India Market Entry

Sales and Marketing

India is a large and growing market for engineering service and products. Indian companies are looking to improve their products to meet the requirements of export markets but also local consumers are becoming more demanding in terms of features and attributes.

However, India can prove to be a challenging place for organisations looking to establish a presence in the market for the following reasons:

• It is a price-sensitive but feature demanding market
• Scope requirements can be vague and changeable
• Purchasing procedure and decision making team can be difficult to determine
• Country is geographically large and culturally diverse
• Significant interaction required and local presence strongly preferred (see below)
• Frequent issues with payments and taxes

Caepro has significant experience selling its own services within the market and through selling services, software and components for clients. We can help in the following areas:

• Market segmentation, identification of key accounts and decision makers
• Development of product and market specific sales and marketing procedures
• Hiring and training of team and establishment of KPIs and incentives
• Customisation of collateral
• Identification of appropriate conferences, trade shows and member associations to raise brand
  awareness

Engineering Operations

There are many benefits to establishing an engineering presence in India including access to a low-cost, highly-skilled, English-speaking workforce, a well established, independent legal system and a democratic, stable government.

However, setting up an operation in a new territory can be daunting, expensive, time consuming and risky. Caepro’s experience in establishing its own presence in India as well as for some of its clients enables it to mitigate these risks. Caepro can help in the following ways:

• Hiring a team and developing compensation structures. Clients can further complement their team with part-time use of existing Caepro resources such as managers or technical specialists. this allows clients to start with teams as small as one engineer and build over a period they are comfortable with. Considerable savings on an ex-pact with ex-pat salary and compensation requirements.
• Training the team and developing procedures. Caepro already has a considerable amount of training material that can be used to train the client team. Alternatively we have experienced personnel that can help deliver the client’s training material in territory saving the expense of sending the engineers to the client or the retrications of online learning. Caepro also use KPIs for continuing capability development.
• Identifying appropriate hardware, negotiating the best price and training. Caepro already has a broad range of engineering software. This can be made available to the client’s team so that not all software needs to be purchased immediately. This is particularly helpful if some software is not utilised full-time. Further, economies of scale in software purchase mean that the nth license purchase is cheaper than the 1st and this benefit can be passed to the client. As Caepro uses the software daily in application engineering we can train the team not only in the use of the software but also for application engineering.
• Being part of a larger, established team can help form relationships and reduce attrition. Client teams can take part in Caepro’s own regular team building and social activities. This helping to further build trust and confidence in other team members and being a fun place to work encouraging creative thinking and idea sharing essential elements of a high-performing team.
• Project management and delivery. Caepro has significant experience delivering projects to its own client base globally. We have structures in place to ensure the highest quality, on-time deliver which can be utilised by the client team. Our project managers can help monitor the project delivery of the client team.
• Accounting and tax. India has relatively complex tax and accounting requirements with little mitigation for small companies. As such significantly higher time and expense is required to cover these activities compared to a similarly sized business in the UK or US. Caepro understands these requirements and our own accounting resources can be used to support the client team.
• Ease and flexibility of entity formation. As part of Caepro team initially there is no need to setup a separate legal structure saving time, cost and administrative effort. No risk of establishing a “legal presence” in Indian for tax purposes. The team can be wound down over an agreed notice period. This gives the client flexibility should circumstances or objectives change. When the team gets to a size that can justify its own entity and management it can be transferred to a separate legal client entity and Capro can help with its formation.