CIO Review interviewed Rohan Fernando, Regional Managing Principal for Asia at ZS Associates. ZS is focused exclusively on helping clients improve business performance through sales and marketing solutions—from customer insights and strategy to analytics, operations and technology.
ZS has seen tremendous growth in the sales and marketing space. Please tell us about how ZS started and which attribute was key to this growth.
When I joined the company in 1996, we had about 250 people while today we have 3,200 people; we have grown more than tenfold in this period. The main driver of our growth has been our ability to innovate and partner with our clients in new ways. In 1996, ZS’s primary services were in the sales force area: helping companies size, deploy and manage their sales forces. Today we work with our clients across all areas of sales and marketing: we help them define key marketing decisions, help run commercial operations, help build technology solutions so that people can make better commercial decisions. All of these services have been driven by our innovation engine.
Please tell us about the positioning of your organization in the market and what makes it different from other consultancy firms.
ZS is a professional services company focusing exclusively on sales and marketing. This focus allows us to be very practical in our approach and create solutions which actually work in the marketplace and create impact for our clients. As an example, if we are working with a client on a marketing strategy, our work is informed by our deep understanding of the sales force. If we are designing a business intelligence dashboard, we do that knowing the company’s commercial strategy so that we can define reports and metrics which are relevant to the business.
Our focus on creating impact also means that we need to help our clients tackle the delicate topic of change management. Even if a strategy is very rational and ‘correct,’ it may still not be adopted if the company’s people do not believe emotionally in the change, or if the change is too difficult.
Our focus on sales and marketing also means that we have often already seen some version of the problem the client is struggling with. Our experience allows us to deploy assets or frameworks to help solve the issue. We do not need to start from scratch every time. I believe our focus is our strength. We do not try and be all things to all people. We aspire to be our clients’ trusted sales and marketing partner.
Could you please share with us an example wherein ZS has enabled the client to effectively boost sales of their offering, or the like?
A small company had developed a new cutting-edge technology for a certain kind of surgery. Their investors and CEO hired us to help examine their marketing strategy. We needed to understand the customers’ viewpoint so we did a lot of customer insight interviews with surgeons and buyers, understanding the landscape, the price points, how the technology would be used and what specific benefit surgeons and hospitals would see. Our program resulted in a major change in the launch strategy, especially related to defining a program for how the hospitals would fund the purchase of this capital equipment.
What do you see for the future of your Asia business?
ZS’s Asia business is growing strongly. We have more than 2,000 people in India and our business in China and Japan is also very healthy. Next year we will open a Singapore office. Asia is a key region for us in terms of talent and growth.
The consulting landscape has undergone a significant transformation. How do you leverage the change to be at the forefront?
We as a company invest a lot of time and energy to keep innovating and to be at the forefront of our space. The good news is that change is happening in all industries. For ZS to thrive, we need to be at the forefront of understanding the changes and helping our clients succeed with them.
Let me give you an example. Today there is a lot of customer data available—not just the ‘structured’ data on customer sales or a company’s activity with them, but also reams of ‘unstructured’ data, leveraging digital interactions and social media. The question is how do we leverage this information to be smarter about sales and marketing? About two years ago we created a unit within ZS whose only focus was to create a solution in this area. The result is our Customer-Centric Marketing solution, which has been deployed in numerous markets and which tackles all the different aspects of making this a reality: How do we collect and manage all of our customer data, structured and unstructured? What analytics do we need to deploy to make smarter customer interactions? What operations do we need to actually implement this, and so on.

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Revamping Sales and Marketing
ZS focuses exclusively on helping clients improve business performance through sales and marketing solutions-from customer insights and strategy to analytics, operations and technology.
The marketing space within global management consulting is expected to reach a value of $402.3 billion by 2016—an increase of 33.6% since 2011. Many organizations are now performing basic and strategic sales and marketing functions in partnership with third parties. As companies become bigger and more sophisticated, this trend of working with trusted partners is here to stay.