SaaSified/Cloudified GSI Account Management

With 13Mn+ highly skilled technocrats and over 50Bn USD revenue, Indian GSIs are movers and shakers of IT Services industry across the globe. Together they serve almost all Fortune 1000 customers, in one or often more than one ways. GSIs thrives on delivering cutting-edge and best-of-breed solutions for diverse customer needs at the most competitive cost and stringent time constraints. The adoption of Cloud and SaaS has been changing the dynamics of the engagement thereby reducing time to value and increasing pressure to innovate faster.

Cloud and SaaS revenues are touching ~$200Bn and that too only for the top 10 Cloud and SaaS Vendors. They are now scaling traction with GSIs to further accelerate the growth. These engagements are now becoming more outcome-driven and customer success-focused. Like everywhere else, Selling is giving way to Engagement in these relationships. The account managers, especially the successful ones, are becoming more of Customer Success Managers and less of Sales Managers. They are finding ways to engage more, deeper, broader with more groups within GSIs. The age of an account manager mapping a (or a few) point people/teams are fast giving way to times of broader engagements within GSIs. This is fueled by Cloud/SaaS democratizing the evaluation, decision, adoption, and ramping up of a solution by more teams/people rather than specific CoEs/Practices. The need for speedy innovation, adjacencies in the technology stacks, and lower skill barrier for building up specialized delivery capabilities within the team who are owning the customer engagement also necessitates this. Information inconsistencies and inter BU/Teams collaboration inertia makes centralization of specialisations even more difficult. That’s why application teams are building infra solutions, infrastructure teams are designing cybersecurity solutions, cloud horizontals are building vertical solutions, IoT teams are solving big data problems and vertical sales organization is writing code. This trend is growing fast. CoE/Practice teams are doing their best to catch up but still blueprinting + validation of any pre-built solution is becoming harder by the day. Given these dynamics, new age Account Managers, who are customer-obsessed, who think big, who are hungry to do more, who are curious to learn fast, who have a credible brand, and who are deft in growing their network very rapidly are adopting what may be termed SaaSified / Cloudified Account Engagement Model. Besides traditional account management, they now focus more on finding newer prospects with whom they build new, cutting edge & sticky solutions to help them land newer customers and expand in existing customers. The success for them is growing adoption and omitting whitespace within their accounts. They show extreme ownership of engagement end to end and act as sales, presales, business development, product, marketing, customer success, and delivery guys and gals rather than just sales managers. And in the age and time of Coopetition and Frenemies, they don’t shy away from facilitating broader industry collaboration and at times even act as aggregators of industry engagements within the GSIs they manage.

Not everyone chooses to adapt themselves to this SaaSified / Cloudified Account Engagement Model and the ones who do, enhance the value they deliver and are most successful. And not just more successful but also more valued and more respected.