Wipro CEO, We have established a client hunting team

 TK Kurien, Wipro's CEO for the IT business, talks to TOI about a whole new sales strategy, which the company hopes will be able to break the reluctance of customers to spend in the current uncertain times, or to transfer business to Wipro from its competitors. 

Business from India & Middle East has dropped in the first quarter after a successful run for several quarters. What are the challenges?
The domestic market is driven by capital investments. The business has come down by 9.9% in dollar terms compared to the preceding quarter because most of our work in India is based on systems integration , which is linked to capital expenditure. We get an upswing of 0.8-1 % on our overall growth because of the India business in the second quarter, but we are not seeing it this time.
We are hoping the growth will come back in the third and fourth quarters. The India pipeline is strong, but the delay in closures continues to remain a concern . Domestic customers are waiting for a clearer view on which way the market would move before they commit to capital expenditures. 

Is there anything new you are doing to get customers in this volatile environment?
We have created a new logo hunting sales team, to mine new accounts. The hunting team's mandate is to hunt for new logos - the logos we want but do not have yet -- among the Fortune 2000. This will be playing out in the next 9-11 months. We have made significant investments into our hunting operations and we expect this will accelerate the pace of deal closures.

We have designed a dedicated structure, which involves global client partners, solution architects, domain experts and delivery heads coming together to mine new accounts. To be effective , we have to hunt in a pack in the client organization. We have 137 people in the hunting team, many of who are new people we have hired. This is reflected in the rise in our sales and marketing expenditure last quarter. 

You have said previously that the current onsite-offshore model is being challenged. Can you explain that?
We are seeing more agile business models becoming a part of the play. IT architecture skills are going onsite and a lot of system design will happen before the customer. A large part of the prototyping work will be done onsite, which means that only the delivery work is coming to India. This means that it's not enough to have a dedicated sales force at the client end; you also need system architects in different geographies