Syndiant Ltd Case Study

Syndiant Ltd.

        Syndiant Ltd. is a global Information technology solutions and services company operating out of India. Syndiant is currently comprised of some 80 associates, 40 sales people in the U.S. and Europe and another 40 sales and marketing people that are located in India. Syndiant offers a wide breadth of services including application management, testing, enterprise resource management, customer relationship management and, infrastructure management.

        Recently Syndiant has been experiencing a period of decline. They have observed a twenty percent decrease in order bookings over the last two quarters (the first and second) as compared to the company’s order booking target. There has also been increased competition from foreign firms such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Recently these larger firms have been expanding in to offshore regions such as China and Brazil in order to be competitive with Indian firms on cost. The switch to offshore support coupled with the fact that the larger firms have a more money to put towards promotions, and their brand image, are giving them the edge over smaller Indian IT firms.

        Syndiant is currently using an Information Technology Marketing and Sales (ITMS) model that was developed by the company a few years earlier. Though the model seems as though it is very thorough in that it addresses pre-sale, sales ,post-sales, advertising, marketing and, public relations; it is very fragmented. There does not seem to be any collusion between the different departments, most everything appears as though it is directed towards the customer. While I do think that the customer and the needs that they have should be at the center of the company’s focus, I also believe that there has to be a good deal of teamwork on the part of Syndiant in order for those needs to truly be met.  The fact that the lead generation is being done by the inside sales force in India and then passed off to the field sales team in the U.S. and Europe is the beginning of the issues that the company’s fragmentation causes. I feel as though the field sales people should be doing their own lead generation. By doing this they will be accepting some of the presale responsibility of the inside sales force and it will help them develop a rapport with prospective leads. This case is talking about businesses spending vast sums of money for these services and I feel that stable relationships allow these transactions to take place more fluidly.

        The marketing team at Syndiant Ltd is in place to give support to the inside sales force and help draw out leads. They are in charge of promotional activities such as advertising, seminars, webinars, brochures, public relations, and relationship management. Again based upon the ITMS model, that was presented in the case; all of these activities are being directed solely to the customer individually. This is an issue because many of these activities should work together systematically. I only make the assumption that they are treated as separate entities within the organization based upon the ITMS but it does not appear as though any of these functions have been put in place to build upon one another. If there are separate teams or if there are even entirely separate departments, it is a problem that they do not build towards some ultimate objective. There is also no mention of how or why the segments are made the way they or of how these segments are being targeted. I again am making an assumption but I feel that with such a small team and so many targets that they are using more of a mass marketing approach to reaching their targets.

        There are many approaches that Syndiant could take to rectify their declining conversion rates. They could refrain from having such a far stretching target market and focus on one of their segments. Take for instance manufacturing and logistics; they could focus the whole of their resources in to the manufacturing sector. In implementing a niche strategy like this and focusing only on one of the many segments they can target core competencies and establish an advantage over other firms who are in multiple industries. Focusing on one industry segment may also lead to advancements in that area giving Syndiant more awareness even though it would be in a smaller total population. Also in doing this, they would be able to expand to other markets, such as China, where manufacturing is at the center of the economy. This would work with any of the five segments that Syndiant is currently targeting. Another solution for Syndiant to reverse their declining conversion rates is to work on their customer relationship management. From the ITMS and the text, I assume that there are various hand off points in the sales process where customers are delivered from pre-sale to sales to post sales with different contacts at each step. I feel that by having the same contact at every stage would be ideal towards increasing conversion. As I stated before in B2B sales relationships are exceedingly important. Knowing the person on the other end of the phone line and having a rapport with them may be what gets a company a contract over another. I do not feel that this person needs to be the onstage personnel in this case either. Merely having one person to contact throughout the process would be beneficial be it a salesperson or someone form the marketing department. Along the same lines, I feel that having the outside sales force generate their own leads would help turn things around. Again, this is just about having a pre-established relationship that may ease the facilitation of a business deal.

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