Chief Marketing Officer / India
Keep the missing condition inside the commercial story
- Marketing colleagues
- 21
- Three managers; ₹6.7 crore annual expense
- Company revenue
- ₹132 crore
- FY 2025–26; 340 employees in March 2026
- Commercial experience
- 26 years
- Event accounts through specialist-software marketing
Decisions & consequences
01Replacing the licence headline with a usable first-year example
In 2022 I approved a campaign example built around a ₹1.2 lakh annual software licence for a defined venue configuration. The illustrated configuration also required ₹0.8 lakh of setup and ₹0.6 lakh of training in its first year. Those components appeared later in the sales discussion rather than beside the example. The resulting ₹2.6 lakh first-year amount, before taxes, was materially different from the impression left by the headline. A simple number had made the proposition easier to advertise and harder for a buyer to evaluate.
Anita's implementation team raised the issue after repeated conversations in which venue managers assumed they could begin at the licence amount alone. I stopped the campaign version and worked with sales, finance and implementation to rewrite the example. It showed the licence, setup and required training separately, explained the first-year total and distinguished the subsequent-year licence from any additional services a venue might then request. Tax treatment was identified separately. We did not represent the example as a quotation for every venue or imply that future optional work was included.
We reviewed 32 open enquiries connected with the campaign. Eleven had specifically understood the licence headline as the opening-year amount. Sales colleagues clarified the scope with those buyers and retained their responses rather than rewriting the enquiry history. The review and replacement materials cost ₹12 lakh. We did not claim that the correction recovered a particular amount of revenue or prevented a quantified loss. Some buyers continued the discussion; others decided the configuration did not fit their budget. The account kept those choices separate from the expenditure on the correction.
My mistake was treating the component detail as something sales could explain later. That transferred a material condition into a conversation the buyer had already entered on a different basis. I changed our approval process so the team responsible for beginning the service reviewed the commercial example before publication. A clear first-year explanation need not show every possible variation. It must show the components that are required for the example we have chosen to promote. The result was a less compact headline and a more usable purchasing conversation.
Stopping a campaign that arrived after the venue's decision
A 2024 campaign promoted our planning software to venue teams preparing professional exhibitions. The initial contact report looked encouraging, but the operating discussions revealed a problem with timing. Of 120 venue conversations reviewed, 73 concerned events whose arrangements were already committed. Eighteen had a later planning window in which a software discussion might be practical. Twenty-nine needed further clarification. Those categories described the reviewed conversations; they were not a conversion forecast or a claim about the whole venue market.
I had approved the campaign around the event season without asking closely enough when a venue could still change its planning process. The team was reaching people who understood the problem but were occupied with delivering an event rather than evaluating a new system. Sales could continue calling them, but more calls would not create implementation capacity. I stopped the immediate campaign and kept its ₹28 lakh expenditure visible. That spending had already occurred; stopping did not turn it into money saved.
We designed a ₹22 lakh pilot around an earlier planning period, with invitations that asked about the venue's current process and next practical review date. The eighteen later-window conversations informed the questions, but they did not become promised sales. The twenty-nine unclear cases remained open for classification rather than being assigned to a favourable category. Implementation colleagues helped specify what a realistic exploration could include before any commitment to change. The pilot was still under review at the reporting date, and I did not attach a claimed revenue return to it.
The decision reduced the volume of immediate activity and made the commercial plan harder to present as a smooth progression from contacts to contracts. It also gave us a more credible account of what the customer could do next. The lesson was not that seasonal marketing fails or that a particular number of months is always correct. It was that our invitation needed to match the customer's decision window and the work required to act. I wanted the team to learn that distinction before repeating the campaign at a larger scale.
Removing physical-production promises from partner presentations
In 2025 we reviewed thirty partner presentations used to introduce Dorvuli's venue-planning software. Twelve used event-production descriptions or imagery that implied our company supplied physical staffing, equipment or on-site production. Some partners did provide related services, but the presentations did not consistently identify who was responsible for them. A buyer could reasonably understand the combined account as a service from the software company itself. The problem was not the existence of a partnership; it was the unclear allocation of the work being sold.
I had encouraged partners to show the wider event journey and had not required enough precision around that instruction. We paused the affected presentations and worked through their propositions with the relevant partner and commercial owners. Nine were rewritten to identify the software scope and any separately supplied services. Three were withdrawn because the proposed account could not be made accurate without changing the underlying offer. We retained the distinctions in examples and presenter notes rather than relying on a small disclaimer to undo the main impression.
The review and reworking cost ₹17 lakh over nine weeks. We asked sales teams to clarify the scope in related open conversations and to direct operational questions to the organisation that would actually perform the work. The review did not certify every partner's delivery quality or establish that every historical buyer had understood the same thing. It dealt with the defined set of presentations and the linked conversations we could identify. No claim of universal partner compliance or measured revenue improvement followed from it.
The more difficult discussion was internal. Some colleagues felt that separating responsibilities weakened the appeal of an integrated proposition. I argued that integration should make the buyer's task easier, not make responsibility harder to locate. A useful combined offer can still state which party provides the product and which supplies physical services. Our future partner approval therefore included an explanation of the customer's next step and the named owner of each material promise. I remained accountable for the original broad brief and for funding its correction, while partners retained responsibility for the services they chose to offer.