Rahul Agarwal,
Executive Director, Commercial Business,
Lenovo India
Postgraduate from IIM, Ahmedabad (1996), he joined IBM as a Marketing Manager in 2001. With Lenovo buying IBM's PC division, he became part of Lenovo India's team
Tell us about your journey in the IT industry?
I was part of IBM team in May 2005, when Lenovo bought over IBM's PC division and was asked to lead the Marketing function for Lenovo India. During this period, we also attempted to create a favourable brand positioning and introduced several unique initiatives that ensured that Lenovo's overall brand awareness rose from 2 per cent in May 2005 to over 75 per cent in April 2010. In April 2010, I moved back to an India role and have been leading the Commercial Business since then. It has been a very rewarding experience for me to lead such a motivated team.
Elaborate on your consumer and commercial range?
We understand that the requirement of Enterprise/ Commercial customers is very different from the needs of end-consumers. Enterprise users traditionally look for products that offer security, manageability, reliability and durability above anything else. On the other hand, end-consumers usually prefer machines that impart added features (e.g., graphics card), stylish designs and have higher multimedia requirements. Taking this into consideration, we created and have maintained two brands to meet the needs of consumers and enterprises: the Lenovo IdeaPad and IdeaCentre range as well as the Lenovo ThinkPad and ThinkCentre range of products for Consumers and Enterprises, respectively.
How are you empowering your channel partners accordingly?
We have a well-defined channel strategy to help strengthen as well as expand our partner base for the REL business. As a company, we believe that the most important way to motivate partners is to treat them as natural partners in profit. For the enterprise business, Lenovo relies on the channel fraternity to effectively target Large Enterprise, Government and Education segments. Accordingly, we help partners to improve their profitability through adequate training (product & sales) and support (marketing support, after-sales service, support). Besides, we have a clearly defined and tiered channel model to incentive performance (Lenovo Premium Partner, Lenovo Corporate Partner and Lenovo Registered Business Partner).
What makes you connect well with the channel community?
I often do round tables and meetings with partners when I travel. We understand that partners value brands that provide ample support to their efforts in growing the business. The key to developing a successful relationship with partners is to keep an open-ended communication channel to garner their feedback and then act on it. We have an effective channel strategy for the REL business unit to help strengthen as well as expand our channel base and this enables us to increase our channel engagement, effectively boosting growth and profitability. We have done this by creating effective communication, enablement and engagement policies for partners, which is the topmost priority of our strategy.
