Infosys’ decision to slash its sales and marketing expenses by 15% within a span of just three months has triggered an alarm within the analyst community, but India’s second-largest IT services exporter has asserted it is only trying to rework its existing sales structure.

The selling and marketing expenses of Infosys at the end of third quarter of FY14 stood at Rs 644 crore as against Rs 757 crore in the sequential quarter, showing a fall of 14.9%. Sales and marketing is a crucial expenditure for any IT services company to get more business and any downward revision in this parameter generally does not bode well for an IT firm.

During the analyst meet post the quarterly results, Infosys executive chairman N R Narayana Murthy said, ?Today, it’s a diamond structure. We have too many senior people and very few junior people beating the pavement in the market.”

Now the company plans to change gears. Infosys CEO S D Shibulal said, ?Right now, we are looking at adding another set of people into the sales force. We want to have a pyramid structure for our sales force and that means that we will add a lot more people at the lower level, at the lower grade than at the upper end of the pyramid structure.?

After Murthy’s return in June, Infosys undertook a restructuring exercise of its sales and marketing teams in India and abroad, including the US, its largest outsourcing market, which involved job cuts. The multi-layered structure at the IT major was slowing the decision-making process, leading to losing out on contracts in an environment of intense competition. During that period, Basab Pradhan, who was head of global sales and marketing, and Sudhir Chaturvedi, financial services head for the Americas, resigned from the organisation owing to differences after they were asked to explain the overstaffing of the sales and marketing task-force overseas.

The revamp of the sales and marketing department also saw reworking on their onsite presence.

If there are shifts working on a project, typically two shifts are in India while one is overseas. Infosys went in the direction of reducing the overseas staff presence to a minimal essential.

Murthy was very clear that there was a performance review of the selling and marketing departments and in the process Infosys did let go of people who did not meet the bar. ?No sales person who is efficient has been allowed to leave. Those that were not performing, some of them have left, some others are on a performance improvement programme… whatever the cost optimisation we have done so far, is primarily in the area of marketing where there are lots of senior people sitting outside India doing jobs that could have been done at lower-cost locations and therefore that’s what we have done.?

As the IT major looks to get back on track of higher growth with superior operating margins, it plans to increase the thrust on newer geographies with sales and marketing initiatives. Infosys president BG Srinivas said, ?We are also looking at how to improve overall sales productivity and increasing the effectiveness and their initiatives in place. We also increased our sales focus in the two large markets within Europe, namely France and Germany.?