I work for a Professional Networking company, where professionals connect with other professionals from the same or different industry to grow their professional network and achieve their personal or corporate goals. I do digital marketing targeted at businesses whose clients are other business and not individuals (such companies are called B2B companies, i.e. Business-to-Business companies). My objective is to create a pipeline of leads (prospective buyers) that can flow in and help our sales team achieve sales targets.

We use various platforms (called paid media) like google display network, Facebook, Google search, etc. to market ourselves. We are responsible for creating a marketing strategy. It is often seen as a fluffy topic. But in reality, it is not! We need to know the right kind of people to target and put into a sales pipeline. In marketing, we call it the Funnel Approach.

I choose the commerce stream when in school. My dad worked in the finance industry and the tech industry. He has been an avid quizzer and composes quizzes for Businesses Standard newspaper in India. He also conducts quizzes in colleges, which are usually marketing trivia. This is what got me interested in marketing. At that point, I was pretty keen on joining the advertising world. As a result, I wanted to do business management and did my BBA in National University of Singapore (NUS). During my NUS days, I got an opportunity to do an internship in the tech industry. I fell in love with it was a highly dynamic and uplifting environment. You are in the middle of it - helping drive business. It involved a lot of operations management.

To be successful in marketing, you need to good in both written and verbal communication. You need to be able to collaborate across sales, finance and business operations functions. You need to be able to work with people who have different mindsets and different approaches. You need to able to think critically and challenge conventional wisdom. You need to be able to sell a story convincingly.