Growth Strategy Archives

Capita Goes for Accelerated Growth with Xchanging Bid | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

October 16, 2015

This week we heard that Capita and Xchanging had agreed on the terms of a recommended cash offer of 160 pence per share. The offer values Xchanging at approximately £412m. If it goes ahead, the acquisition would be Capita’s largest ever; it is 260% bigger than its previous largest acquisition, that of avocis for £157m in February 2015.

Capita’s newly found appetite for larger acquisitions marks a noticeable change in approach between the current CEO, Andy Parker, and his predecessor, Paul Pindar. While Pindar went for niche acquisitions, Parker is going for accelerated inorganic growth.

If this bid goes through, it will impact Capita’s business in the following ways:

Significant leg-up in Insurance BPO: Xchanging is something of a jewel in the insurance sector due to its golden relationship with Lloyds of London as well as insurance sector specific technologies such as Xuber. Insurance services accounts for the larger part of revenue at circa 60%. For some time now Capita has been talking about growth in the insurance sector, setting the scene for more of its M&A activity. It has previously stated, “Where premium growth remains modest, (insurance) firms are focused on improving operational efficiency and organisational flexibility, areas Capita is well placed to help them address.” Before it made the offer for Xchanging, Capita had expanded its insurance capabilities through the acquisition of SouthWestern. This brought it 700 skilled, multi-lingual FTEs at two sites, Krakow and Lodz, providing services to insurance, finance and legal administration, and customer management across Northern Europe. Another relevant and recent acquisition was that of tricontes in 2014. The £6.2m acquisition of the Munich-based company in June 2014 brought Capita specialist contact centre services for various sectors including the insurance sector in Germany.
Bigger play in the private sector business: The split between Capita’s public and private sector business has always stayed roughly around 50:50 with annual variations of plus or minus 5%. In 2014 Capita’s private sector business was £2273.6 and accounted for 52% of revenues. With revenues of £406.8m in 2014, Xchanging could boost Capita’s private sector business by as much as 18% – a significant growth.
Entry into potentially lucrative BPO segments: Xchanging has good capabilities in the fast growing Procurement Outsourcing (PO) and Capital Markets BPO. Our analysis shows that both market segments are growing upwards of 10% CAGR. Further, these are specialized BPO segments and hence less prone to commoditization. However, to fully capitalize on the potential, Capita would have to address recent issues with Xchanging’s PO business.
Geographic diversification: This acquisition would help Capita expand its market presence beyond the UK. Some of the key countries where it could help Capita are Italy, Germany, and the U.S. While the scale may not be big, it can provide Capita a base upon which to build its international business. Further, continental Europe is a specialized market, which may not be the easiest to penetrate for an external service provider. Xchanging, with its multiple contracts in Germany, can help Capita in its entry in that geography.
Greater global sourcing leverage: Capita has around 5,000-6,000 FTEs in offshore location. This acquisition offers the potential of increasing this number by 20-25% primarily in India.

Clearly, this acquisition can help accelerate Capita’ growth and capabilities in multiple ways. However, as with any acquisition, successful integration will be key to harness the potential including effectively addressing recent issues.

Capita is not the only service provider to be eying growth in the insurance sector. With this bid, Capita’s acquisitive culture is set to give it an edge over the others.

For our previous coverage of Capita’s growth strategy see “Capita’s German Gambit.”

Multi-Channel Solutions – Defining the New Age Contact Centers | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

October 14, 2015

The customer care industry is going through myriad changes, but none as far-reaching and impactful as the rise in the adoption of non-voice channels. Recognizing this shift in customer behavior, enterprises are working to ensure their customers have a seamless experience across the channels of their choice, in order to increase customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty. This change in buyer expectations is having its effect on the global Contact Center Outsourcing (CCO) market as well.

One of the key findings in Everest Group’s Contact Center Outsourcing Annual Report 2015 is an almost 10 percent erosion between 2011 and 2014 in the voice channel’s revenue share, even though it remained the dominant channel of customer interaction. While voice has grown at a sluggish pace (3 percent CAGR between 2011 and 2014), non-voice channels have witnessed robust growth, led by email, which experienced a handsome 22 percent CAGR revenue share growth between 2011 and 2014. Chat and social media account for smaller proportions of non-voice channel revenue, but grew at 43 percent and 53 percent, respectively, in the same period.

Increasing adoption of non-voice channels has also given rise to solutions specifically targeting multi-channel requirements. Everest Group research shows inclusion of channel management as a value-added service had almost tripled from 7 percent of the contracts signed in 2008-2010 to 19 percent in 2013-2014. In fact, multi-channel solutions have become so pervasive that growth opportunities for players supporting the voice channel predominantly are diminishing rapidly. Barring contracts focused on outbound sales services, 60 percent of new contracts focused on operational or value-added services have a non-voice component. As discussed in our recently published viewpoint, it is becoming increasingly imperative for service providers to design solutions with a portfolio that combines value-added services and non-voice channels.

As service providers make investments to augment their capabilities and build expertise in managing non-voice channels, below are some implications they should keep in mind:

Outlining the right shoring strategy. Our research shows a clear move towards onshore delivery as CCO clients increasingly prefer agents closer to home, especially for the voice channel. The changing channel mix will dictate the direction in which the shoring strategies evolve in the future
Defining the right skill-sets. Non-voice channels provide productivity gains by allowing agents the opportunity to juggle multiple channels without impacting quality. Service providers must ensure agents are upskilled through the right set of training programs and hiring requirements, which are different from those for voice
Leveraging analytics. Non-voice channels are more digital-friendly by definition, and are suited for use of advanced analytics tools. Close alignment of analytics solutions to derive incremental insight and information from the data generated from non-voice channels will be critical
Using sophisticated pricing models. Non-voice channels align well with output- and outcome-based pricing models, and have witnessed higher adoption of these pricing models than the voice channel. As they build capabilities on the non-voice front, CCO service providers must also look at how to best align their processes and metrics around non-voice channels to support clients’ desired business and customer experience outcomes. This essentially involves redefining CCO’s value proposition beyond cost savings to include business performance
Supporting clients through the journey. CCO clients require guidance and clarity on where to begin the non-voice channel journey, and how to move forward with it. We have already seen consulting practices within BPO firms helping clients confidently undertake this transformative journey, and could be a very critical component in the successful adoption of non-voice channels.

In a heavily commoditized market, non-voice channels give service providers an opportunity to differentiate themselves and stand out from the crowd. While some providers have taken the lead and become front-runners in the multi-channel solutions race, others have more recently started augmenting their capabilities in this space through acquisitions and partnerships. Building capabilities is a key success factor, but as highlighted earlier there are other factors for service providers to consider to ensure they make the best use of these capabilities.

Adapting to Evolving Client Needs – the New Mantra of Growth for Smaller Contact Center Service Providers | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

October 13, 2015

As a USD$70-75 billion market that has been growing steadily at 5-7 percent over the last few years, contact center outsourcing (CCO) has captured the interest of multiple non-CCO specialist service providers in the recent years. In fact, the more generalized ITO and BPO providers that have started CCO operations in the last decade have realized appreciable growth and success in recent years, some of them outdoing the market growth and growing in excess of 8 percent CAGR.

However, it’s not been an easy journey for these relatively new entrants, given their relative small scale and scope of operations compared to the incumbent players, some of which make billions in revenue through contact center services alone and have operations across all major geographies. To differentiate themselves, these new players have tried to stand out from crowd through innovation, and by tapping areas within the CCO space that have showed the maximum growth in the last few years and have emerged as value propositions for CCO clients.

Most of these high-growth players are, in fact, relatively smaller players, such as Genpact, HCL, HGS, TCS, and WNS. While many have had long-standing contact center capabilities, it has only been more recently that these firms have taken a more strategic go-to-market approach to pursuing the stand-alone CCO market. Their revenues from CCO operations are in the USD$100-450 million range, which is miniscule in size when compared to some of the bigger players such as Convergys and Teleperformance. To sustain their above market growth, these providers have adopted multiple steps to emerge as serious contenders. Instead of merely tapping the traditional CCO markets such as North America and Europe, these players have aggressively expanded their footprint in emerging buyer geographies such as Asia Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Middle East & Africa. By building their capabilities in languages specific to these areas, they have been able to cater to client demands better. They have also been making their presence felt in some of the fastest growing verticals in the CCO market, such as retail, healthcare, and travel & hospitality. Many of them have effectively leveraged their organization’s overall investments in vertical industry expertise to further enhance CCO capabilities and offerings. A key differentiator for many of these players is their ability to link the consumer interaction in the contact center with downstream industry-specific processes by delivering front-back office integrated solutions. These investments seem to have paid off well, as the revenues from these verticals have shown sharp growth for these service providers.

Our research shows that buyers are looking more towards building deeper working relationships with fewer CCO service providers. This means that buyers no longer expect service providers to just deliver on SLAs, but are looking for value beyond labor arbitrage. More contracts being signed now involve value-added processes, and include non-voice channels such as email, chat, and social media. To address these new value propositions, these high-growth players have invested in multiple technologies to build their capabilities in these domains. Most of them have leveraged their vast IT and BPO expertise to deliver solutions specific to contact center needs.

They have also made it a priority to focus on building strong relationships with their clients. They have performed quite strongly on Everest Group’s buyer satisfaction survey, and have frequently been cited for their flexibility, responsiveness, consistency, and execution. With buyers looking to consolidate their portfolio of work with fewer strategic partners, it becomes more essential to have a stronger client-service provider relationship, which the service providers can only achieve by walking that extra mile to keep clients happy with their services.

With the changing scenario in the CCO market, where the focus has shifted from improving the bottom line to adding more value to the operations and thus improving the top line for clients, scale can no longer be considered the primary metric for assessing a service provider. The focus has shifted to cost savings through process improvement and business outcomes, and this provides these relatively new generation high-growth players enough opportunity to prove their mettle in the market where they have been aligning their capabilities with changing client needs. Everest Group’s findings show that clients are taking notice and giving these providers a chance to prove themselves.

Photo credit: Flickr

A Light Bulb Has to Want to Change | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

September 22, 2015

There’s an old joke that asks how many psychologists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer is it doesn’t matter; the light bulb has to want to change. I think this has a deep truth when applied to the services market.

Almost every service provider looking for growth sees that capturing a share of the transformational marketplace is key to their success. In their effort to pursue this, they come up with arguments and proof points that they can do a business function better, faster and more cost-effectively than shared services or the target organization. They then conduct significant analysis, looking at which customers would be the best fit for their strategy.

Unfortunately for these providers, their efforts often are frustrating and come to very little reward. The reason can be seen in the light bulb joke. The key to significant transformational change has less to do with the potential impact and more to do with the motivations of the client and its willingness to change. Few people can be squeezed to undertake the risk of a significant large-scale change and transformation.

Key for service providers

Service providers seeking to capture transformational deals must first identify senior executives with a change agenda and then gain an understanding of how they wish to change. That is where the transformation journey must start. Although this sounds obvious, my experience has been that providers rarely approach the problem from this perspective.

When you couple this starting point with the changing objectives of customers focusing on business value and cycle time instead of costs that I’ve blogged about before, it’s easy to understand why so many providers’ strategies fail. Looking for transformation opportunities through the lens of cost savings is a mistake, and increasingly the provider’s efforts will go unrewarded.

Just like the light bulb joke, transformation opportunities won’t happen unless the customer wants to change and the provider understands what the customer wants to accomplish through the change.

Photo credit: Flickr

Why Is HP Breaking Up? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

September 2, 2015

I’ve been blogging about why certain companies such as Accenture, ADP, and TCS are such successful service providers. In contrast, let’s look at HP and examine why it’s breaking up.

I’ve explained in prior blogs that the most successful companies have six operational elements aligned, as shown in the Everest Group assessment framework below.

In successful companies, their promise is consistent with their business model, their talent model is consistent with their promise and model. Their investments align with the talent and business models, and the portfolio they end up with aligns with the other components. In addition, they tune their go-to-market approach to maximize their advantages in these components.

HP, as much talked about, is breaking up, separating its printers and PCs division from software and services. Printers and PCs are late-stage, mature devices and represent a market that is commoditized, mature, and saddled with slow growth. Software and services give the promise of growth.

HP is taking the first steps to create better alignment in both their businesses between the functions of brand, go-to-market, investments, and the other components of the framework illustrated above.

HP’s printers and PCs business is well aligned in terms of its brand promise of high-quality, cost-effective end-user devices. Its go-to-market approach is consistent for both printers and PCs, and the portfolio is rationalized around those devices and the warranty services that support them. Its investments can focus on maintaining market share. The firm can harmonize talent to ensure it’s appropriate for a mature business. And its business model and supply chain are consistent across their offers and can be further refined and focused. So I see the break-away from software and services as a no-brainer.

HP’s software and services area is a more complicated story; here, I think they have further to go. A smaller, more focused organization will allow HP over time to refine its brand to focus on large enterprises. Its go-to-market approach can be more easily integrated. Its portfolio, which is still very diverse, will probably need further refinement over time.

Although they clearly don’t have all six components harmonized for the software and services business, the break-up gives HP a much better fighting chance to work through that. They have further work to do across all these areas – particularly in brand and portfolio. As they get a crisper brand promise into the market and a portfolio aligned with that brand, the firm’s business model, go-to-market approach, and investment choices will become clearer.

HP is still early in this reformatting of the company. But history tells us that, as they succeed in getting these aspects clarified and aligned, the firm’s performance will improve.

Photo credit: Flickr

Dead Deal Costs Will Kill the Services Industry | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

August 24, 2015

I’ve blogged extensively on how the industrialized arbitrage market is maturing rapidly. One of the many frustrating aspects of a maturing services market is that a dominant portion of procurements for larger opportunities come through RFPs. These RFPs require sophisticated and elaborate responses with large deal teams and solutioning teams working at the provider’s expense to create a compelling response. This cost is growing, and what’s worse is that it’s not unusual for providers to lose 66 percent of these costly bids.

In the large-deal segment, it’s not uncommon for service providers to spend $1 million – and in some cases as much as $10 million – to respond to the RFPs. These costs are often disseminated through the service provider and not easily recognized; they are borne by the individual delivery teams and therefore can creep up or grow unmonitored by the service provider. When viewed objectively, the costs amount to a substantial amount of money.

At Everest Group, we’ve done a significant amount of work on competitiveness and improving providers’ win rates. For world-class performers, the win rate is around 33 percent of their opportunities – which means that they lose 66 percent. Let’s take the low end of this range as an example. If it costs $2 million to respond to an RFP and solutioning for a winning bid, it costs $6 million for a deal the provider doesn’t win.

These unreimbursed “dead deal” costs are an increasing drag on providers’ profitability and are a significant contributor to service providers’ growing cost of sales.

The implications of this are very significant for service providers seeking to maintain their growth by bidding for larger transactions.

Here’s my question: Can the industry change this?

Yes, there are numerous solutions. One is for providers to pursue only the opportunities that they have a realistic chance of winning.

Here’s another question:

Can the industry shift away from these dead deal costs, instead giving solutioning free to the client in the RFP response?

Effectively, the provider would move to a more consultative structure in which the highest value is not given away in a free solution but is paid by the client in consulting services.

These are intriguing thoughts. This structure would be difficult to accomplish – but well worth the journey if it can be changed.

Why is TCS So Successful? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

August 18, 2015

TCS has a sophisticated suite of apps and delivery tools. They accept small engagements with the intent to grow those accounts by being reliable and over-delivering. And they’re willing to shift away from their comfort zone. But this isn’t why TCS is a leader in the services industry.

Why are they so successful? To answer this question, we used Everest Group’s framework of six characteristics necessary for success.

Our assessment is that TCS’s success is due to aligning all six aspects in the framework. By doing so, they perfected an industrial global services model in which they are able to take a pragmatic and cost-effective approach to large-scale processes. These processes must have at their core the ability to deploy TCS’s local services offshoring model in a highly repetitive or highly predictable consistent-quality manner.

Using this core understanding of who they are, TCS operates in a wide variety of geographies across a wide variety of industries. They apply this core understanding to a bewildering set of disciplines ranging from applications to infrastructure to F&A to customer service. On the surface, these service disciplines look highly unrelated. But when you dig deeper, they all have in common the ability for TCS to apply an industrialized global services model to the benefit of their clients.

This understanding of their essence and their discipline about applying it has allowed TCS to emerge as a true industry services leader.

Photo credit: Flickr

Will Corporate Venture Funding Lead to the Death of VCs as We Know Them? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

August 14, 2015

For some time now, large companies have shied away from corporate venturing, unsure of returns and/or efficiency of capital usage. Enterprises have seen their venture initiatives fail, and many give up hope quickly after initial enthusiasm. Even corporates that have managed to run successful funds have struggled to monetize their leveraged investments as they scale up. Given these challenges, it’s not surprising that enterprises with large, under-utilized cash piles chose to maintain the status quo, rather than invest in an emerging startup economy.

However, we’re starting to see a significant change in the funding landscape. This week, Google announced plans for a new operating structure that effectively makes the eponymous search engine giant a subsidiary of a new holding company, Alphabet. One of the main driving rationales for this decision was to delink Google from other ventures in which the parent organization is involved, and give it more room to experiment with new ideas. After all, Google has diversified into areas including life sciences, drone delivery, space research, and home automation.

Last month, Workday, the enterprise SaaS poster boy, announced Workday Ventures, the company’s first strategic fund focused on identifying, investing, and partnering with early to growth stage companies that place data science and machine learning at the core of their approach to enterprise technology. In June 2015, Intel Capital led a US$40 million Series D investment in Onefinestay, best described as a luxury Airbnb competitor. And other corporate venture funding efforts have figured prominently in the recent hyper-competitive boom in the deals landscape.

Corporate VCs don a new avatar

Corporate venture funding has taken a new lease on life, and aroused widespread interest, notably in The Economist and Harvard Business Review. This is not without reason. AMD, Dell, and Google are technology giants with early venture funds, and firms such as Microsoft and Salesforce made similar moves later. A CB Insights study on corporate venture investment trend found that corporate venture capital activity witnessed a significant uptick in 2014, with deals by corporate venture arms jumping 25 percent YoY and funding rising 76 percent. The most active corporate venture investors in 2014 among technology companies were Cisco, Comcast, Google, Intel, Salesforce, Qualcomm, and Samsung, underscoring the attention being paid to this route.

In terms of exits by corporate venture investors, technology players again emerged on top, led by Google Ventures (OnDeck Capital, Hubspot, and Nest Labs), Intel Capital (Yodlee, [x+1], and Prolexic Technologies), and Samsung Ventures (Fixmo, Cloudant, and Engrade), and Qualcomm (Divide, MoboTap, and Location Labs). The marquee corporate venture deals in 2014 were Cloudera (US$900 million, led by Intel Capital), Tango (US$280 million, led Alibaba), and Uber (US$1.2 billion, led by Google Ventures). The chief areas of investment include Internet of Things, analytics, security, and platform technologies.

Differences between corporate venture funding and conventional VCs

While VCs tend to focus on growing portfolio companies and time their exit from a ROI standpoint, corporate venture funds take a strategic view of investments, and look to use their expertise to guide start-ups
Acquisition of portfolio companies is not uncommon for corporate venture funds (e.g., Google Ventures – Nest Labs). Funding a startup and acquiring it later, rather than building one organically, makes for a stronger business case. Traditional VCs frequently work with the intention of taking investments public
Corporate venture funds are less risk-averse than conventional VCs, given their deep pockets and long-term position. This is also reflected in their higher involvement in seed funding rounds
Typical VCs tend to lag corporate venture funds in terms of average deal size or term, also due to corporates’ deep pockets and long-term holdings
Corporate venture funded start-ups tend to go public more often than their VC portfolio peers

Strategic technology investment or desperate spend?

Given improved macroeconomic confidence, there is a lot of “easy money” floating around the technology continuum. And this is beginning to result in a “perpetual investment bubble.” While this isn’t to say that doomsday is just round the corner, with everything and anything getting funded (does anyone remember Yo?), utility, monetization models, and future relevance seem to be the last things on investors’ agenda. More often than not, there is a fine line between a blunder and a brilliant bet. Everyone and anyone in this easy dollar-fueled utopia tend to be under the messianic illusion that the next multi-billion dollar bet is around the corner and will change the world. Most players tend to add incremental value over existing processes, systems, and interfaces, rather than changing them as we know it, which is the reality of investing.

Given their tremendous business acumen, corporate funds have talent, skill set, pedigree, and, ultimately, deep pockets to exist and thrive in a volatile knowledge economy as they look to identify and nurture a truly revolutionary idea beyond just incremental technology value. That said, there is likely to be significant churn once the rose-tinted glasses come off. Still and all, with the strategic depth and domain guidance large enterprises can provide, their portfolio companies are likely to be better positioned to ride the wave.

Analytics Services Market Maturing Quickly | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

July 27, 2015

Analytics has been a bright spot in the services world, particularly for the Indian service providers as their analytics practices have grown faster than the rest of their organizations. They often are able to command premium pricing in this space, and it holds the tantalizing promise of transforming other service lines such as ITO, apps dev, and BPO. However, I’m making a bold prediction: The analytics practices are going to quickly hit maturity and the rate of growth will quickly slow.

We at Everest Group observe three maturity characteristics now happening in this space, so the “recipe ingredients” are in place for this market to start maturing.

Gold rush stage. As companies come to understand and believe in the power of analytics, they are eager to do proofs of concept, which they then scale into a Center of Excellence (CoE). For the most part, the leading providers that offer analytics services establish a CoE or complement an existing CoE with data scientists. But data scientists are scarce, so they often use partners to augment their CoE. But the analytics gold rush is starting to ebb. Many providers have already seen the light and are already on the journey to establish or scale up a CoE. Therefore, the market will mature.
Analytics becomes core. At Everest Group, we see a trend in which the benefits of analytics are so strong that analytics customers over time tend to want to build their own CoE and use their own capabilities, leveraging third parties only as an overflow or extension of what they are doing.With the return on investment in analytics being so high and customers viewing analytics as core or necessary to their business and competitive advantage, they view the expense of building an internal analytics CoE as a justifiable cost and wise decision. Therefore, service providers’ labor arbitrage offerings are less compelling.
Benefit doesn’t pull through to a process. For the service providers that have built a capability around analytics, it should lead to complementing other BPO or IT practices; but we have not seen this as a common occurrence. We believe the reason is that the customers’ stakeholders block providers’ access and seal them off translating the analytics work to a broader business process or IT application. The providers’ hope of pulling through work has not manifested consistently in a large degree.

As we analyze this issue, we believe there are three areas where analytics providers can build distinctiveness:

Provide access to proprietary data
Build proprietary tools
Provide capability

As already explained, we expect the market for providers whose practices are built on capability will slow rapidly. But we see substantial opportunity where a provider combines proprietary data and proprietary tools with capability that focuses on a specific business problem.

An example of a scaled analytics program that has achieved billions of dollars in this way is OptumRx. This solution includes a proprietary data source, proprietary tools and capability focused on a business problem that serves the healthcare industry at scale. And it generates billions – not millions – in revenue.

We believe that providers that transition to a model of creating proprietary data and customized tools combined with capability to solve a business problem will enjoy ongoing and potentially explosive growth.

But those that stay focused on providing capability and data scientists are doomed as they face a quickly maturing marketplace. It’s not that this space will go away; it’s just that it won’t grow fast and pricing pressure will start to take hold.

Although we believe the analytics market maturity will happen in the next two years, we think a lot of room and potential remains for providers that combine the three analytics components (data, tools and capability focused on a specific business problem).

FOMO (“Fear of Missing Out”) – the Service Provider’s Ebola | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

July 14, 2015

FOMO is reaching epidemic proportions among service providers. We see it particularly in the Indian firms, but it’s not confined to the Indian providers. It starts in the sales teams as they fall behind in their sales goals; then it spreads and infects the entire organization.

You can easily identify the providers infected with FOMO. In the marketplace, there is no RFP or opportunity they don’t want to contest. The FOMO infection causes them to run from client to client with the newest PowerPoint presentations of great promises. But the decks aren’t compelling and lack depth, so the buyers don’t believe the providers’ messages. The buyers aren’t infected with FOMO, so they aren’t blind enough to believe that one company can be great at everything.

Because of FOMO, the providers don’t spend enough time with the existing or potential client to be able to develop the necessary depth.

Those free of FOMO actually outperform in the market consistently and build a much more relevant perspective unique to a client because of their effort to gain a more in-depth understanding of the client.

They focus on a client’s issues rather than chasing every RFP. They only go after opportunities where they have developed a perspective. They put most of their sales resources into focusing on existing clients instead of developing go-to-market schemes for yet-uncaptured clients.

Paradoxically, not only do disciplined providers outperform other providers with their existing clients, but they also outperform in the marketplace with new clients. This is because when they do engage, they engage in a thoughtful, impactful way.

Fortunately for services buyers, FOMO hasn’t infected the entire services industry.

Photo credit: Flickr

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Tag: growth strategy

Capita Goes for Accelerated Growth with Xchanging Bid | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Adapting to Evolving Client Needs – the New Mantra of Growth for Smaller Contact Center Service Providers | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

A Light Bulb Has to Want to Change | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Key for service providers

Why Is HP Breaking Up? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Dead Deal Costs Will Kill the Services Industry | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Here’s my question: Can the industry change this?

Here’s another question:

Why is TCS So Successful? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Will Corporate Venture Funding Lead to the Death of VCs as We Know Them? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Corporate VCs don a new avatar

Strategic technology investment or desperate spend?

Analytics Services Market Maturing Quickly | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

FOMO (“Fear of Missing Out”) – the Service Provider’s Ebola | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

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