Selling a SMAC word. This brief note tells on how Indian IT services companies should be selling in a SMAC world. In a highly competitive and commoditized IT Services industry, this article provide strategies for Indian IT firms on how to be competitive.

1. How Indian IT Services companies
– should be selling –
in a SMAC World
Marutish Varanasi
(Marutish@gmail.com)
June 17th
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 on building senior business relationships
Indian IT companies need to bets 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 of the client
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. 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 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 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. 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.
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.

3. 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.
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. 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.
Marutish Varanasi
(The author is a market consultant based out Hyderabad – India). He can be reached at
Marutish@gmail.com