What distinguished the Marketing
group at Wipro Technologies, from many others' that
Prayag has encountered, is the tight linking of
their programs and initiatives to business results.
It is not a surprise therefore that increasing the
business visibility through various mechanisms aimed
at strengthening the sales pipeline is a high priority
activity for the group.
The marketing team has conceptualized an integrated
sales generation lead program that combines telemarketing,
web-leads and electronic and direct mailers. When
the general perception today is that lead generation
activities are quite inefficient and have a low
success rate, Wipro's experience has been dramatically
different. What has Wipro been doing differently
to make this work? What have been the critical factors
for success?
According to Sangita Singh, H-Strategic Marketing,
Wipro Technologies, the integrated approach (explained
below) and unwavering focus on implementation are
the reasons for success:
"We clearly identified lead generation as one
of the marketing focus areas and ensured that each
of the activities in our marketing mix clearly contributes
to lead generation. For example, while most organizations would treat the corporate website
as a branding tool, we went that extra mile to turn
it into a lead generation engine. Today, wipro.com
serves as the largest channel for lead generation.
Moreover, we have put in place metrics for each
activity, and rigorously measure contributions of
each marketing activities in tangible terms. We
go to the extent of tracking these leads to sales
conversions and measuring ROI on these activities."
Nirav Desai, who anchors this initiative, adds that
their team focuses a lot on pull media like the
web and events. Says Nirav, "It is important
to strike the suspect when she is scouting for information.
A pull medium offers the advantage of getting the
prospect to your door to satisfy her needs (both
tacit and explicit) compared to your knocking on
her door when she's least interested. Push media
has its own merit, however, and we use it judiciously
to complement the pull channels."
An interesting feature of Wipro's program is its
high level of integration based on the concept of
a "single view of the customer". While
it's easy to measure and track leads based on a
channel (but not as effective), Wipro has taken
a different perspective. Keeping the customer/company/account
at the center and interact with them using different
channels. Each channel dove-tails with the other
and that offers tremendous leverage. Putting it
in simple terms, coordinating all promotional activities,
both PULL & PUSH - Telesales, DMs, Web, Events,
media etc-- to provide a consistent, continuous
message to the same suspect/prospect. This explains
the Prospect interaction piece. Complementing these
processes are strong processes and systems, at the
back-end for increasing Prospect Knowledge. A strong
back-end tracking system (using the principles of
data-warehousing) helps in building the prospect
knowledge (understanding prospect's explicit and
tacit interests). This prospect knowledge, built
over time, helps Wipro in adopting a focused approach
in future communication.
This approach has contributed to shortening the
sales cycle time and faster lead conversions.Without doubt,
the program has paid rich dividends- "In
the last one and a half years, we have tripled the
number of leads generated from Marketing. More importantly,
the quality of leads generated has been far superior
and that has given us faster lead conversions -
some of them being closed in as fast as 20-25 days"
adds Sangita Singh.
Wipro has shown that a concerted effort in terms
of prospect generation is the way to go. They have
successfully integrated their marketing activities
to get superior prospects and also shorten the sales
cycle considerably. A clear winner here.
