.

1. Selling in a SMAC World – What should Indian IT Services
companies do ?
Marutish Varanasi
Market Consultant
(Marutish@gmail.com)
June 18th 2013

2. 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
don’t 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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 won’t necessarily work in the
future. In this new world, the key
challenge for IT firms is to
understand and enable customer
needs.

6. 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.