How to grow 10x in 10 years to reach $7.5 Bn revenues

The technology boom had created a need for tech talent, even across the Fortune 500 companies that weren’t in the tech business themselves. When NYTimes’ Tom Friedman wrote “The World is Flat,” he touched a raw nerve in corporate boards, and soon, there was an insatiable hunger for low-cost, high-quality engineers from around the world, especially India. This company (Infosys) had three-quarter billion dollars in sales by 2003, and the next ten years would be its’ “decade of destiny,” where the company could grow as fast as its engines could fire. So long as the engines kept firing.

Doloop Digital’s Gaurav Rastogi was the company’s sales transformation architect for this critical period. The problems to solve were many. How do you hire and promote many people into the sales team while raising standards? How do you grow mid-sized accounts into large accounts with more than $100 million each in revenues? How do you beat the strong market momentum by proactively taking new ideas to clients and having the discipline to see these through execution while charging more for the consultants?

By solving these and many other problems, the company experienced its decade of destiny. The company grew 10x in the next ten years, clocking in at $7.5 Bn in revenues by 2013.

When facing a favorable market, you must pull out all stops to soak all the growth the market can offer. This means creating a well-tuned revenue engine. Here are a few places to start working:

• The atomic unit of enterprise growth is an account. The tendency for the Pareto principle (most revenues come from a handful of accounts) means you must continue to focus on your large accounts and think about how to grow them into mega accounts.
• Sales momentum comes from ideas. If your team takes ideas to the clients, you can create more than market momentum. If not, then you are playing a losing game, and your growth will, at best, be market growth rate. (See Billion Dollar Ideas Factory).
• ‘Great salespeople have large ears and long noses; each eye is a different color.’ If your success depends on finding these very rare specimen of a salesperson, you will not hire many, and your company will not grow that much. Your sales go-to-market has to assume many smart and dedicated people who are unexceptional. Change your messaging accordingly.

Further learning.

• Sign up for Gaurav Rastogi’s “Understanding the Enterprise Revenue Growth Engine” workshop.

Please know that we will only fully support a transformation program the leadership team is committed to executing. It will take at least 18 months to show results, but those will be long-lasting. These could be your decade of destiny