Bangalore: Shifting from the traditional focus of selling services to IT heads of leading customers such as Citigroup and General Electric, Indian top IT firms including Wipro, TCS and Infosys plan to follow Accenture's sales model.

These companies plan to hire senior partners who have a vast experience and are capable of having a dialogue with chief executives of the organizations. Wipro, which serves customers such as British Petroleum (BP) and Citi, has hired around a dozen senior partners from Accenture, Ernst and Young and Deloitte over the past few months. Girish S Paranjpe, the company's Joint Chief Executive, told Economic Times in an interview that his company would hire another 30 such partners in 2010.

Some senior executives who joined Wipro in the last few months as part of the company's new sales strategy include Kirk Strawser, Managing Partner and Global Head, Wipro Consulting Services; Chris Rooney, Global Practice Head, Business Transformation and Roger Camrass, Senior Practice Partner, Business Transformation.

Paranjpe said, "We often lost because of having pure CIO-level dialogues, we got hurt and even lost some deals. We will hire another 30-40 such professionals who will be responsible for growing our client relationships to $30-40 million in revenues."

Since long, TCS, Infosys and Wipro have been focusing on software application development and maintenance, getting new business from CIOs of large customers such as Citi, GE and many others. Now, as they seek bigger, multi-year transformational deals, they need to penetrate boardrooms of Fortune-500 companies.

"Client partners think and breathe business problems of customers who seek advice and guidance - they are people with a few decades of experience," said Paranjpe. At the time of recession, when business was tough to come by, Wipro managed to penetrate large customers such as BP, helped by the new approach. Camrass, who joined Wipro as Senior Practice Partner a few months ago, is respected by many decision makers within BP. With over 35 years of experience, Camrass has worked with top consulting firms such as Ernst and Young.

R Suresh, Manging Director of search firm Stanton Chase said, "All top IT firms are looking at hiring partner-level people. One of the reasons is they are winning huge long-term IT outsourcing contracts. These are annuity-based contracts and the client needs to see the same face when he's interacting with the service provider."