After setting the hunting team to hunt for new logos (clients) in the beginning of the fiscal, Wipro has now established a team of 'farmers’.
As it has happened in the case of hunting team also, the farming team will not exactly go out with their ploughs to cultivate the land. Their mandate is to cultivate the accounts (clients) won by the hunters, and grow them faster and bigger by deepening relationship with them.
“It is the job of the hunting team to win new clients, but it is the farming team which will actually be responsible for extracting the most out of them and grow them further. This has already reflected in the growth of our top accounts which is growing above the company average,” T K Kurien, the CEO of Wipro’s IT business told Business Standard .
The farming team constitutes of about 790 people who are part of the company’s sales team, he added.
In the first quarter of this fiscal, Wipro had formed a hunting team who were mandated to look for newer clients, especially the Fortune 2000 ones who have the potential to grow into larger accounts in the future. Initially, the team had a strength of 137 people which has now gone up to 160.
According to the company, the hunting team has been able to win sizable number of new accounts in the past two quarters. In the Q2 of FY13, the company added 53 new clients while the client addition in Q3 stood at 50.
Kurien said while the win rates have been very good in the past two quarters, the ramping up of those accounts may take some time. Besides, the company is also significantly focusing on growing the top accounts, especially the clients who contribute over $100 million in revenues in annualized basis.
“While we have now 10 clients who give over $100 million each in revenues, the average revenues we get from those customers is almost half than what some of our peers get,” said Kurien.
“Our focus will not only be on growing the $100 million relationships, and we will also have to increase the size of $100 million clients which will be primary focus of the farming and hunting teams,” he added.
In the quarter ended December 31, 2012, Wipro had 484 clients who contributed over $1 million each in revenues for the company. The top 5 clients accounted 13.2 per cent of the company’s IT services revenues of Rs 1577.2 crore in the quarter.
