After a runaway success in the consumer market in India owing to its superior packing, designing and aggressive pricing, TP-Link has now riveted its attention on the SME/SMB market and wishes to be placed among top 3 networking brands by the end of 2016. The company has taken up some planned strategy to make it happen.
Year 2016 is really a critical year for TP-Link in India as the company has stepped into SME/SMB market, a space which is very unstructured and dispersed. Various counts give various numbers but the government of India, Department of MSME’s website suggests the number to be around 40 million. This of course is inclusive of micro enterprises. However only SMEs in India could easily be approximately 10 million. So for TP-Link to succeed in this huge market is a daunting task.
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The common perception among the partners about TP-Link was that we only have the products for the bottom of the pyramid – for the Home and Soho market, which we wanted to correct.
Sanjay Sehgal
VP SMB & Telecom
TP-Link
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Looking at the size of the company in India, TP-Link cannot touch base with the millions of SMEs physically. It requires physical presence in all geographies and all clusters, which again is not possible. Therefore, the best bet is to go through the channel ecosystem, which the company is focusing on for last six months.
Sanjay Sehgal, VP SMB & Telecom at TP-Link, says, “Before selling to the customers, we wanted to educate our existing set of partners – distributors, business distributors, VARs and SIs. Reason being the common perception among the partners about TP-Link was that we only have the products for the bottom of the pyramid – for the Home and Soho market, which we wanted to correct. Therefore, for last six months we have been trying to educate our partners’ community that we have a whole lot of products for the SME/SMB market apart from the entry level switching and wireless routers.”
“Apart from that we developed a team for the SME/SMB business within the core team of TP-Link, who would focus on the SMB business. We brought one person in Delhi to take care of North and East and another person in Mumbai to look after West and South,” he added.
These two people know the channel ecosystem very well. And using their experience they support TP-Link field staff located in various geographies assigned to them. Along with this TP-Link has also developed a team for pre-sales to develop customised solutions for the partners.
Sanjay maintained, “Apart from this, we also have developed training modules for the partners. So at present we are training people through WebEx – almost twice a week. This is a good model for training apparently but yes this April onwards, we will start roadshows.”
As per Sanjay, the roadshows that the company is aiming at creating will also be very lively and interactive. It would be solution specific. He added, “For example, if we want to target the hospitality segment, we would be creating the solutions for the hospitality segment and would invite the partners to walk in and learn from the roadshow and later sell to the customers. So, similarly we might create roadshows around education segment or some other vertical market segment.”
And, these roadshows would start from the major cities including Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad. After looking at the success of these roadshows the company would extend to other cities.
From the product perspective, TP-Link today has the entire range of products including the PoE switches and injectors. What the company does not have is the core or chassis switches. Therefore, the company is clear in its strategy that it is not at all targeting the enterprise market but only SME/SMB market.
Today, TP-Link is operational through two NDs including Redington and Supertron for the pan India presence and to address the tier -1 SIs like Wipro and HCL directly. Apart from this, the company is engaged with close to 18 regional distributors, whom the company calls as business distributors reason being there might be more than one distributor of this kind in a particular region. Under these BDs there are 60 authorised SIs, with whom TP-Link has been working regularly and they inturn position TP-Link in the market dedicated.
However, Sanjay maintains that the company aspires to enhance the number as the company progresses in the market. The strategy is, along with these partners, TP-Link would work with the customers and create success stories and move ahead in engaging more partners and enhancing more traction in the market.
Customer wise, TP-Link has been successful in bagging decent accounts so far. For example, the company has wirelessly enabled the entire Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai. Similarly, Nagpur high court is another respectable name where TP-Link has been successful in implementing its solutions.
Sanjay says, “The advantage that TP-Link brings in is it manufactures every product in-house that are sold under TP-Link brand. We have our own R&D and Manufacturing team. We do not outsource to any third party for anything. Although nothing wrong in outsourcing but having our own in house team, we are able to control the quality and turnaround time to the market.”
“However there are challenges in the market for us in India. The first challenge is that we have a limited number of team members to address the reach in the market. But as a solution to this issue, we are bringing in Value Added Distributors to address the growth in the market,” he added.
Finally…
The goal of the company is to become one among top 3 preferred brands in the SME/SMB space as far as customers’ or partners’ brand recall is concerned at least within one-year time frame.
