Rashi Peripherals is putting in a lot of efforts and budget for hard and soft skills training for its employees. Rajesh Goenka, Vice President, Sales & Marketing, Rashi Peripherals
highlights the importance of upskilling and how critical it is for partners to upscale their techno-commercial skills in order to adapt to the changing times
What’s the direction for Rashi Peripherals as an organization in 2018 in terms of focus areas and initiatives being taken?
Rashi Peripherals continues to register double-digit growth despite market challenges like demonetization and GST among various other disruptions. This is predominantly due to a very wide product portfolio and the largest reach of over 50 branch offices spread across India.
Our aim is to keep the double-digit growth in the year 2018 as well. In order to sustain this momentum for the next three years, we are now targeting verticals like system integrators, LFRs, retail, SMB, enterprises, and government. With this focused approached, we should be able to sustain our momentum for the next few years.
In this digital disruption era, how do you envisage the role of partners evolving with the changing market dynamics?
As digitization progresses, just product delivery will become almost a secondary job; whereas, services and support will become the prime driver. Hence, it is critical for partners to upscale their techno-commercial skills in order to adapt to the changing times.
The overall partner landscape would remain similar and since we as Indians, especially in the IT industry, are learned, techno savvy and more adaptive, I foresee that partners would upskill themselves.
What efforts are being put to build capabilities and skill-sets of your internal team so that they are ready to address customer requirements?
Rashi Peripherals is putting in a lot of efforts and budget for hard and soft skills training for its employees. The focus is not only on sales and marketing but also on finance, logistics and services team. Fortunately, at Rashi, we implemented SAP almost 11 years ago, therefore our systems are very robust and more adaptable to the changing requirements of business. If we were to be with the older software platforms, adaptation would have been very difficult. This year itself we will be conducting more than 10,000 hours of training to our team.
How much support do you receive from OEMs / vendors in your bid to be market-ready? Is there any specific channel program being run as part of hand-holding?
In today’s scenario, vendors, distributors and even partners approach business hand-in-hand. Any one missing in this link is a recipe for failure. Various vendors have various system and processes to support the same. For example, vendor ‘A’ has a very good online portal wherein you can lock-in all the leads and then progress along with them to close the deal. Another vendor ‘B’ lays more focus on training about product and technology and tries to upgrade the skill-sets of sales and marketing team periodically.
What are your expectations from the vendors / OEMs?
Realistic business planning with appropriate support of demand generation activities is the key for success. Also, some vendors are not investing in manpower, which is the need of the hour. I think vendors should consider these critical factors while framing their roadmap in India.
