Chief Marketing Officer
India
Practice / Perspective

Recognition should make the buying conversation more useful

Harish Qelvankar / Published perspectives
No.	The idea	Subject / reading
01	The royalty proposal cannot explain what the name will mean	Industrial brand licensing and responsibility 5 min read
02	A recorded lead may still be waiting for its first useful conversation	Industrial enquiry intake and commercial evidence 5 min read
03	A new product name still has to answer an old customer's question	Industrial naming and reference continuity 5 min read

The practitioner

Harish Qelvankar

The enquiry arrived with a product name, a quantity and a request for our best price. It looked complete on the sales list. It did not identify the person who understood the intended application. I had seen that pattern as a young coordinator and saw it again as CMO: a neat commercial entry could still leave the most useful conversation waiting to begin. When we later reviewed 184 recorded leads, sixty-two lacked an identified application owner. I wanted marketing to improve that starting point rather than celebrate a larger number of incomplete introductions.

Open to Board appointments

Start a conversation

01 / Category boundaries in industrial brand licensing
02 / Responsible routes to installer communication
03 / Commercial briefs that identify the application owner
04 / Product naming across a legacy installed base

Industrial commercial career: 29 years; First appointment July 1997
Marketing employees: 26; Four managers; eight agency personnel counted separately
Annual marketing authority: ₹8.4 crore; Distinct from company revenue and the wider commercial account

Win a place in the right buying conversation

I am Harish Qelvankar, CMO of the fictional Vorzeli Industrial Belting in Kochi. I began on the receiving side of industrial enquiries, where a buyer could ask for a quote long before anyone had explained the application. That experience still shapes my marketing work. I want the brand to be remembered for a useful reason and the next conversation to contain enough context for the right person to help. A larger contact list is not much of an achievement if colleagues must begin every enquiry again.

Vorzeli makes conveyor belting for non-food industrial handling at operations near Alappuzha. We employ 610 people and recorded ₹213 crore revenue for the year ending March 2026. I lead twenty-six marketing colleagues through four managers, with eight agency personnel separately and ₹8.4 crore annual marketing authority. CEO Anju Belzhori owns the wider business account. Technical head Faisal Zorqemi retains application suitability and technical claims approval. Marketing should make his team's contribution easier to reach, rather than turn a familiar product name into an answer that only an application assessment can provide.

My recent decisions concern the boundaries of a brand and the quality of the buying conversation. We declined a proposed licence for unrelated industrial goods, changed an unlaunched personal referral-reward idea into approved communication work, and redesigned enquiry intake around an accepted commercial brief. We also revised confusing legacy product names while retaining the old-to-new reference route. None of those decisions automatically created an order. They changed what people could understand, what marketing paid for and which commercial obligation the business was willing to accept. That is the level at which I want the work examined.

Recognition with a defined category

A ₹32 lakh review preceded rejection of an unrelated-goods licensing proposal with an indicative ₹2.4 crore annual minimum. No signed receivable or recognised revenue was surrendered.

A brief behind the enquiry count

Of 184 recorded leads, 62 lacked an identified application owner. A ₹64 lakh intake programme enriched 46 of those briefs, with 16 still pending;technical qualification and orders remained separate.

Names that lead to the right question

A ₹42 lakh naming programme revised 18 of 28 legacy references and retained 10 with clearer descriptors. A later 48-person explanation exercise found 39 identifying the intended family and 9 needing assistance.

Current focus

Making industrial brand recognition useful at the moment a buyer, purchaser or installer needs the next responsible answer.

Conversations I welcome

A first board contribution on industrial market position and buying decisions,subject to preparation, employer consent and relationship review.

Beyond the page

The record behind the perspective.

Formation

Bachelor of CommerceZarqeni Commerce College · 1997
Postgraduate diploma in MarketingKelzavi Marketing Institute · 2009; part-time

Harish made us examine what a purchaser would expect from the proposed licence, alongside its indicative minimum. His recommendation retained the review cost and the opportunity we declined, rather than turn the decision into an effortless defence of the brand.

Anju BelzhoriChief Executive Officer, Vorzeli Industrial Belting

The full record ↗

Contact

A first board contribution on industrial market position and buying decisions,subject to preparation, employer consent and relationship review.

Board appointments

Write to Harish Contact page

The royalty proposal cannot explain what the name will mean

A recorded lead may still be waiting for its first useful conversation

A new product name still has to answer an old customer's question