Hi there. My name is Ali. On Craft Theorys I write about being ambitiously slow: building boring, profitable businesses with big goals, at a pace that leaves room for the rest of your life. Subscribe if that sounds like you. And if you’re in a B2B business, apply to The Boring Business Club, my private WhatsApp group.
This is the third piece in a series on reinventing IT services firms, about as boring and profitable as businesses get. The first explains why the growth ceiling is gone. The second argues that reinvention starts with learning to sell. This one is about what to sell.
If you run an IT services firm in India and you’ve followed this series, you’ve reached a harder question: what do you actually sell?
Most Indian services founders I know try to answer it the same way. They open the portfolio.
It’s a reasonable instinct. A firm that has spent years on custom work has done a bit of everything: mobile apps, web platforms, ERP integrations, a data migration, a few engineers placed with a client who needed them in a hurry. The answer must be somewhere in that pile.
So the client work goes into a spreadsheet. Which clients paid the most. Which industry shows up most often. Which tech stack the firm keeps getting hired for. Out comes a pie chart, and then a decision. “We’re strongest in BFSI, let’s focus there.” “Most of our revenue is React, let’s be the React shop.”
Spreadsheets, however, do not tell you why someone bought your services. Without that, you don’t know what to sell, and you’ll keep guessing and keep investing in “supply” (if you don’t know what supply means, read the first piece).
Product companies have a name for the state where buyers come looking for you. They call it product-market fit. A services firm needs its own version. Call it service-market fit.
What is service-market fit?
Start with how a product differs from a service. When someone buys a product, they take it and work out how to use it themselves. They might need help now and then, but getting value out of it is their job. A service is delivered. The output comes from people and a process working together on the client’s problem.
So here’s the definition.
Service-market fit is when buyers who don’t know you keep coming to you with the same to-do, and you get it done for each of them the same way, with people plus a process. You’ll know you have it when your case studies start to look alike.
Demand comes first. The process gets built behind it, and the case studies come out of the process. Ten case studies about ten different projects show you can do a bit of everything. Ten that tell the same story show you’ve found something.
A firm with service-market fit can answer three questions:
What do buyers come to you for?
Who needs it urgently, with budget?
When do they come looking for you?
Once you can answer all three, every channel starts working. Ads, webinars, LinkedIn, newsletters, a WhatsApp group, for all I care. You know who you’re talking to and what to say to them.
Most IT services firms in India can’t answer any of the three with confidence. They have a long list of work they’ve done and no idea when a buyer would go looking for them. Work arrives through referrals, which means someone else decided who the firm is for.
Fit comes in degrees. You might find it first with a small group: twenty manufacturers who all need the same integration built on the same ERP. Then you widen the group. The firm gets bigger, the problem doesn’t change.
Why your portfolio won’t find it
Go back to that pie chart. Each slice is a client, and behind each client is a reason they picked up the phone. Ask yourself whether you know what that reason was.
For most firms I’ve seen, the honest answer is no. The client came through a referral, or through a salesperson who has since left, or through someone the founder knew years ago. The reason they bought was never written down. So the gap gets filled with a story, and the stories usually come in two shapes.
The first is about technology. “We’ve done a lot of React, so we’re a React shop.” A buyer hires you to get something done by a date. React happened to be how it got done. They’d have taken Fortran if it shipped on time. Specialising in a stack also puts you in the most crowded part of Indian IT services, next to the thousands of firms that already say the same thing.
The second is about industry. “Most of our revenue is BFSI, so we’re a BFSI firm.” Look closer and those BFSI clients often came for different reasons. One needed ten engineers in a hurry. One had a vendor who stopped picking up the phone. Same industry, two different needs, two different processes. Their case studies won’t look alike, so by the definition above, there’s no fit there yet.
So where do you look instead?
Two places to start
Where you start depends on one thing: whether buyers who don’t know you are booking calls with you.
The first state is zero. Every client is custom work, almost all of it came through referrals, and in a typical week no stranger books a call. There’s nothing to go back and study, because there was never a call to study.
The second state is some. A handful of people find you on their own, through your website, a post, an ad, a directory listing, and book time with you. Some of those calls were recorded, or someone took notes. That’s raw material.
Be honest about which one you’re in. Calls with existing clients don’t count. Referral calls can still help, as long as you can work out why the person agreed to talk. Most founders I’ve met sit in the first state and believe they’re in the second.
The two states start differently and end in the same place. In the first, you guess what buyers need and go sell it. In the second, you dig it out of the calls you already have. Either way, you end up selling and listening.
When nobody is calling
The hardest part of the first state is your ego. You have a team, clients and revenue, so acting like it’s day zero feels absurd. Do it anyway. Your clients don’t need to know you’re starting over. They’ll assume you’re busy. The firm you’ve built can’t find this for you.
Start from a clean slate. A first to-do usually comes from one of three places:
Pain on the job: what went wrong while you delivered. Mine was not knowing how every project was doing without being in every room.
Pain from your own life: something outside work you’d have paid to fix. Say, getting your family’s clinic to take bookings online.
Prospecting: no pain of your own, so you guess one. Say, manufacturers whose ERP doesn’t talk to their warehouse system.
Write your guess down in the shape from the first piece:
We need to ______
by ______.
We’ve already tried ______,
and it didn’t work because ______.
We can’t do it ourselves because ______.
Then sell it, one-on-one, with you on the call. Pick twenty people who should have that problem. If the guess is right, they move towards a start date without you pushing. If you’re explaining what you do more than once, it’s wrong. Rewrite it and go again.
If you think outbound is dead, that’s bullshit. You just haven’t found the right to-do: one people need help with and have no other option for.
Once a guess pulls, people start booking calls with you. You’re in the second state.
When people are calling
If buyers already book time with you, the answer is sitting in those calls. Go back through the recordings and transcripts with one question: why did this person take time out of their day to talk to us?
Nobody wakes up wanting to buy services from an IT firm in India. They’re busy. If they booked a call, something on their list made them do it, and these days most people will tell you what it is. It sounds like this:
“We bought an ERP and need custom integrations on top. Finance is waiting.”
“Our website needs an update. Our engineers are busy and marketing’s backlog keeps growing.”
“Demand is outpacing what we can hire for. We need offshore engineers within budget.”
If you’re on the calls yourself, talk less and ask more. Here are five questions that do all the work:
Why did you take time out to talk to us?
When does this need to be done?
Who else are you talking to?
If you’re still talking to us, what’s missing from those options?
What does success look like for you?
If there’s no project or no date, they aren’t buying yet. Move on.
Watch for tourists. “We’re talking to multiple vendors” usually means they’re talking to nobody. “We have a few quotes in” means they’re serious. That’s when you ask: “We usually charge $X. Is that in the ballpark of what you’re seeing?” Watch their face as much as their answer.
Let AI read the calls
You don’t need to fill in a spreadsheet, and you don’t need to have been on every call. Most call recorders give you a transcript now. Put every transcript from buyers who found you on their own in one place, and ask an AI to read them. Something like:
For each call, tell me why the buyer booked it, what they need done, by when, what they’ve already tried, and why it didn’t work. Then group the calls by what they need and tell me which ones come up most.
You’re looking for the same to-do from people who don’t know each other, with a similar deadline and a similar failed option behind it. When several calls say roughly the same thing, you have a guess worth selling to more people.
AI is good, but it can’t summarise a question you never asked.
If every call says something different, either you haven’t had enough calls yet, or the people calling don’t share a problem. Go back to guessing one and selling it.
Sell it to more people
One buyer with a pressing need and no good options is a start. It might also be just that buyer. Their situation might be unusual, or the options they turned down might suit someone else fine. The only way to find out is to sell the same thing to more people who should need it.
Go where those people already are:
Outbound: short, plain messages that name the problem. “Is finance still waiting on those ERP integrations? We build them in 2 weeks.”
Ads aimed at people who look like the buyers who called you.
Reddit and the other communities where they ask for help.
Content about the problem: posts, a newsletter, a webinar. The call to action does the qualifying.
Use the words your callers used. The transcripts already tell you how buyers describe the problem, so you don’t have to invent a pitch.
What you want is buyers pulling this out of your hands.
How you know it’s working
Count one number: calls booked each week by buyers who don’t know you, about this one problem. Calls from existing clients don’t count, and neither do calls about something else.
Then watch how fast it grows. Starting from zero, 10% compounded monthly is a strong rate. That roughly triples your calls in a year. Further along, the bar moves, but the line should keep going up.
If the number flattens, either the guess is wrong or the people you’re reaching are. Change one and go again.
Then cut everything else
Once one to-do pulls, do just that. Everything else gets a no: the custom project from an old client, the referral for something you used to do, the new service line a competitor just launched.
This is the hard part, especially for firms doing fine. Every custom project pulls people off the process you’re building. Your case studies stop looking alike. Delivery stops being repeatable, and the demand you found starts to slip.
So once you’ve found it, tell the rest of the work to f*** off, and do this one thing.
Where this leaves you
If you run an IT services firm in India, you’ve probably spent years getting very good at delivery. Clients stay, the work is solid, and the business pays for itself. What most of us never learned is how to find the work worth repeating.
Service-market fit is that work. One to-do, buyers who come looking for it, and a process that gets it done the same way every time. Find it, and growth stops depending on how fast you can hire.
It also makes the firm calmer to run. Fewer projects you don’t fully understand, fewer late nights rescuing them, fewer Sundays spent on a proposal for something you’ll never do again. You can chase 100% growth and still be home for dinner. That’s what I mean by ambitiously slow.
More is coming in this series.