When a leader builds a team with practical professional acumen, they hold the potential to drive the desired change at its most refined form. They understand that people build businesses; thus, keeping your team intact through every up and down becomes essential to make stronger bonds that can face every challenge thrown at them. Similarly, the marketing world frequently evolves, challenging its leading peers to adapt, innovate and surpass in their forte. As the marketing demand proliferates, it requires leadership with broadened views to encompass the challenges, redefining the norms of marketing functions to bring significant change.
This demanding nature of adaptiveness came in handy for Rohit Prabhakar, who consistently adapts by relearning everything from scratch. He started his professional journey as a software engineer, which later shifted to sales and then finally onto marketing, gaining knowledge from different sectors. During these career shifts, he moved to the U.S., which was challenging as he had to adapt to the new work culture, leading teams with values and principles that were far different from his previous experience of the corporate culture of India.
Later, Rohit implemented his expertise in the digital side of marketing for a decade leading global teams to deliver revolutionary digital solutions that engaged clients for very large companies like McKesson and Thomson Reuters before landing in his current position as the Chief Growth Officer at EQ Holdings.
Right Place at the Right Time
Early in his career, Rohit often came across unhappy clients who didn’t receive what they sought due to mistranslations during the projects. He stepped up to resolve these significant issues by understanding the needs and desires of the customers. He efficiently communicated and translated what they precisely sought, to his team, resulting in better results regularly.
Rohit expresses that the two years he spent in sales were the best time of his career as he got the opportunity to learn needs directly from customers and become customer obsessed. He was then introduced to the world of marketing, where he could use the perfect blend of Tech and Digital skills and training in sales. He found his calling in the marketing space, as technology started playing a significant role. He gathered knowledge that helped execute various strategies that made him one of the cherished pioneers in the field as a thought leader in marketing technology, data and artificial intelligence. Rohit entered the marketing world, understanding multiple aspects that enabled marketing organizations worldwide to influence positively.
Building Sustainable Growth
EQ Holdings operates as a private holding company to acquire, invest in and build meaningful businesses in partnership with management over an indefinite time horizon. Rohit mentions, “Our philosophy is we are looking for businesses that we can take to the next level using the power of digital and great customer experiences. EQ Holdings is an ESOP company where all employees are the owners.”
Rohit focuses on increasing demand generation & sales, improved Customer Service, operational effectiveness, process improvements, reinventing business models and enabling digital talent/culture as part of digital transformation programs. He aims to implement the voice of the customer and customer zero (employees) to improve the overall customer experience, and wherever possible, innovate and disrupt. He says, “I’m responsible for the digital and improving the overall revenue growth of those companies. Marketing, sales, customer experience, and customer service are the areas where I can improve with data, analytics, digital technologies and great CX. Unlocking Business Growth with Digital transformation is my core responsibility.”
Valiant Efforts
What makes Rohit an admired leader is his ability to build a team, instilling a culture that is trusting and focused on growth while looking after each other. He understands the importance of a team that can create a massive impact on the company’s top and bottom line. He shares his experience by stating that he built or nurture world-class teams in every organization he has worked for.
Rohit believes it is essential to hire or train right talent that can add value and bring new innovative ideas to the table. He worked with leaders to make this change happen, creating teams that enabled innovation disrupting the landscape of the industries with DevOps, agile and data-driven marketing. He asserts, “Things that any successful startup feels proud about do, my teams have enabled that in large organizations. Customer obsession was not even a hype in most places when I started there. During my tenure, I have enabled customer obsession across several organizations through data-driven decision making instead of leading with executive opinions.”
Rohit knows that Data sits at the core of all decision-making; with the precise data and supportive culture, one can bring a winning stack in multiple aspects of business such as marketing, sales and customer service.
Another essential thing that Rohit dedicated his efforts were to improve customer experience. He measured customer experience through things like net promoter scores (NPS), CSAT and task completion rates. He has executed various strategies to enhance the customer experience that led to increase revenue growth. The prime example is the 360% increase in e-commerce sales that his team enabled at recent company and generating almost $1 billion in net revenue for another Fortune 500 company. On operational side he notes, “We improved return on ad spends (ROAS). We were spending lot of money on paid media, but we were not generating even 1:1 returns on those investments. We hired a small team of experts led by a smart leader, a right AdTech platform and enbaled them with with data-driven decision-making in real-time; which led of improvement of ROAS from under 1:1 to 1:2.5 in less than a year. I don’t think there is any agency that you can hire, that even they can do it in one year, but we did it with our in-house paid media team.”
As a thought leader, Rohit understands the importance of curating a good team is not worrying about failing but failing fast and extracting lessons learnt from failures to ultimately succeed big.
The Potential Turning Point
According to Rohit, marketing technology is going towards a more maturity-driven return of investment. Currently, companies waste around 60 to 70% investment in marketing technology; thus, focusing on generating better outcomes utilizing ROI could be beneficial. Rohit believes that we will see more e-commerce and marketing technology coming together to build better whole new customer experiences and enabling busines growth.
What Lies Ahead
Rohit sees himself continuing to improve customer experience and enabling business growth by digital transforming marketing, sales, and customer service. He wants to improve the top-line growth of the organization’s revenue and profits. He says, “I’m passionate about marketing, and I would like to continue enabling different organizations. I don’t care about the title until I am doing what I’m passionate about.”
Bequeathing Excellence
Rohit received this advice very early in his professional journey, and he would like to pass it to the upcoming leaders – Do not be afraid of making mistakes and failing! Quickly learn from your mistakes, pivot don’t repeat those mistakes again.
