How to Maximize Sales Intelligence for Accelerated Revenue with Asheesh Raina

[00:00:05] Vamsee Tirukkala: Good morning everyone! Great day to have a wonderful guest with us. We have Asheesh Raina, who's the Vice President of Growth Intelligence at Genpact, and he's here to talk to us about how to maximize sales intelligence and revenue growth. Asheesh, the Draup Dialogues are intended for educating our users and customers on- with the best practices from industry leaders like you.

So with that, give us a quick update about yourself Asheesh.

[00:00:41] Asheesh Raina: As you rightly suggested, I'm part of Genpact at this point in time, and there is a entity called Growth Intelligence Unit that I manage. Prior to this, a quick start base. I worked with Accenture in the same capacity, for one of the top platform practice.

And even before Accenture, I was part of Gartner. I was a Research Director. I managed some technology areas, platforms. Now this amalgamation is that is what is helping us to be where we are. We're using Draup, just to set the premises.

And, it has to be used very judiciously and you rightly suggested that it has to be somewhere aligned with the revenue growth. Otherwise what happens is it becomes very cosmetic. Sometimes we question why we are even using it or for that matter, other secondary research platforms as well. So what we have done in our organization is we are totally aligning with the organizational mandate, which is the revenue proof.

And how do we enable that through secondary research is where your Draup dialect and some of the peripheral information platforms comes into picture. Now, it's a very complex thing, it's not easy. And having worked with multiple organization, I know that we have never been able to nail it fully. However, what we have done is, we try to configure with respect to the sales life cycle. Is again, across multiple things and each has a different theme. Right from the discovery when we- when there is a whole lot of ambiguity. There is data, there is information, but it has to take a shape, and that is where journey begins.

To the point till we see a qualified conversations, we move to next level, we see what more is required, there probably is accountable . We had to displace competitors to the point where there is a pricing intelligence required because we want to be as sharp. And eventually it has to translate into a deal win for us.

Now that's a very top level deal cycle and of course everything will not be immediately collaborated with their revenue. These sales life cycles are pretty long, sometimes three quarters, four quarter, even years. But our the correlation begins with the degree of influence. That each stage,

what is the influence that we are able to bring as a team, as a growth intelligence unit. How we are able to bring that. Right from discovering the right set of information to maneuvering it to the next level where it takes a shape, to the level we are able to displace competitors, to the level we are able to conclude that as a win by tightening

the winning quotient. So this is in a nutshell how we align ourselves with organizational revenue mandates. But again, as I said, much difficult to do. So there has to be some frameworks, there has to be doctrine dos and don'ts and some in principle, you know, the corrections that we keep on improvising over a time.

[00:03:32] Vamsee Tirukkala: I think you set the context really, really well Asheesh. Sales intelligence is not a one-time thing.

[00:03:38] Asheesh Raina: Yes.

[00:03:39] Vamsee Tirukkala: It has to be ingrained into every process of your commercial lifecycle. It has to be ingrained into every decision and a workflow that you are going to be involved into. I think you put it- really really beautiful,

but at the end of the day, people are still gonna ask us, as you said very well, what is the value? So one of the questions that we always come to is, okay in every stage you need to anticipate what is the customer requirement.

[00:04:09] Asheesh Raina: Absolutely.

[00:04:10] Vamsee Tirukkala: And the end of the stages, you're going to talk about how am I going to deliver this to the customer, right?

So it's not like where you made a decision, okay this is my customer, this is my ICP, and I'm going to go after without any intelligence. That intelligence is gonna percolate throughout that value cycle, right? Tell us a little bit more about how do you map all this intelligence throughout your process?

[00:04:37] Asheesh Raina: So that's a good pertinent question, and there's a question we keep asking ourselves almost every day when we wake up, that how we are going to make a difference to our people. By people I mean client

facing reps. Their work is to stay as much as possible with the client side. Now, the next best thing for them is to have lots and loads of intelligence.

Now we're sitting in a time where there's an overload of information. It could be through mobile, websites, generative AI, people, everything has some nuggets of information. Now, the challenge for us is to distill the credible information, connect the dots and pass it to our people to whom it'll make a difference.

A very common reference which I give to myself, to our team, to our people is, think about edge computing. Now, what edge computing does is, it does analysis at a source site. It doesn't pass the information for somebody else to interpret. And that is what we try to do ourselves. So we have a whole lot of information, thankfully from platform as well, which is very credible.

We combine that with a primary intelligence that we have while walking the beats. So overall, these tools are very powerful. The art here is to connect the dots. The art here is to connect the dots, triangulate the information, make it credible, make it analytical, and then only pass information that makes sense.

It should be a recommendation list. It should generate certain action, and then our success directly correlates with it. The moment we send something, moment we share something, which is like a lump of information, it defeats the purpose and they might as well do it themselves.

[00:06:17] Vamsee Tirukkala: So I think, there somewhere when you are trying to convince them, you need to tell them, hey, how this impacts directly with the revenue, right? There

a lot of intelligence, as you said, you need to take it, make it credible, make it actionable but at the same time, when you want to win the trust of the account executive or an account manager or a senior executive who's trying to pursue those leads or pursue those opportunities, they're going to say, what does that mean to us from the revenue perspective, right?

How do you take your intelligence and make it trustworthy and exciting for someone to take it and action it, Asheesh?

[00:06:58] Asheesh Raina: That's right, yeah it's a, good question once again. I would say we are semi-amused when we get asked these questions because the nature of work is, we are not client facing.

We sit at the back end, we do a lot of intelligence. Now, allow me a bit of distraction because it is important we understand. This distractions come from

my old experience, when we were still in college, and I asked my mentor that what do you mean by specialization? Now that we are doing it, and I was hoping for a very long answer by the way.

So he said specialization means knowing more and more about little and little. Now that one stayed with us. Now that time it was just a verbatim. Now being part of Growth Intelligence Unit, I realize this is the degree of influence that we bring to people. When we tell them that we get to know more and more about little and little, the absolute L3 level of granularity

which probably would not be available elsewhere, or it would be, but then you have to really get a lot of data structured, unstructured, going miles back in the timeframes, collecting it.

[00:08:16] Vamsee Tirukkala: Yeah.

[00:08:17] Asheesh Raina: Making a sense of it and then something may, may not come out. Now when we do it in a faster time,

in an accelerated manner, we do it in a credible manner. By credible, I mean credibility gets established over a period of time when every time we give them something to chew on, something which directly translates into a qualified or unqualified opportunities, but opportunities that can be tied, if not immediately, maybe in couple of quarters to revenue.

The credibility gets established. So which means we are giving them the right information. Of course, we are not personally developing it. We are using intelligence platforms. We are using the help of our partners, including you. Then credibility gets established over a time, and then that is the information

which they don't get most of the times, quickly. And they're in the dark because they're seeing- they're able to see, in a very limited space, but when we do this kind of intelligence and bring it to them, we collaborate. It makes a lot of revenue, I would say revenue for the sake of it, but it makes a lot of monetizable opportunity conversations for them.

[00:09:28] Vamsee Tirukkala: So I think in essence what you are saying Asheesh is everybody is fascinated with hyper-personalization of intelligence for the prospects and customers. What you're saying is you need to do the same thing for your internal stakeholders also because many times they can't actually consume everything that you're going to throw at them.

[00:09:48] Asheesh Raina: Yeah.

[00:09:48] Vamsee Tirukkala: You need to kinda hyper personalize some of these insights so that they can align with their next steps or the short term goals.

[00:09:56] Asheesh Raina: That's right.

[00:09:56] Vamsee Tirukkala: Is that what I'm hearing?

[00:09:58] Asheesh Raina: That's right, I mean, come to think of, you know, a little bit of math here. Our- the client facing reps or the BDs, they have a lot of work in their hand.

They had to keep meeting in their client. They had to manage relationships, they do a lot. The real estate in their mind is limited. I cannot keep on supplying them infinite information. I only supply, or should rather, my goal is to supply the information they must must know, and that should translate into something which is tangible in nature. And of course, these are our internal stakeholders, but having said that, it's a collective effort by the end of the day. Their success immediately translates into our success and vice versa. You know, the more better job I do of mining the intelligence and passing on to them the better they perform,

and vice versa. The more successful they are, the more they consume from us.

[00:10:52] Vamsee Tirukkala: Absolutely. So on that hyper-personalization topic- changing the gear a little bit on the hyper-personalization, Asheesh. The- one of the challenges that we are hearing is with the hyper-personalization, especially with your prospects and customers is the privacy laws that are coming in. Often times customers are saying that, hey- you are saying that, hey, I can't do this in specific region, I can do this in specific region. How do you manage that kind of a dynamics? And that is also changing all the time.

[00:11:25] Asheesh Raina: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you're right,

my apologies, I- the hyper-personalization point I wanted to, continue with this one but I just missed it.

[00:11:33] Vamsee Tirukkala: Sure.

[00:11:34] Asheesh Raina: But yeah, that is the most important part because organizations have different maturity levels and to go to organization despite being in the same region probably, or having the same nature of work will be alike, the maturity levels.

So hyper-personalization is definitely required in terms of the appetite is to consume, from any of the organization, any of the supplier side. At the same time, it doesn't come easy. One from the compliance purpose there is a GDPR. There are a lot of other compliances and I think the most important part here is, of course we had to be very sensitive about it.

Combination of a human and the system. So in system we have compliances, layers where we would not get into the confidentiality part of our clients or even the prospects or for anyone, for their financials, for their personal identifiers or anything else. And also, the human part is because we always get tempted to do that

or, sometimes we even stalk a person and see what are happening in their privacy life. But we train ourselves, as an organization, we train ourselves to stay away from that kind of a temptation. And to come to think of it, the moment, the moment I cross the compliance, or moment I get into the personal identifier layer,

it's misleading because, then I'm not doing the right work. My, or our collective work is to look for the organization, their dynamic, their insights, their goals and to align with it. At no point in time organization is an individual. We train ourselves and then we also have re-checks, and then we also have the best practices where we do not cross the boundaries.

But yes, we stay within the end bit of the compliance.

[00:13:25] Vamsee Tirukkala: Yeah, even in this world it is becoming increasingly important, right Asheesh? And can you give a- can you think of an example that you can share that you actually thought like wow, this is something that we need to deal with it and what you have done.

And at the same time it helped you to engage with your prospect or a customer or your BD has come back and said, hey, Asheesh, that really worked. Is there an example that you can share with us?

[00:13:50] Asheesh Raina: Yeah, there are. These are part of our daily routine.

[00:13:54] Vamsee Tirukkala: Okay.

[00:13:55] Asheesh Raina: The law of averages suggests that we hit the bullseye more than 50% of the time.

Now I don't know what example to cite, but let me give you what excites people. What excites our organization or any organization for that matter is when you're able to make an intelligent extrapolation. I will not go too much back in the time but we- our current macro-environment at this point in time is having the tariff concerns over there.

Lot of talk about it. There was some particular verticals that got tariffed. 30%, 40%, 50% regional tariffs and all those things that were happening and all, then there was concerns, there still are concerns about the services part getting tariffed and all. Now, there is a whole lot of dilemma,

there is a whole lot of ambiguity once again. So what excites our people is to make way through a intelligent extrapolation once again. That what that means, and if we are able to articulate, articulate the intelligent way to our clients that how to maneuver through this tariff topics, what in case, anything gets tariffed that we are part of engagement this point in time. What we should be doing? The bypasses or the best way to mitigate it, in fact, the best way to leverage it.

I don't know there is an industry word for it, but I- the nearest I can call it is an intelligent extrapolation of the client dynamics with respect to the macro environment is what excites us. And this is what we do, and our clients love us for that.

[00:15:37] Vamsee Tirukkala: So basically you are not only leveraging that insights for your internal, you are also in many ways educating your customers.

[00:15:44] Asheesh Raina: Yeah, that's right because, yeah.

[00:15:47] Vamsee Tirukkala: That's a big value there.

[00:15:48] Asheesh Raina: Yeah, yeah. That's a value part of it because you know what happens is eventually the nature of work we have, we're heavily reliant on alignment with our clients.

[00:16:00] Vamsee Tirukkala: Sure.

[00:16:01] Asheesh Raina: Unless until we don't do that, then it becomes a very difficult proposition for them also.

I think now, we're in a world where we are in a third generation of outsourcing. It's not even a first or second. Expectations are high, stakes are high. Clients want us to be a trusted partner, which we are. And what does a trusted partner do? The trusted partner does the same thing what we do, give them intelligent

advices, show them the way, the way we see it and what they see, have the common shared goals.

And this all comes from being intelligent, having that information and making use of it in an intelligent way for collective gain along with the client. Otherwise this information internally will die, at some point in time, connect to our clients.

[00:16:46] Vamsee Tirukkala: Absolutely. Okay, now moving on to a most interesting and topic of the decade or probably the century, is how AI is transforming our world, right

Asheesh? I think every- we always talk about this. I don't think that there is any article that you and I read that doesn't have some form of AI in it. So tell us maybe, maybe a specific question. How, in your perspective, you've been in this industry for a long time, right? Intelligence and helping organizations to grow through insights and value is not something new for you,

you have seen this evolve in multiple ways. So from your perspective, how is AI helping in prioritizing high value opportunities more, much better than the traditional models? Can you share some, some thoughts with us on that?

[00:17:47] Asheesh Raina: Yeah, you're right. It's a topic of our decade, maybe more.

Yeah, I think it is so omni-present, that hardly anything is thinkable without AI being embedded or being a routine part of us. Now, specifically with respect to client, what is happening with the AI is, first of all, the expectations in terms of turnaround time have reduced. Conventionally, if we would do something in a three days, four days now, expectation is with the client and internally and with ourselves as well, that it should be done in a couple of hours. And it should be immaculate, you know, the quality should be high.

And I remember when AI just emerged, we used to speak about hallucination and all, but I no longer, I don't think so it hallucinates as much as it used to work. But now, the value, the value to the client is if we agument that with out experience, because AI what it does is, it has LLMs at the back, it looks like a baby.

And so we also have our own proprietary babies, which kind of-

[00:18:55] Vamsee Tirukkala: You are an industry leader Asheesh, you have to have your own proprietary babies.

[00:19:00] Asheesh Raina: Yeah, yeah. So they're quite, in the same analogy, they're adults now.

[00:19:05] Vamsee Tirukkala: Yeah.

[00:19:06] Asheesh Raina: So they're doing pretty well. But now the expectation is again, the augmentation, AI and human combined together.

The turnaround times, the accelerated deliveries, information with a high quality check and sometimes even unthinkable things. I remember many, many years back, we used to think about structured data, unstructured data, large data, getting them together, it used to be a quite a nightmare.

But now it has done pretty fast. It has done very accurate. We are able to do so many things. Combining the sentiments, combining the structure data, making a pass at unstructure data and the client is expecting it. They don't get amused even, it is something they, they want us to do.

And having said that, guess AI is again in every part of us. The degree of automation and degree of things that we never thought before could have been done, we are trying to push that collectively, along with the client internally and, everything in a pressed, pressed matter.

[00:20:16] Vamsee Tirukkala: Asheesh, that kind of brings up to another topic, right? As people who are actually watching this will be very curious about how an industry leader like you has evolved. So what is your tech stack today to automate a lot of these processes that you just mentioned and whatever you can share Asheesh.

[00:20:34] Asheesh Raina: No, it's a- it's kind of a very visionary question if you ask me. And, Genpact does have a blueprint around. We have evolved pretty fast I think in the last one, one and a half years. I'm not a spokesperson for Genpact, but being- experiencing it, we got into that technology way pretty fast.

Especially writing the AI, so much so that we talk about service as an agentic AI. Providing services to multiple verticals through agentic AI. Now that is a degree, it requires a confidence. That is a degree of confidence we have at this point in time. And, you know how as an organization we have evolved is, when we started off a couple of years back, we used to work with some of our partners.

They were chosen ones or the visa versa basis our business expertise, bases our domain expertise.

We started around 10 to 12 and within a year or so, or two years, we have ran them to 40 plus. So you can imagine, you know how this has really evolved, the tech stack, the partnership stack, it has evolved. From 10 to 40. Yeah, it's a massive growth and it is not one way. They want us for our expertise and we also provide them the value in return, that how it can be collectively applied to our clients and how they can make a lot of it.

So our tech stack, obviously without getting into the granularities, have really evolved maybe three to four times what we would've seen in two years. So quite a drastic change. Our vision, for the Genpact vision, which our new CEO has laid on is quite fantastic. In fact, something which we say is,

use yourself before even putting into production with the clients. We are a test bet. We experiment ourselves a lot. We think a lot, we ideate a lot. And, unless and until we are really confident of putting that into production, we don't do that. But again, to your point, we have grown maybe three to four times in our partnership in tech stack usage.

[00:22:48] Vamsee Tirukkala: Wonderful, so what you're saying is you are not only helping your customers in their AI transformation, you are transforming first before you actually take it to your customers. That's, is that-

[00:22:59] Asheesh Raina: Yeah, that's right. That's what we're doing. Yeah that's what our CEO BK has laid out for us.

[00:23:06] Vamsee Tirukkala: Wonderful. So let's, I know we are coming to that endpoint, Asheesh.

It's been incredible discussion- discussing with you, but I have one very quick- I want some quick answers on these questions. This are- we call them as rapid fire questions, right? So tell us what's more powerful? Is it customer insights or the competitive intelligence? If you want to choose when you're one of them, which will you choose?

[00:23:30] Asheesh Raina: I have to give you explanation or I can just choose or I can do both.

[00:23:33] Vamsee Tirukkala: One word answer.

You can give an explanation, it's fine.

[00:23:36] Asheesh Raina: No, I think, there is no contest. Client insights. That is what we aligned with, from the demand side.

[00:23:44] Vamsee Tirukkala: Okay. So what is one key skill every growth intelligence leader must have in 25 and going into 2026?

[00:23:56] Asheesh Raina: I'll not call it a technology skill, but I will call it a consultative skill, which is correcting the dots. If you fail, it'll- it's not the way to go.

[00:24:07] Vamsee Tirukkala: So what's that one technology that you have recently seen or observed that you are very excited about for the next five years?

[00:24:17] Asheesh Raina: I think we touched base with that.

I'm excited, I'm scared. There are butterflies in my stomach and it's the agentic AI, unfathomable. I don't even know that how it'll shape up, but yes.

[00:24:31] Vamsee Tirukkala: Sure, agentic AI it is. So, one last question. What is the most underrated KPI or a metric that you think people don't track or don't give the enough credit, when you are thinking about revenue growth?

[00:24:51] Asheesh Raina: There are multiple ones but the one closer to my heart is, is a repeat revenue.

[00:24:58] Vamsee Tirukkala: Okay.

[00:24:58] Asheesh Raina: You know, because maybe I would like to explain a bit. One time is a fluke, twice probably is a requirement, but when we do it consistently, repeatedly, there is an intention behind it, then it really is something that you're doing exceptionally well.

Even in terms of revenue. If you're getting revenue from same client for a longer duration of time, then that is really the thing that you should be tracking. And for different buying centers or from a different people, the repeatability, in terms of revenue is what I feel is, the most underrated.

We very often ignore.

[00:25:32] Vamsee Tirukkala: Exactly. This has been a wonderful wonderful conversation, Asheesh. Thank you so much for sharing all your thoughts. It's not so easy to come up with such a clarity that you have described today. I think

our viewers are going to walk away with why- not only why it is important, but what you need to do to make it to be a continuous process and how to better leverage the platforms.

Both- not only to solve your customers externally, which everybody tries to focus the first, but also to leverage that internally, be the customer zero, and then take it to the market. And again, I can't thank you enough for sharing all these wonderful thoughts and best practices with us.

[00:26:18] Asheesh Raina: It's a collective success and, trust me with you around it has been a great journey. Without our partners, without our trusted partners, we would not have been able to accomplish what we think we are accomplishing at this point in time. So thanks for being around and all the best!