Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow Placement Interview Questions

Introduction.

Tell me more about your work at ZS.

What are your top 5 strengths?

Godrej wants to launch FMCG products (soap and shampoo for this case) and wants to leverage analytics for the same. Where all can we use analytics?
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate]

I- Pan India. Consider generic product here and anyway I am looking for ways where we can deploy analytics – not particularly around product specific analytics. So, be as diverse as possible.

C- *Asked for a minute*

Okay, so there are following areas where we can take help of analytics –

To start with –

i) Demand forecast.
ii) Supply chain management & inventory optimization.
iii) Marketing mix.
iv) Salesforce deployment.
v) Customer service - Sentiment analysis & feedback.
vi) Pricing strategies.

*Interviewer stopped me in between and asked for more details on demand forecast and salesforce deployment*

Demand forecast – I would take data from competitors’ sales which have been operating in our product category. Plus, there are industry specific reports by several firms which can guide us with the same. This would enable the company to manufacture optimum quantity of goods thereby reducing inventory costs. Input from the local sales team will also act as an input while creating the forecast.

Salesforce deployment – I would create two teams for salesforce.

Wholesale team – Focused on major brands such as Dmart, Big bazaar, Star Bazaar and so on. If we can push for the shelf space in just the HQ, it would ensure that we have ample shelf space in all their branches.

Retail team – Focused on retailers. Identifying the right set of retailers or wholesalers to have a tie up with. Analytics can also be used to identify the right margin for them. Concentrated sales team would be required in places with high demand and analytics can be used to decide upon the frequency of visit based on relationship, influence of the retailer, and generated sales.

What have you done during your college life?

What challenges did you face while working on your NGO?

How did you land up at ZS?

The transition from Engineering to consulting?

So, you have worked at Tata Steel. What did you learn over there?

How would you determine the profitability of an investment?

Why do you want to join Accenture?

GTM strategy for a product with reference from my work experience.
Talked about the steps we followed during the drug launch and which part of it we worked on. Started with segmentation, pilot launch, co-launch with existing team and then full-fledged targeting.

Went onto talk at length on targeting.

• Q1. What other projects have you worked on at ZS?
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• Q2. Which one did you find most challenging?
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• Q3. How is pharma targeting different?
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• Q4. Had it been a different product, what would be your approach?
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• Q5. What was your project at Tata Steel?
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• Q6. Why did you form an NGO?
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• Q7. What challenges do you face?
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• Q8. Who is running it now that you are here? How do you finance it?
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• Q1. Tell me something about yourself.
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• Q2. What are your academic interests?
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• Q3. Why McKinsey and why you?
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• Q4. Questions based on statistics.
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• Q1. The first interview was majorly an interaction on different concepts of Statistics.
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Your client is a financial institution who provides loan services. They plan to extend loan facility to lifestyle products (TV, mobile phones) in the online market. Consider they plan to tie up with e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Flipkart etc. How many loans could they expect, given that more than 50% of the market will avail the service for products over ₹5k.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate]

C: Starting with India's population (took 1.4 Bn for ease of calculation), I would first split them on the basis of urban and rural population. Then I would consider Internet penetration in these regions. Further I would divide each region on the basis of age as it influences people's preference towards online medium for purchase of Lifestyle products. Am I heading in the right direction?

I: Go ahead.

C: So here we have the total market for lifestyle products. Next, the average life of a product is generally 3 years which I would factor in to get the annual demand. I would then look at income division to understand which people will actually turn towards loans for their purchases (Took the interviewer's buy in while fitting the number to get the market size)

I: So Disha, now that we do not have much time left can you summarize what steps would you take after this to get to the answer.

C: Sure, I would consider the 50% market size and considering around 80% lifestyle products (assuming phones, TVs, smart watches) are above 5K I would come up with the final market size.

• Q1. Tell me something about yourself.
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Your client is a glass manufacturer looking to grow. They need your help.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate] 

(Firstly, used a CPCC framework to know more about the problem)

C: Okay, I would like to start with knowing a little more about the client. When we say it is a glass manufacturer, what type of glass products do they manufacture. Is it the one used at homes or in cars or buildings or any other use?

I: Yes, so it is a glass used in glass facades in homes for windows and panes.

C: Okay. So, what type of expansion is the company eyeing. Is it looking to expand into new markets or within the same market?

I: The current market in which it operates is pretty saturated, and they are looking to expand into new markets.

C: And by new markets, do they mean new geographies or new product line.

I: They want to operate in the same geographies they have currently been operating in. They are looking to expand their product portfolio. Can you help them decide that?

C: Yes definitely. So new products can be added by either identifying different uses of the existing manufacturing capabilities or adding new ones. Considering that we have less time, the first option seems to be a better one.

I: Yes, that’s correct. Can you help them identify what are the alternate uses of the glass that they sell?

C: I would like to first divide the uses into 2 groups. Stationery uses and Moving objects. Moving objects would be the cars, buses, trucks etc. and stationery would include the buildings.

I: You can look into the building use.

C: Okay, so buildings can be then divided as residential buildings and office spaces. Majority of the office spaces have glass facades and very few residential buildings have it due to privacy concerns, which area should I first focus on?

I: We have primarily been selling our product for office buildings. Can you give some uses of the product in residential buildings?

C: Yes, definitely. (Asked for some time and then came up with a few uses) So, the uses can be of 2 types. One is outside the home use, and another could be inside it.

Outside uses includes the glass railings, windows, staircase railings Inside the house includes indoor windows, dining tables, fixed cabinets, steam room in washrooms.

(Overall, it was a moderate case. The interviewer focused more on idea generation than anything else.)

• Q1. Tell me about yourself
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• Q2. How interested are you in joining Kearney?
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• Q1. Tell me about yourself.
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• Q2. Tell me about the work you did in your previous company?
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• Q3. Tell me about the committee you are part of at IIM Lucknow. What all have you done till now for that?
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• Q4. Any questions that you have for us?
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• Q5. What did you like at Deloitte? What was your role?
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• Q1. This was supposed to be case solving round (as told by other candidates). For me, it was more conversational and less Q&A.
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• Q2. How are you doing today?
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• Q3. You have exactly one minute to tell me about yourself. So, keep it crisp and short.
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• Q4. Why Accenture?
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• Q5. Any academic project that you did in your college?
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• Q6. Did you appear for any process before this? Which company did you sit for and how was the process?
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• Q7. The Q&A were followed by some conversation about myself to end the interview with.
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• Q1. This was the partner round. Go in with the same energy as the previous interviews
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• Q2. So how has your day been? Must have been pretty tough going through multiple interviews?
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• Q3. So, tell me a little about yourself.
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• Q4. You said that you are into reading. What was the last book that you read and what did you learn from it?
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• Q5. What do you write? Can you recite some of your writings?
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• Q1. Introduce yourself.
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• Q2. How has been your experience in MasterCard so far?
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Your client is a 2-wheeler tire manufacturer seeing decline in sales for the past 4 quarters.

They have asked for your help.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate] 

Started off with CPCC and understood that the decline was in South Indian cities. Client has a B2B business model wherein they’d sell to auto OEMs and also has a B2C arm as well selling to retail market.

The sales were primarily offline sales and decline was witnessed across all products. Client is one of the top 4 players pan-India and is losing customers to all competitors, no one specific (asked this to eliminate the possibility of the competitor doing something differently and focus only on internal issues).

C: Please allow me a few moments to structure my thoughts. A decline in revenues can be either because of tweaking our prices, the product mix or the overall number of units sold.

I: Yes, focus on the overall number of units sold.

C: Units sold could have gone down because either we are unable to manufacture enough and thus it’s a supply side issue or there isn’t sufficient distributor push or customer pull.

I: We have sufficient supply. Let’s start off with what the issue could be with respect to distributor push and then customer pull.

C: Before I dive deep into the distributor side issue, do we have stand-alone distributor, or the distributor sells our competitors’ products as well.

I: Yes, they do sell the competitor’s products as well.

C: Okay then issue can be either because there’s a change in the number of distributors, location of distributors or the distributor relationship.

I: What do you mean by distributor relationship?

C: Primarily the incentive structure, our distributor could be preferring the competitor because we have changed our terms, or the competitor has changed their terms.

I: That’s right, the competitors are providing a higher cut and thus our distributors are pushing their products. Now lets’ move on the customer pull.

I went the customer journey route splitting to Need, Awareness, Affordability, Awareness and Experience (per-purchase, during as well as post-purchase). She asked me to dive deep into awareness, so I split it to Personal Selling, Advertising, Sales Promotion and Public Relations.

Before we could discuss more on the customer side issue, she asked me to summarize the
case and we were done.

Guesstimate the annual revenue of your favorite restaurant in your city.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate] 

Clarified if the focus is only on offline or online delivery sales as well. He asked me to stick to dining sales.

Made the below assumptions:

Working hours: 12
Service time: 1 hour

Split the day into peak and non-peak hours and split the week into weekdays and weekends to give varied occupancy rate.

Average order value per table = Rs. 1000
Average order per person = Rs. 300
40-seater restaurant

Got a weekly sales number and multiplied by 52 to arrive at yearly sales (he tried to check my attentiveness by saying I will be multiplying the sales number with 365 days, right?) After all the calculations, the yearly revenue came out to be Rs. 3 Cr/annum.

He then asked me to summarize the case as I would to the restaurant owner using a crisp structure.

Client is a credit card issuer (think ICICI Bank) who has launched a product that gives 4% discount on online spend. The profitability is going down. They have asked for your help to increase profitability.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate] 

Asked clarifying questions whether this was as per-COVID or post-COVID issue. The issue spanned both timelines.

Target audience was millennials, digitally savvy with inclination to spend online. 1% discount on offline sales but the usage was almost exclusively online by customers.

C: To increase the profitability we can try to reduce our costs or increase our sales.

I: Focus on revenues.

C: Revenues can be split into fixed revenue (such as annual fees) and transaction-based revenue from merchant, late fees, etc.

We discussed extensively on above talking about increasing the APR, reducing the discount we give, reduce period of default, increase revolving income, increase size of transaction.

• Q1. Tell me something about yourself
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• Q2. He tested my knowledge of singers and music directors, to check if I was genuinely interested in music (the hobby I stated) or not.
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• Q3. Tell me more about your past work experience.
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• Q1. Estimate the number of Denims sold in a year in India.
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• Q2. You want to enter the ice cream market in in Jammu. Let us say a Baskin Robbins store. What all would you do?
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1. Which of the two companies (A and B) would you invest your money, here is some data from their financial statements and one financial ratio. You can ask for more financial ratios/ data which you might need in your decision-making process.

2. Tell me about the methods of depreciation and the industries where these methods are relevant.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate]

I: Which one looks like a better company?

C: Based on the data given, I answered (majorly profitability and efficiency ratios).

I: Okay great, now I am giving two more ratios. Now tell me which one looks like a better company.

C: I did some math and found out the other company looks better now with the given ratios in hand.

I: Cool, this company is better. Good.

• Q1. 1. Estimate the number of students doing coursework online on a Wednesday afternoon in Bangalore?
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• Q2. Our client manufactures a screen protector. Should he enter the market or not?
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• Q3. Our client is an established pharma company and wants to see if entering the sanitizer market is commercially viable for them. Help us.
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How Pharma Companies like GSK can increase interaction with their customers?

Duration: 10-15 minutes.

Selection: 1 candidate.
I started with GSK and their connect with customers as a company; mentioned the products of GSK in GD. Tried to bring different perspective and ideas while making entries. I made 4 to 5 entries. Tried to keep calm."

• Q1. Duration: 30 minutes. Tell me something about yourself and follow up questions from it.
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• Q2. Why GSK?
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• Q3. Why Sales and Marketing?
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• Q4. Importance of 4Ps.
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• Q5. You are given money which you can invest in a drug for fever (consider that GSK don't have any fever drug right now) or research going on oncological drug. Wher...read more
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• Q6. Guesstimate: How many MRs will be required to deliver new oncological drug in 4 metropolitan cities?
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• Q7. Any modifications you can bring in current product of GSK.
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• Q1. Why marketing? Why not other domains like Finance? Will you join the team if offered role in Finance?
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• Q1. Tell me something about yourself.
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• Q2. Why McKinsey? Why consulting?
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• Q3. What are your key strengths?
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• Q4. Why mountaineering? Where all have you travelled solo?
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• Q5. What do you write on?
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A private equity firm is interested to invest in metros and ports in India. Help them decide.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate]

C: Understood the motivation behind entry into the Indian market and this sector and their existing portfolio. Clarified if there was any other motive for entering this market apart from profits. For the valuation part, I analyzed the targeted rate of return and time for recuperating the investment and the desired cost of capital.

I: A Canadian firm wants to invest in India and is looking for good income flow. The timeline is 2-3 months. There is no specific location or other constraints.

C: I analyzed the regulatory environment (given the nature of the sector, wanted to understand if there were any current / upcoming regulation regarding investments in infrastructure). Clarified that tolls form a major source of revenue for the highway (95% w.r.t this case). Therefore, I restricted the analysis to the revenue earned via tolls as a matter of this case. I mentioned about different types of valuations and clarified that Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) method will be used to value this project.

I: What are the potential risks to this investment?

C: Used a graph to show the risk factors and ROI indifference curve. Future economic outlook, systematic risk, operational, Technology changes in future, currency risk. Spoke about the risk equation of r = (1/N) *Var + (1-1/N) * Cov to highlight that there is always going to be some systematic risk and mentioned the risk mitigation strategies through hedging.

I: Can you calculate the loss in case a type of commercial vehicles stopped using the highway (agri vehicles)?

C: (Got data related to different type and proportion of vehicles that use the highway and calculated revenue lost if 50% of agri: commercial vehicles stop using the highway.

Data: 100,000 vehicles per day; 40% cars, 20% buses and 40% commercial vehicles with toll charges 100, 200 and 300 respectively. 50% agri and remaining auto commercial vehicles. Calculated per day loss of 3 Mio and was asked to list down the reasons for decline in agri commercial vehicles and ways to compensate for the lost income.

• Q1. Hi Bhavya, how has your day been so far?
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• Q2. Tell me about yourself.
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• Q3. How was your experience at Bain earlier this year?
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• Q4. How do you like to spend your weekends prior to IIML?
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• Q5. What projects did you work on during your time at Deloitte?
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An IT company is seeing decline in profits. Diagnose the issue & provide recommendations.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate] 

I: (Interviewer realized I was a bit anxious and stressed, so had a candid conversation about Bain, her work there and general stuff about IIML for 5-7 minutes).

Okay Bhavya, let's get started with a case. Our client is one of the top 3 IT service providers, you can imagine it to be a Wipro/Infosys. It has 5 verticals: CPR, Manufacturing, Tech, Media and Financial Services. Of these, CPR, Manufacturing and Financial Services have a sales Department. The work of the IT company involves building applications, infra maintenance or building of servers, app maintenance, data work (e.g., Cloud) and IT consulting work. Now the focus here has to be on IT Consulting.

For procuring these projects, the company has salespeople. They have targets they have to meet based on which their salary is dependent.

Now, it has been observed that our sales have decreased while the salesforce commissions based on the targets have remained the same. It has also been observed that the average time period per project has decreased. Can you help us diagnose this?

C: Sure! Firstly, could I know since when this decline has been there and whether it has been there across the verticals?

I: It's a secular decline, taking place for the last 1 year.

C: Alright, secondly, I'd like to understand the salespersons' salary structure a little better. I'd imagine there would be a fixed and variable component, and the variable component is based on them meeting the sales targets?

I: Yes, and let's assume the variable component makes up most of the salary.

C: Great, could you explain how the commission structure is designed?

I: The structure is designed as No. Of projects * Conversion Factor.

C: Oh okay, what exactly is the conversion factor?

I: Good question. The conversion factor is defined two ways: 1) Number of projects won/ Number of projects bid or 2) value of projects won/value of projects bid.

C: Oh, so if I get this correctly, there's one based on no. of projects while the other is based on the sales value of projects?

I: Yes, that is correct.

C: Oh alright, I'd want to dig deeper into this a little bit before I proceed. Have both metrics seen a decline?

I: No, so while number of projects won is at par, the value won has declined.

C: Understood. So here I'd want to explore potentially something were doing wrong because of which the value we're winning is low.

I: Go ahead.

C: So, I believe there could be a couple of things. Either there's some problem with the projects itself, with the way they're being pitched by salespeople, or the competition is offering something better.

I: Hmm, well the pitch is fine. But the competition is largely providing longer term projects while we aren't.

C: Understood, so in that case, that seems to be the issue. We aren't able to pitch longer term projects which might have higher dollar value. Now, I'd want to understand differences between the competition and us in terms of securing these longer-term projects. Can I assume similar types of projects and similar salespersons?

I: Yes.

C: Okay, in that case, if the salespersons are similar and so are the projects, there might be an issue in pushing the projects from our salespersons. Is the conversion factor we talked about linked to Number of Projects or Value of Projects?

I: Yes, the conversion factor is largely linked to number of projects.

C: Understood. In that case, it's apparent that pushing longer term projects isn't incentivized adequately, is that fair?

I: Yes. However, there are other factors at play too, since till last year the value of projects was at par.

C: Understood. Are there other attributes of longer-term projects that differentiate themselves from the short-term projects? Potentially in terms of nature of projects, time to convert for salespersons or effort involved even in shorter time periods?

I: Yes, the second is the case. It takes more time on average to close the project which is causing the issue. Do you have any recommendations for this issue?

C: Yes, for our current sales,

1) We could incentivize longer term projects better through value-based approach

2) We could train the salesforce to pitch the projects in a shorter time period and close it earlier

3) We could increase the quality/composition of Salesforce that could be more equipped to deal longer term projects. Alternatively, we could think of identifying new areas of sales that could compensate for lost sales through longer term projects, potentially specializing in short term projects and increasing volume there.

I: Great, thanks Bhavya. How do you think it went?

C: Umm, I think I diagnosed the problem, but it took a lot of time to reach there. Could've been more efficient.

I: Yep, I felt it was alright as well, you could've been more efficient. But thanks for your time, and best of luck!

Havells Chief Logistics Head is thinking of employing Bain. What ideas can we propose? (I had worked in the Transportation & Logistics space during Deloitte Consulting, so case made potentially keeping that in mind)
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate] 

(Interviewer proceeded to tell me about himself and experience at Bain. He asked me questions including why don't you tell me about yourself, what was your work like at Deloitte, how do you spend your weekends, post that to ease me into the case)

I: So, you know how these interviews go, I am obligated to give you a case while I'd like to keep chatting. Let me give you something maybe slightly related to what you've worked on.

Your client is head of logistics of Havells. This is our 1st meeting with him, and we're supposed to have a conversation to pitch ideas.

C: Great, just so I understand this correctly, we have to pitch some ideas to Havells' Logistics head regarding potential improvements in their department for reducing logistics costs?

I: Yes.

C: I'd like to understand Havells a bit better before I proceed. Is it the electrical goods company? What sort of products does it have and what is its value chain like?

I: So yes, Havells has multiple factories and produces wires, switches, etc. They manage their own logistics.

C: Okay, and just to be sure about this, they procure raw material, there's inbound logistics, they manufacture the goods, there’s out outbound logistics, they store goods at their own warehouses and sell it to distributors?

I: Yes. You can ignore inbound logistics, however. Just focus on factories to distributors.

C: Great, also are there any specific objectives Havells has, going into this meeting?

I: Yeah, so you can assume they want to improve cost of logistics as a % of revenue. So even a 5% improvement for 10K crore company is high.

C: So, the structure I'd like to proceed with involves assessing Transportation & Warehousing. I can potentially proceed with transportation here.

I: Go ahead

C: Under transportation, aspects I'd want to look at include 1) The Modal Mix 2) The Route design 3) Effectiveness of covering routes.

I: What do you mean by Modal Mix? Havells just uses Road.

C: Oh okay, I could have looked into any scope for efficiency from transports mix that could reduce costs. Is there a constraint only on using roads on?

I: Yes, go ahead with route design?

C: Sure. So, there we could explore the potential routes decided at a network level between plants to minimize time and cost. The permutations could be explored that work best for Havells.

I: How can a consulting firm here provide value? Havells must know it's routes well already.

C: I understand, but:

1) Consulting firms typically have access to huge amounts of data and analytics tools that are unique solutions for such kinds of problems. We could leverage them to optimize route design for them.

2) Business owners/heads have their own biases while approaching such issues, an objective route mapping could help check for any bottlenecks.

I: Okay, go ahead?

C: Under route effectiveness, I'd want to look at if there's any internal or external factors that inhibit truck owners from covering these routes adequately. In internal issues, aspects such as truck capacity/truck effectiveness in carrying goods, driver issues can be explored. In external issues, aspects such as stoppages, bribery etc. could be explored.

I: Okay, but why does this even matter?

C: Improving effectiveness in routes would mean lesser time taken on these routes.

I: And how does that help? They pay fixed amount per ton to drivers.

C: Well time saved would mean more tons delivered in the total time present. Then the incremental revenues in the time saved would be the benefit to Havells.

I: Hmm, let's move forward.

C: Right, I'll move to warehousing now. Herein, I believe again either optimization at the network level can be done or within warehouses can be done.

I: What sort of optimization at network level are you talking about? And how would we do it?

C: This would involve the ideal placement of warehouses on the routes to minimize time and costs, as discussed earlier for route design using data and analytics. Herein the aspects to optimize would include:

1) Number of warehouses

2) Location of warehouses.

I: Hmm. Can you provide aspects within warehouse improvements?

C: Sure, this would include aspects such as improving turnaround time of trucks at warehouses and improving logistics operations within the warehouse.

I: Examples of within warehouse improvements?

C: Few that come to mind include improving inventory management, assembly and roll out of goods in shortest time. Labor and Role of automation here could be explored for improvements in time.

I: Hmm. Alright, we can stop here. How do you think it went?

C: I think it was alright, I tried to cover the board but there could've been improvements.

I: Right, I think you largely covered everything. Just could've taken more pauses and been more concise. But that's fine. Alright, best of luck and take care Bhavya!