Overview

An IT start-up company, setting up an offshore development unit in Pune needed a robust
business development strategy. The company boasts of technically sound leadership with
over 40 years of experience. Their expertise lies in Microsoft technology, embedded product
development, Salesforce & AI.

Challenges

IT service and product development is an immensely competitive market. To gain a firm footing and ensure continued business, it is important for a company to have an early-stage focus on business development. The company leadership has a technical and operations stronghold but lacked the expertise in terms of strategic prowness required for business development. There were three main areas of focus that required the intervention of an expert consultant.

Enhancing Workforce Potential for Sustainable Success

There are many approaches to business development and it is necessary to get it right the first time, to avoid loss of time and revenue. Business development strategy also affects sales. Given the growth of digital tools in the workplace, it is also necessary to establish appropriate tools and platforms to help in the implementation of the designed strategy. The first order of business was to interview the business owners and decision makers of the company. We spent about 80 hours in this phase, to get a deeper understanding of the business. This helped us in gaining an insight into the nature of their business in-depth and the leader’s personalities, how they influence the business and their expectations from the business. Based on these discussions, we realized that the need was to create a strategy-focused organization. This would give a clear objective to the efforts that the business was planning on the technical and operations side. We also discovered that the main revenue stream would be IT services, for which quality lead generations was a priority.

Organizational Structure

We defined the organizational structure to ensure that all stakeholders had a specific role. For example, dedicated sales and business development roles were created to avoid overlap with technical and operations roles. This also enabled the team to work on their strengths, leverage them to address responsibilities that supported set functions and ultimately the growth of the company

KPI’s

We worked closely with the leadership team to define Key Performance Indicators for various business functions. Our main priority was financial KPIs that would help the company be cash-flow positive at the earliest without burn on lead generation or OpEx. KPIs were first defined for 3 months and monitored. Yearly targets were set based on the outcomes of this exercise.

Balanced Scorecard Tool

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) Tool was suggested by us with an imperative on financial objectives and creating new business avenues. The BSC tool is a management system that enables a business to monitor their internal processes as well as outcomes. It empowers decision-makers with the information they need for continuous improvement of performance and results.

OUTCOMES

The BSC developed by us gave clear-cut objectives to all business functions within the company. The company leaders were able to effectively monitor the progress of various organizational participants with defined KPIs and course correct as needed. Through our strategy, we ensured that BSC was used to engage all stakeholders and line managers so that everyone was aligned to a common objective. As a result, the company was cash-flow positive within 3 months without burn. The proof of our efforts was demonstrated by the fact that the start-up generated ₹5 Crore in revenue in its first year of business and ₹7 Crore in the second year.

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