Marketing function for IT Services companies

In one of my previous articles I had written about the importance of having a marketing function for IT services companies. Most IT services companies fail to realize the need for this function. They jump into sales or account management functions. These companies can do much better if they identify this gap and fix it.

Here is an example of an activity this group can perform before the sales team goes to market. First thing that comes is the offering or what you want to sell. Then comes whom you want to sell it to. What you want to sell for IT services companies is little diluted as they always go into the customer through a placement and then see if they can convert it to an offshore engagement.

Where marketing helps is that if you want to enter the market say in the California bay area. You have to first identify the companies on growth path that you want to do business with. Let us say you shortlist Facebook, Yahoo, Ebay, Google, Wells Fargo, Schwab, Kaiser, Walmart, Safeway, Oracle etc. as your target companies then you need to know the culture in each organization (budget cycles, what technology they use, offshore plans, decision makers, HR policy, preferred vendorship process, existing vendors and so on ...) Having known this you can hire a sales guy who already has relationship with the company you want to work with from your competitors. This approach will give you a jump start than hiring the sales guy and then trying to develop the business.