Chief Marketing Officer India

When the market story needed more work

Marketing colleagues: 32; Through four heads in a 480-person company
Annual marketing budget: ₹8.8 crore; Function and programmes; contracts owned by sales
Communications and marketing experience: 30 years; July 1996 to October 2026

Decisions & consequences

Forty-eight losses that did not share one explanation

Our quarterly review initially described a run of lost bids as evidence that translation prices were too high. The explanation was plausible but incomplete. I asked the account teams and research colleagues to examine forty-eight closed-lost opportunities with a documented approach, using available buyer feedback and the contemporaneous records. We selected one primary concern for each case and retained secondary observations separately, so the categories would not be added together as if they represented different buyers.

Nineteen cases centred on release integration, fourteen on translation price, nine on interface testing and six on work outside our intended service. The evidence was not equally strong in every case, and the report made that visible. I did not present the split as a representative survey of the whole market. It was a way to challenge our explanation of this specific set of opportunities and identify questions our material had left unanswered.

We committed ₹34 lakh to rebuilding the service narrative and discovery support around the differences. Product marketing worked with delivery to explain integration, language review and interface testing as related but distinct work. Sales colleagues worried that a more detailed explanation would slow the first conversation. I argued that a conversation based on the wrong service assumption was already slow, even if the initial meeting looked easy to secure.

The immediate outcome was a revised set of service pages, proposal-introduction material and discovery questions, approved by the relevant owners. We did not claim that the change recovered the lost contracts or caused a later improvement in win rate. Those would require their own evidence. The lesson was to use a loss review to change a decision, while resisting the temptation to turn a small and partly retrospective record into a universal conclusion about buyer priorities or a reason to discount every proposal.

Rebuilding eleven demonstrations before publishing them

We prepared thirty-six demonstration journeys across Hindi, Bengali and Japanese, twelve in each language. The early campaign treatment used selected screenshots to show the quality of our localisation work. Delivery leader Farah Dolvani's review found that eleven journeys concealed context important to understanding the service: a preceding action, an error message, a layout constraint or a source change between releases. The screens were attractive, but the presentation could make the work appear simpler than it was.

I held publication of those eleven examples and approved ₹28 lakh for a four-week rebuild. The twenty-five journeys that passed the review remained in the programme. The team added the surrounding interaction and an explanation of the localisation task, with language and engineering colleagues checking their respective parts. We did not use confidential client screens without permission; the demonstration was our own constructed material.

Creative colleagues were concerned that the additional context would weaken the visual simplicity of the campaign. I wanted the examples to remain clear, but clarity should help the buyer understand the work rather than remove the condition that makes the example meaningful. We tested whether the revised presentation could be followed in a sales conversation and left specialist judgements with the people qualified to make them.

The result was a publication set whose thirty-six journeys had received the agreed review. That is a statement about our material and process, not proof that every future interface in those languages would work correctly. We did not describe the exercise as certification of a client's product or a general accessibility assessment. I would now plan contextual review before the creative treatment is settled, so the example's visual appeal and its explanation develop together instead of requiring an expensive correction near the publication date.

Waiting six weeks to buy Japanese-market attention

A ₹72 lakh campaign for a Japanese-language service proposition was ready to launch. The adverts and landing material had been reviewed, but a rehearsal of the enquiry path exposed a gap. The campaign invited a detailed discovery conversation in Japanese, while the proposed response arrangement depended on ad hoc availability from delivery colleagues whose client work was already scheduled. Marketing had prepared the invitation more thoroughly than the conversation it promised.

I postponed the campaign for six weeks and agreed an ₹18 lakh preparation programme with sales and delivery. Language-capable specialists helped define the response route, the points requiring technical participation and the handover into a properly scoped discovery meeting. The team rehearsed enquiries involving a changing source release, unavailable interface context and a request outside our service. The goal was not to script every answer but to make the promised route credible.

The delay meant relinquishing planned campaign dates and revisiting supplier arrangements. I did not report the unspent ₹72 lakh as a saving: the campaign was postponed, not cancelled, and the budget remained subject to the revised launch decision. The ₹18 lakh was a separate preparation expense. Keeping those figures distinct prevented a readiness decision from becoming an exaggerated efficiency claim.

Once the agreed response process was in place, the campaign could proceed through the normal approval route. We did not infer that preparation would create demand or that one language preference described an entire country. The result was narrower: the particular invitation we intended to make now had an operating response behind it. My lesson was to include the conversation after the click in the market-readiness review, with sales and delivery ownership established before advertising dates make a delay commercially awkward.

Replacing the word-count shortcut in discovery

Delivery colleagues reviewed twelve recent quotation requests that had reached us principally as word counts. Seven lacked the application context needed to understand where the content appeared, three had an unsettled source release and two were ready for the intended scoping discussion. The categories described the primary obstacle recorded in this small review, not a claim that a project could have only one dependency. Our marketing material had encouraged a precise-looking input while leaving other preparation questions too late.

I worked with delivery and sales to create a different discovery brief. It asked about source readiness, access to interface context, expected release cadence and the person authorised to accept the result. A buyer who could not supply those details was offered a preparation conversation rather than pushed directly towards a firm quotation. The language was designed to explain why the questions mattered, not make the customer feel it had failed an admission test.

The change cost ₹16 lakh in research, content and enablement work. We replaced the old material in the relevant service journeys and briefed the account teams on using it flexibly. Sales colleagues worried that additional questions would discourage enquiries. I accepted that risk but wanted to examine the quality of the subsequent conversation, not preserve a simple form whose apparent convenience transferred confusion into delivery.

The immediate outcome was an approved discovery route and clearer ownership of incomplete briefs. We did not claim that all twelve requests became contracts or that the new brief eliminated rework. A later review would need to examine how buyers used it and whether the service teams found the resulting discussions more useful. For me, the case showed a practical role for marketing beyond generating interest: helping a buyer understand what it needs to decide and what assistance is available before a specialist service can be responsibly scoped.

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