1. Project Opportunity Finding or Account Mining — an approach that will bring
more opportunities during this economical crisis for an organization
Prepared by: Dr. Parimalendu Bandhyopadhya
H.O.D of Dept of Business administration (Bengal Engineering College, Durgapur)
Prepared by: Joydeep Chowdhury
Former Lecturer of Dept of Computer Application (B.B College, Asansol)
Introduction:
Project Opportunity Finding or Account Mining - a newest approach to find out opportunities
from the existing clients or from the accounts. The software companies are specially adapting the
Project Opportunity Finding approach. Project Opportunity Finding is an effective approach,
which helps also to find the capabilities, the services and financial strength of the customer in the
special services area. It is also effective for the IT companies to gain contracts or projects
especially from existing client or the client from competitors in this economic slowdown time.
This “Project Opportunity Finding” or Account Mining approach is highly acceptable by the
clients because some time clients also don’t know the services and the requirements for their
business, the best technology supports, the cost effective frame works services clearly. The
“Project Opportunity Finding” also contains a complete lifecycle which us to start from finding
the “Services Opportunities” in client business to the deployment of “Proposed opportunities” in
customer environment. The second or third stage of this approach is contains the consultancy
services for the customer. This also helps to build better relationship with the customers or
clients.
Benefit of Project Opportunity Finding or Account Mining:
The benefits of "Project Opportunity Finding" or Account Mining can be depicted as---- "Getting
more opportunities with less effort". The advantages of "Project Opportunity Finding" are:
• In some critical economical situation (For e.g. the "Economical Crisis” in 2001 and 2008-
09) the "Project Opportunity Finding helps organization to find out opportunities for
existing customer or other customer. Because this time customer or client use to retain
the strength of their kitty and use to relies o their "Risk Management" strategies. Clients
are use to throw less attention to the "Service Support", "Production Support" areas rather
than their core "Services", "Production".
But co-incidentally these "Service Support", "Production Support” areas may helps to
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2. boost the core "Services and Production" which directly affect the client revenue. The
venders use to find out these areas of opportunities where their service implementation
will be helpful for clients. In this way the vender can understand the "Client Business"
clearly and client can also understand the "Critical Crisis Point" and "Value Assurance
Services" in their business.
One example will briefly elaborate the scenarios. One of the U.S giant "First Food"
Producing Company started to reduce its investments for IT supports and Call Centers
because of this recent economical crisis. But, still there was no remarkable sustainment in
revenue. Their vender an IT and BPO Company had done a survey and found out that-----
-- “Most of the "First Food" customers does not want to wait for their order for long time,
they want to spend that wasted time either in office or for their personal job purposes".
Hence to improve the services of that "First Food" company, the vender suggested
implementing some customer support centers where they can take the order when
customer is going to park their car for restaurant by an "Auto Caller and Identification
Machine". This approach affected and last quarter their revenue has grown 4.5% the
previous quarter.
• Project Opportunity Finding helps to find out and grooms some of the “Technical Service
Providing” areas for vender. That technical areas may be not the biggest practice for the
vender but still this kind of “Economical Crisis” time most of the clients or customer try
to find out some “Small technical practice scale venders” who can provide necessary
services with low cost along with quality assurance.
For the “Small technical practice scale venders”, they don’t have that renownedness for
their best technology practices. So, “Project Opportunity Finding” is the only way to find
the opportunities and project the opportunities with the capability document to client.
• The clients are use to relies on the existing venders and if venders are taking “Project
Opportunity Finding” as approach to find out more opportunities, actually they will work
as a “Technical Consultant” of client. In future they may be assigned or referred as
“Technical Consultant”.
• Through “Project Opportunity Finding” one vender can measure its capabilities towards a
specific “Technology Area”. After measuring the capabilities venders can implement
these in their “Proposals”, “Capability Documents” and can do some changes in their
“SOW/CR/RR.
• “Project Opportunity Finding” not only provides the information about the client business
but also it provides the information regarding the verticals and geographical distribution
of business. This experience can be use in any of the related vertical and geographical
distribution.
For example some of the Indian IT companies are started their business in Japan and Korea as
the new emerging business geographical location. Their “Project Opportunity Finding” practice
brought lots of opportunities at critical economical time. The IT companies successfully
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3. executed the projects because of their knowledge of verticals and geographical distribution of
business.
Approach of Project Opportunity Finding or Account Mining:
Project Opportunity Finding or Account Mining is a cyclic concept and approach. It will run
continuously. But there should continuous monitoring of the customer business, market, vertical,
expansion, geographical expansion, culture, political impact, business leaders’ approaches,
needs, requirements and competitors’ business, their technological practice and business support.
The approaches can be described in following steps:
1] Create template for Account Information: Create and template that will be contains some
basic as well as some critical information about each account. The information will be as
follows: 1) Name of the Account 2) Geographical Distribution of Customer Business 3) Industry
Vertical 4) Present and past year revenue and profit 5) Present and past year IT expanses 6)
Technology services provided by vender 7) Technology they badly needed 8)Technology they
use to take services 9) Who is their competitors 10) What is the current portfolio that vender has
about the customer 11) What are their present step about recent economical crisis 12) Who are
the main customer of the their product 13) What additional services or improvement they can
implies 14) What are the domain support customer specifically require 15) What top level
technology services other competitors of customer are following. 16) What is the relationship
status with customer?
17) What is the relationship status of vender’s competitors with customer 18) some basic account
base information like number of resources providing support to customer. 19) Who are the
controllers of the customer account in vender region? 20) Comparing customer approach with its
competitors.
2] Collect Information for each account: Pass this template to controller of each account or
some of the person who may provide the required information specified in template. Verify the
information with the GRM or AM of that account.
3] Create a repository for each “Account base Information”: Create a common repository of
these templates for each of the account where authorized people use to give some contributed
data; rectify the invalid information with accurate data with proper reference. These verification
will be a cyclic process and will be done time-to-time, may be everyday practice.
4] Verification of Information: Verify these information through each Account Manager,
GRM, GM or high-level Account personnel: Once all the information has been collected, these
all information will be verified by either AM, PM and GRM or by all of them. There may be
some dedicated group to verify the information.
5] Use this template for “Project Opportunity Finding”: The final templates are given to the
team, which is responsible for creating Project Opportunity Finding document. The team may be
divided account wise, Business Unite wise, Vertical wise, Geographical distribution wise,
Revenue wise or by other perspective wise.
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4. 6] Find out the service areas and the product sectors that Customer offered: Find out the
services offered and the product development of the customer. It will help vender to understand
the customer product and service life cycle.
After understanding the life cycle vender can find out which step of this cycle require changes or
require automation to survive and compete with current market trends. Each of the steps and
automated system or support activities, ITES approaches, consulting activities should be
compare with the competitors’ steps and support activities. This competitive difference,
suggestion, consulting supports should be crystallize and documentaries.
Suppose a retail customer contains some “Inventory Process” for their goods storage and transfer
to depots. If the vender can understand the chain of process he advantages will be:
Vender can refer the success story to some other retail customer with the steps and automated
system or support activities, ITES approaches, consulting activities.
The vender can study some stander process and refer that process to present customer.
Vender can find out the lop holes of customer’s process.
Vender can find out the exact step where customer requires automation, consulting or other
supports.
7] Brief analysis of customer business: Study the “Customer Business, Technology Practice,
Revenue-Profite, Geographical distribution, Competitors’ Detail etc. Brief analysis of Customer
business contains brief analysis of some areas these are as follows:
What technologies they require to support the business?
Do they require any IT supports?
Are these prescribed technological support going to fulfill customer requirements and support
their kitty strength?
Are they using any technological or system based support and ITES support?
For example if the customer is a retail client then the SAP,ORACLE APPS,JDE,LAWSON will
be some prescribe able services. Here customer can purchase the prescribe product and say
vender to work on their environment or vender can create an application and host it in customer
environment. If it is a financial customer then may require ECM support, if they are insurance
client they may require “Data ware housing” support.
9] Analysis the technology services according to Customer need and economical
capabilities: Analysis the technology services that customer require according to their kitty
strength. The convenient practices is to create proposal about multiple technology supports
according to
• Time frame,
• Cost effectiveness,
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5. • Robustness,
• License availability,
• Partnership with some product base organization
• Easy to migration.
10] Find out Competitors’ practice about these technology and their success stories: Find
out the competitor practice and their success stories to implement some technologies in particular
stage of customer business.
The better use is to create a “Prototype Module” and implement in a dummy environment of
customer and test the response.
11] Create a “Capability Document” about the service provided by vender: After collecting
the whole information about the customer summarize all the section and create a “Project
Opportunity Finding Template” for that particular customer. Store this document to a common
repository and do the verification.
12] If no capability practices are there, add reference to “Project Opportunity Finding”: If
customer doesn’t have some technologies or practices that customer require at that instant vender
may refer to some of its partner or well-known vender/service provider companies.
The benefit of this-----It will not only improve the relationship with customer but also the service
provider whom the vender is going to refer. “In future the service provider whom you are
referring may refer you for some projects”.
Conclusion:
Project Opportunity Finding or Account Mining is a new coming approach and now days most of
the IT companies are started to rely on these approaches. It will increase the values and
relationship of ender to other customer. One common survey depicted that in such economical
crisis “Project Opportunity Finding” has brought almost 15% more projects to the venders than
other approaches like Goodwill of vender, Strong Proposal, Less Cost, Free Consulting and
Reference etc. Overall the organizations those, which adopted “Project Opportunity Finding”, are
still in gain and those, which started to follow this approach before 2008 have avoided the crisis
situations. The following fig. shows that the companies which started to follow the “Project
Opportunity Finding” made remarkable gain of 10-20% in current scenarios.
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6. Fig 2: Some basic scenarios where the companies those who are following “Project
Opportunity Finding or Account Mining” are in gain”
“Project Opportunity Finding” is not only an approach to find out the opportunities, it is also
worth full because it uses to give proper consulting to the customers. In today’s world this value-
base relationship is getting more and more preference. The value-based relationship brings the
partnership business opportunities for the customer, which customer fill more secure to execute a
project. It will also help vender to do an agreement-based business. Today most of the vender are
stated to adopt the “Project Opportunity Finding” approach and customaries it by their own
business way. The day is not so far when the “Project Opportunity Finding” will one specialize
way to measure and calculate the opportunities in customer business.
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Reference:
We are really grateful to get the vast information Rajat Kalra (Sr. Executive of Sales) of
USTGlobal, and leading IT company in India.
Other references:
• Product marketing and sales force management and software
http://resources.bnet.com/topic/product+marketing+and+sales+force+management+and+softwar
e.html
• Software Marketing, Sales and Business Strategy
http://www.software-marketing-advisor.com/
• Information technology Industry(Economy, Economics & Investing Reports):
http://www.economywatch.com/business-and-economy/information-technology-
industry.html
• Y O G E S H P A T I L ' S B L O G : http://ypat.blogspot.com/2008/05/best-and-easy-way-of-
account-mining.html
• Indian Software Industry(Economy, Economics & Investing Reports):
http://www.economywatch.com/business-and-economy/software-industry.html
• India’s Information Technology Industry
http://www.indianembassy.org/indiainfo/india_it.htm
• India and the IT industry
http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20090126/technologylife02.shtml
• Origins and Growth of the Software Industry in India
http://aparc.stanford.edu/publications/origins_and_growth_of_the_software_industry_in_india/
