Google gets into business consulting for SMEs

Just five years ago, it was common place to find people sending custom invitations from Google to open gmail accounts. Well, the web search giant has moved on.

Today, it will more likely pitch: “You have 13,000 clients receiving your floral bouquets. We can make that 26,000 in one month, with negligible cost on your part.”

Google is gearing up to give the McKinseys of the world a run for their money, as it makes inroads into the business consulting space. The targets are the millions of small and medium businesses (SMBs), Sridhar Sheshadri, head online sales, Google India told DNA Money.

“When I came into Google about two years ago, we found that small and medium businesses, startups, etc were grappling with this challenge of execution,” he said.

People have business ideas, even investment capabilities, but lacked execution approach.

“We started a pilot about a year-and-a-half back by setting up a call centre where the mandate was to address the execution issues of small and medium enterprises. We put business experts at the other end of the call who could guide them from conceptual stage to revenue generation. The approach we take is to ask the business owner about things like breakeven, cost of capital, etc and suggest ways to improve on those metrics with support from Google search data,” Sheshadri said.

According to estimates by Google, there are about 40 million businesses of various sizes in India, of which just about 2 million are online in some way or the other.

All of Google’s existing clients in India (the firm does not give client number for specific country) have gone through the consulting phase.

“My discussion for instance with that adventure sports businessman from Uttaranchal is not on adwords, ad-serve or anything related to Google. My discussion is mostly on what kind of topline and bottomline is he looking at. I start from his perspective and work backwards. The moment you get it, they love it,” said Sheshadri.

Google sees demand for consulting in India increasing rapidly and the firm is gearing up to increase its capacity. “We are seeing the demand increasing. And we are well placed to ramp up the capacity from handling 1,000 calls to 5,000 calls per day. That will take about 2-3 months,” said Sheshadri.

Google India’s sole call centre, run by another firm for Google India, operates from Delhi. The company is looking to set up an additional call centre in southern India. “The biggest challenge for me currently is to handle demand for helpdesk in local language.

That is one huge task. The online part is in English. But SMB owners are more comfortable in their vernaculars. The new call centre that is coming up will take care of the South Indian language needs. We aim to provide support in 10 Indian languages by the next 18 months,” said Sheshadri.

The firm is hiring more and more business domain experts for carving a bigger share in the consulting pie. “We do not look at that as cost. We look at that as investment. Our aim is to bring advertisers on to digital and stay forever,” said Sheshadri.

Meanwhile Google has initiated a campaign to evangelise the benefits of going online to attract more and more business owners. However, as Google feels a large portion of people in India may not at all use Internet, the firm is now devising products to reach them offline on mobile phones.

“Today, majority of mobile phone users use it for voice calls. Even telco VAS (value added services) revenue is very small currently.

So we are looking at how to reach to those people and businesses who do not use Internet. So there are some SMS related products, voice related products and a few others which we are developing that will bridge this gap between online and offline,” said Sheshadri, a marketing professional, who spent about 12 years with ICICI Bank before joining Google about two years ago.

Besides language support, the challenge for Google India is to convey its business consulting capability to those who do business offline and even for those doing business online, since the word Google has become synonymous with search and to some extent technology.

Amongst some of the efforts from Google India to that end are getting into dialogue with SMB businesses through on-field activities, events, conferences, client meets on a city by city basis since Sep 2009. “We are also taking the co-marketing approach with partners, such as banks who already have huge SMB client base. In these, we are adopting a combination of direct marketing and helpdesk,” Sheshadri said.