IT Services Marketing

They are hiring again!!

With what seems to be a “come back” for the IT outsourcers, most of the biggies are hiring staff, and how! The leading IT companies in India, like Infosys, Wipro, Mahindra Sathyam, TCS and Cognisant are opening their gates to welcome new talents, especially in their middle and senior level. According to an ET report, the headhunters estimate about 3000 senior professionals have been hired by the Indian IT sector in the last quarter of 2009.

The companies are irrefutably looking at seasoned talent in order to bid for the upcoming IT deals, predicted to be huge. Even a high talent acquisition cost (average CTC of approx $32000 pa), is not dampening the spirits - the way to go is, indeed, forward. Here’s wishing both the companies and the headhunters, a happy new year all the way!

Good news for the Indian outsourcers

If the Infosys revenue report for the quarter ended December 31, 2009 is anything to go by, the offshore outsourcers are recovering and in fact managing to make profits. According to a Networkworld report , India’s second largest outsourcer, reported on Tuesday revenue of US$1.2 billion, up 5.2 percent over the same quarter in the previous year. Though the profit was only 0.6, the company has revised upwards its forecast for the fiscal year ending March 31.

2010 promises to be better with experts predicting new large deals by the second quarter, a revenue growth of about 15 to 17 percent by the end of the next Indian fiscal year, a 19% growth in the domestic market and a pick up in the global IT spend.

While all this is great news for the Indian outsourcers, experts also add that there is a lot of work to do. Siddharth Pai, a partner at outsourcing consultancy firm Technology Partners International (TPI), says that in order to take advantage of these upcoming opportunities, Indian companies will also have to invest in a variety of new technologies like cloud computing and green computing.
Also, he added, they will also have to start looking like global companies with the ability to service their clients from multiple locations. Long way to go for a happy ending…

Choosing by trust: Services sell better to clients who trust

As I often repeat, business is run between people–not companies. People are by nature a trusting tribe, including your customers who also happen to be people. In today’s services market, buyers are spoilt for choice: ever-shrinking vendors’ fees, large pool of suppliers, and easy access to services. This quite resembles a consumer business today. How do you make a mark in this?

Have you explored ways to build trust with your customers? Easier said than done. But here are some points to think through.

1. Embrace transparency: from real capabilities (when you are pitching services) to pricing the deal to all the way during executing a project, being transparent is quite possible. All it takes is a few minutes of your time to provide a voluntary update, tell your sales heads to learn to say no, and show your customer how you priced her engagement. This way, you don’t build very high expectations, but can easily surpass what you set, and need not remember what you said last week.

2. Know your customer: at the end of it, the person on the other side of the wall is also human–with needs, pressures, and living through business cycles. Getting to know her, her peers, work groups, and company is quite an achievable task. It will give you a better insight on her decision-making process, and align your services to her future needs.

3. Stand up for a cause: It may seem disconnected to your line of business, but your business is part of a larger society that does not always work only for monetary reasons. A staffing company adopting a stricter visa compliance program might seem counter-intuitive. When people need to work with a company that is strict but transparent, who will they choose? When clients want to work with a vendor who is transparent and compliant, who will they choose? Work with the forces that influence your business in society: your local business council, technology groups, and so on.

I welcome your thoughts on how your business has built transparency.

Social Media in the IT Services Marketing

Over the last two years, many of our clients have been rushing to create a Twitter handle, Facebook fan pages, Linked In profiles and so on. Specialist B2B social marketing firms have made grandiose pitches on traffice generation, monetization and so on. After having worked with some of the larger IT services firms in their social media marketing (SMM), we have learnt a few things.

1. Have a reason to connect in the social world: CIOs, Vice Presidents of Sourcing, typical corporate buyers do NOT make decisions reading a blog, a Twitter feed or a Facebook comment. Sad, but true. So if you really need to connect with them, SMM may not really fetch you the right returns on your investments. Remember, social media is so named for a reason: it is for a society.

2. So define your SMM audience: as a services company, your audience could include your internal employees, consultants, recruiters, and so on. Find ways to connect with them informally through the social tools. If you are launching a new service line, your consultants could give you feedback on its life expectations. If you have a new hire, your Tweet could announce the position and could feed into your Linked In group. For a start, use your SMM to leverage the audience closest to you. Your prospect client…ah, they will come in a bit.

3. Blog in earnest and they will come: Yes, starting a blog is cool, but not after the first post. If you really spend some time (10 mins) to write a thought, disperse it to your group, you will find it slowly getting you traction. Try this everyday (now I really got to eat my own dog food), and you will find it a decent strategy to connect with new people: influencers, market watchers, other bloggers who write to build an interest group.

It is not a bad idea to simply not blog at all. Try using it as an internal collaboration tool for your company to build ideas, share news, and so on. WP is cool.

4. Consider listening before selling: Quite often, blogs are repeats of web pages. Tweets announce messages about the company that has no relevance to the receivers. Facebook fan pages are filled with more marketing spiel, and Linked In groups are getting to be blatant postings for services. It will be helpful if you really spend a bit of time to listen to what your audience is asking for. Is your blog discussing the H1 visa issue with your consultants? Why not? Is your Linked In group announcing new opportunities in cloud computing? Why do you think you should not be re-posting such jobs for your group to read about?

5. Be traditional: your business comes from people who are worried about ensuring business-as-usual, who are fighting budgets, who are under pressure from C-suite to deliver tangible results. They are under pressure to help roll-out their own company’s SMM. It is easy to still be connecting with these buyers and make business the traditional way. Here again, the three elements do not go away: relevance (how relevant your buyer thinks your service is), responsiveness (how well your communication evinces a response from them), and reliance (if your client can think he or she can rely on your pitch).

I would be interested in hearing your SMM initiatives and how they have helped.

Tags: Facebook, Linked In, social media marketing, Twitter

Presenting a Service: an Ad agency’s beautiful lesson

So four ad agencies were called in to pitch for a multi-million dollar account. The client gave each agency 2 hours. The first 3 agencies went in with big suitcases of slides (this was still when the LCD projector was not connected to the laptop or (shudder!) Microsoft PPT. They took the two-hour window to showcase their capabilities, client lists, and awards. In the end, they each had one slide for “Questions?”

The last agency went in with 6 people. The CEO stood up and said, “You are probably brain-dead by now. We can shovel another 2 hours of our past at you, or we can spend the next two hours understanding your business and offer 12 hours (2 hours x 6 people) of free consulting.”

Guess who won the business.

How are we presenting our services? Suffocating by slideware? Death by the bullet-points? If we are called in for a presentation, should we not first ask the client to speak, and then tailor our conversation around their discussions? Assumption is the first step to ignorance.

Let me know how you plan your next presentation.
Maybe we could help you turn it into a conversation with your client.

Tags: powerpoints, Sales presentation

Selling the promise

When you travel, why do you prefer a particular hotel chain? Why do you lean towards a specific restaurant? Human beings buy promises. The Sheraton (or Marriott, Hilton, Ritz) promise you a certain set of standard comfort elements and quality. The Buca or Il Fornaio promise a certain menu and food. Services industry competitors sell you promise–not rooms, or menu cards, or cars. They promise you comfort, extra time to check-out, ambience, and so on.

What, my dear IT services vendor, is your promise?

Clients–humans–seek to find your promise to solve their problem. Your technology, team, expertise, experience are ALL exactly the same as the next vendor’s. So putting up a laundry list is simply worth nothing.

Instead, have you focused on what you can promise them? For instance, can you promise them that your expertise in a middleware domain will help the client company achieve a 100% welding of all their distributed data silos into a real-time intelligence source? Can you promise a guarantee?

If you notice, this is what most clients seek: Your promise to help solve their problem.

The next time you haul out your slideware, check to see if you have a promise to sell. Because other vendors have already sold your client enough laundry lists.

Vision Problem: Why Clients and Vendors don’t see the elephant

Last month, I hosted a Breakfast With CIOs session in Silicon Valley. This very interesting session gave some insights on the pressures a CIO is facing:

- Selling IT to the C Suite as a critical component to the business is getting difficult everyday due to:
- C-suite not seeing IT as critical
- Projects not meeting goals
- Aligning IT vision to the business vision

Even as these senior leaders showcased how they successfully managed IT value delivery to the business groups, IT services providers would only distill these insights into a direct relationship to their staffing capabilities.

A project to the service market is measured in just people numbers, not in complexity, business goals, and financial benchmarks. Given this big disconnect in how clients (CIOs) and vendors see a project, how do you think the future of IT will pan out?

Thought welcome

US competing closely with India

That’s the best way to read the findings of a recent study by BDO Seidman LLP, an accounting and consulting organization. The study reveals that nearly a quarter of the chief financial officers at U.S. technology businesses who outsource plan to consider the United States as the main outsourcing destination in 2009.

The obvious reason driving this rapid growth of US in outsourcing services is the rising costs in traditional Indian destinations such as Bangalore and Mumbai, making second-tier U.S. cities like Indianapolis and Boise, Idaho, relatively more price-competitive than in the past, explains a CIO Today article.

And with the global economy burrowing deeper into recession, the pursuit of alternatives for outsourcing destinations to stretch every IT buck thin has accelerated, giving way to alternative onshore outsourcing.

As a result, such unexpected local destinations as Boise, Indianapolis and Idaho are benefiting in US. Reason: Low cost of living in these cities in comparison to other western cities such as San Francisco and Denver, according to a CIO Today article. Also, onshore outsourcing can help firms overcome the inevitable angst of working 24X7 to keep with the time zone in India.

But can this quest to substitute offshoring with onshoring beat the benefits of the dollar-rupee conversion?