For IT services companies
IT Services companies spend significant resources and budgets on generating business – both new business as well as retaining and expanding existing business. But there is always a struggle to improve sales effectiveness.
- Gap between aspiration and capability
- Sales teams spend disproportionately high amount of effort on proposals and are also dragged into details of fulfilment and delivery
- Companies allocate available resources to solutions and pre-sales and pull them out for any billable opportunity
- People allocated to pre-sales and solutions don’t see this as a long-term career option and want to change
- Differing views on business opportunities between sales, pre-sales, solutions, delivery, finance, legal, which is by design often becomes corrosive
How do we strengthen and streamline this vital growth engine? While just pre-sales and solutions may by themselves not win deals, they can sure lose deals!
We work with sales, pre-sales, solutions and delivery teams to
- Respond to complex and solution intensive opportunities where they do not have in-house capabilities. This includes taking the company’s capability and base technical solution to structure a compelling response, innovative commercial models, articulation of business value, etc.
- Provide bid management capability if it is a complex bid
- Participate in Q&A or yellow-pad sessions and internal discussions with sales to understand the need better
- If the internal teams have already prepared the bid, review the solution, commercial models, positioning and help improve the proposal
- Help prepare for proposal defense and negotiations
- Assistance in contract negotiation, work with their legal teams.
- Identify proactive solution ideas to be taken to their customers for customer retention
- Training / Workshops to up-skill their in-house pre-sales, solutions, sales teams:
- Help define or refine market strategy
Our decades of work in Continental Europe, UK, North America and APAC brings practical insights about the customers, culture, competition and how to structure customer interactions and proposal for maximizing win ratio.
For end-customers
Companies have to periodically relook at their IT strategy, current in-house capability and also their vendor landscape and the value they get from them.
- Business demand changes
- Technology and service expectations change
- Service contracts tend to become outdated and costly
Multi-year contracts are frequently either too complex or too rigid. They outlive their relevance very quickly and are taken out only in case of a serious dispute or a crisis. But are the contracts and vendors really delivering value?
- Contracting frequently tends to focus on getting the least hourly rates or unit licensing fees
- Any service level framework, KPI and associated financial implications are too onerous to implement – both for the service providers and the customer. So, they mostly remain only in the contract
- Service providers frequently start with a base headcount, then commit to year on year cost reduction, innovation, transformation, etc. But very frequently, these are all lost in the day to day work.
How do we reimagine contracting which work for both the customer and the service provider?
Our consultants bring robust practical experience of advising multiple CIOs and COOs on improving their operational efficiency of their IT services to
- Review their IT services landscape and recommending areas where quality and efficiencies can be further optimized
- Review vendor landscape and their contracts to recommend changes to improve service quality and reduce costs going beyond rate cards to capability and engagement models
- Assist in rebidding services and structuring efficient contracts that work for both customer and service providers
We bring practical, on-the-ground experience to come out with actionable recommendations and help implement them too.