Akhil Agrawal, SVP, Revenue and Customer Success at InfoCepts: The Journey from Data to Leadership

all right today we welcome Akil agrawal SVP of customer success at infos Akil

brings over 20 years of experience in his industry where he’s earned a reputation as a trusted adviser to se

Suite Executives and Business Leaders helping them maximize the value of their data he’s currently at inos seeps where

he leads the North American Business and customer success team driving growth optimizing costs and ensuring customer

satisfaction prior to this ail managed Global delivery teams overseeing more than 1500 professionals across North

America asan and Amia ensuring exceptional quality and Innovation on

the personal side Akil loves reading is a Calvin and Habs fan and big-time cricket and movie buff he recently

picked up an interest in hiking and exploring trails in the New York and New New Jersey area as a family he enjoys

traveling to different countries with his wife Vegeta and two daughters AA and Vanya we are fortunate to have him here

today Akil welcome thank thank you so much Scott and thank you for introducing

me so well looking forward to our chat thank you I also am so excited to talk

to a fellow New Jersey native I grew up there and I love love the state oh yeah

I’m looking forward to host you here whenever you visit here oh absolutely I definitely will be taking up on that um

so you know just to kind of dive in I’d love to know a little bit about what sparked your interest in data and analytics you know was there a specific

moment during your time for example at vnit that influenced your career

path interesting that you asked that and I never thought about it like that way

honestly to be very honest I never knew that data analytics is a field while

growing up or in the college but uh my affair with data and analytics probably

started during childhood right I come from a business family and my father

used to give me and my brother uh assignments like okay so those were the times when there were no computers right

there were manual ledgers and he every week on or on the weekends he used to

give us okay this is the weekly transactions do the aggregations come up

with what are the top buyers top sellers kind of a thing right so different insights that he would ask us to do that

and whoever would do the fastest will get some reward right so probably that that that’s where my love for data or

numbers started or insights rather and then during college also I was uh

drawn towards more or I was pretty strong with quantitative reasoning data

interpretation and stuff like that but eventually I landed in a software company because that was the coolest

thing at that time to join right with swanki campus and all those things but I

I think uh I gravitated towards data in that company and then during first or

second year of my professional journey I got got a chance to work on a data warehousing project and probably that’s

when I decided like okay this is the field I want to be or I got so again a long answer to your short

question but I think I I love that because I think it’s it’s so funny to think about what our parents guide us

towards whether they realize it or not right no absolutely yeah um so you know once once you

graduated from vnit um you’ve been at infos steps for for a while now and you’ve also just LED some pretty big

teams across North americ Andia as I mentioned before um I would love for you

know to kind of know a little bit about your leadership style and were there any times throughout your career where you

sort of developed or changed that leadership style um I’m I’m sure what I am today is

some of all the experiences right that I have working with different sets of people and in the geography right so uh

difficult to pinpoint uh incidents I’m sure there are a few which would have

impacted me a little more than others but uh uh I think I’m more of a

situational leader uh uh I I have managed to change my leadership styles

depending upon the situation uh but what I enjoy the most probably is a player coach model right where I am very

handson uh working with my team uh on trying to do stuff so that I understand

the intricacies and I have little bit of empathy towards

what’s happening right and at the same time I set the pace right so Pace setting as well as uh little bit of uh

it needed autocracy as well right so if I know that something can be done I can

be pretty autocratic as well right at the same time uh transformational or P Setter kind of a thing so I would say uh

player coach model has worked better for me but there are few things that I uh

which uh has helped me over the years right so one thing is of course and this

probably I’ve learned from difficult situations when my leaders or my colleagues have done something which I

wanted to repeat or which I didn’t want to repeat right so one thing is keep it simple so say do the principle which is

dearest in my heart right do what you say and say what you do right so Ive tried to do that uh throughout my

professional as well as personal life another thing is uh embrace the

diversity right that is uh in my mind that’s the easiest path to Innovation so

that I think has helps me a lot or understood and then of course if you

build trust and empathy around you your team right you would be more often than

not you’ll be surprised what they do in difficult times right so right yeah I I

think the uh the idea of diversity especially when it comes to you know a global team it’s very important just

because you know we we have so many different participants that need to be heard and understood and you actually

have to work together and if you don’t you know like like you pointed out it’s going to be hard to move in the right direction absolutely yeah so you um when

you first started off uh you started off as sort of a more technical role right you you were you know like you mentioned

kind of in the weeds um and then you managed you kind of move to managing these large cross cross functional teams

um I I’ve I’ve been myself in sales Business Development and you know now I’m CEO of our company that you know we

manage a team of Executives um and I think there’s a lot of challenges that you can run into in that de development

of that leadership approach um what was it like for you any big challenges or anything that stood out to you that was

hard transitioning from technical to managing a larger team oh man yeah I mean I think at each

stage uh I’ve gone through regular pains right right from being a technical lead

to the department lead then cross functional team or being an organization leader right so in stage there were uh

different challenges but two things I mean uh which and relating it to the

question you asked earlier right so two transitions which were most difficult

for me was moving from technical role to customer success role and the reason I

say that in a technical role you are a sort after person right people look for

you whereas customer success is seen a little bit more as an overlay right your

customers don’t want to talk to you because you they see a sales agent in you right by default and stuff like that

they don’t see a value uh I mean it was uh a little difficult on my ego right

from being a very sought after to somebody who’s trying to gain attention

right but over a period of time you realize that okay it is not the uh it is

nothing but the value that you bring to the table that will keep you relevant right so when I move to customer success

soon I uh move towards defining value or telling the story right so that was one

thing another big uh uh transition was leading cross functional when you’re are

leading direct line of Command right uh you know them better you have lot of

controls but functional team usually will have your peers sometimes your

seniors in the team right whom you are required to lead so they’re also I think

leading from the back I think that was one phrase that I read somewhere and

then I related to it right take a back seat right right when you are leading across functional team you’re urged to

do things yourself are trying to direct it never works right take a back seat

just help with whenever there’s a confusion or more or if somebody needs support with

decision making that is the role you play otherwise once you have defined what and why you have to just take the

back seat so I think those were the two transitions I I would say shaped me a

lot I I think it’s really interesting that you point out that when you’re in a customer success role versus a technical

role um even now customer success can be many different things for example the

the CEO of gainsight which makes a you know customer success product um he highlighted how companies have often had

customer success managers in an under Revenue leadership Revenue teams and so

their focus ends up being upgrades expansion you know all Revenue based and

so like you said you know those people end up being um those that you want to avoid because they just they just know

that they’re hunting for money um so you you really do have to find a way to provide value and and actually be a

customer agent as opposed to you know a sales absolutely

absolutely um you know so transitioning a little bit from the kind of leadership style and a little bit more into just

developing relationships with customers uh it seems like you know there’s a lot of different strategies ta tactics that

you can use to develop these relationships and nurture and grow them um when it when it comes to customers on

a a global scale I’d love to hear your perspective on how you build relationships with customers and nurture

them over time I I was fortunate uh throughout my

career where I’ve dealt with a global uh scale Enterprises right so uh one thing

is in global setup right when you have a global uh teams Etc

uh term called gloal uh I think that was uh something that I had heard a long

back which is like think Global but act local right so customize your uh be

policies process framework Etc to suit to the local uh style of wherever your

customers based right so that was one thing another thing uh is is uh I

believe in that uh uh framework where consistency

uh brings you credibility and credibility brings you visibility right

so if you’re consistent you will win that credibility or trust from your

customer once you have won the trust automatically your relationship and business both Grows Right so I think

those are the two strategies and third thing is in my role uh very early on uh

I did focus on business value right when I I told you I had to find my is so

defining business value people are interested in outcome and when you start talking about outcome uh they give you

time and more time better relationship building right so so running those

customer success programs via a a good feedback loop or reviews business

reviews right I think these are some of the things right that has helped me the

the I like especially the idea this uh you know consistency increases credibility um I mean we we both have

kids and you know my my kids occasionally will say Dad why don’t you trust me and I’ll say well the last 10

the last 10 times you have failed to meet you know the expectations of the thing that we asked you to do and I think uh customers really they can tell

they can notice they can see you know if you don’t follow up with an email that you were going to provide them or a webinar or some specific ask and and

again going back to this idea of being like a customer agent um they they really can tell they can really see that

so I think that’s a really great thank you so um AI uh you know

it’s it’s this it’s the new cool thing it’s gonna I never heard of

it you’re kind of you know you’re really in an interesting place because uh with all the data and analytics and sort of

customer facing time that you have um you’ve probably seen your your whole

industry evolved pretty spectacularly in a lot of different ways uh I’d love to hear a little bit about you know what

you’ve seen when you initially started and then how things have changed over the years and and now maybe with

AI okay so again going back 20 years and

already started to feel little older now but yeah when I start

uh those were the time when data warehousing was the B world right and

from there on if I look back in last five to eight years it has been really dramatic and rate of change has uh

really gone up right each year you are seeing such a dramatic uh changes in the

way uh this industry is evolving with explosion of data in the digital world

advancement in Technologies right uh all these things uh

uh I would say uh it has made uh so much uh that we

when I had started I had never thought that uh something like these would be possible right and when I talk about

some of those things like real time intelligence right when we were working on data warehousing project doing

operational reporting itself was a three to six months project and today we are talking about realtime intelligence

prescriptive analytics right uh using AI agents for driving the

customer experience or for that matter even the sales sales process so all these things I think these are some of

the real uh use cases that I have seen evolve something that we wish or at

times we never imagined right and those things have come up but I I’m very upbeat about overall the direction which

industry is taking with the advancement and all uh I think we are solving some

real world problem not only for the business and Enterprises but in the social sector right in for policy makers

for governments and all those things right at the very grassroot level so data and AI together I think it’s

changing uh at the gr grassroot level in general for health and for General we

so I’m very upbeat about that have have you found over the years um that when new technologies are announced and

introduced that um people get excited about them and and maybe try to Ram them

into the business but they don’t provide value um have you ever seen examples of that all the time all the

time yeah so and a lot of times uh you face a

customer who are right little noes or uh Mavericks uh in their own way right and

who want to really uh take on the newest thing on the Block right and we come

across that all the time but uh again in our role

uh you you have to have uh that business

outcome in mind and use that to uh give it back to or at least make them think

about the business value and not use it for the sake of it I think if if you ask

me in last 20 years there are three or four waves which has kind of lived up to

the hype right uh of course after data warehousing that whole big data wave

right even in that there was too many dimensions but yes we all accepted that big data is there then this whole mobile

uh apps kind of a wave and then uh Cloud which has kind of made everything so

much scalable and now ai I do think like there is lot more hype I think last two

years were more of a hype and people tried to thrust everything but uh

eventually now it is tapering down and people are really asking those questions okay if I’m doing something

uh it has to have a business value right and we we have defined our own framework

I mean in when I say framework process right for any any project that you you take up you try to align solution with

the business objective with the pain point and a strategic goal you try to

Define up front on the business metrics or kpis that you want to measure

in throughout the cycle you keep on doing that and third thing that we do

which is very important and I think a lot of time uh we as a uh solution

providers or product uh uh and provide ERS right we tend to miss is on adoption

so once the cell is done or project is completed or once you have implemented

uh that focus on adoption is one single biggest thing uh that will define

whether the hype with the technology or a trend Will Survive or not and adoption

will will be the key so I think those are some of the things yeah I think that’s that’s a great point about

adoption um there there’s so many tools and projects products that uh become avail to us and a lot of the time I

think many people they try them you know if you think about like mobile apps for example one of the the waves you mentioned you know you get your phone

and most people are probably going to use Facebook Instagram and then slack or Gmail or teams or something and then

they have they have hundreds of other apps that they just kind of like disappear they stop using so it becomes

a big challenge to to drive that that that change so as you’ve seen some of these

Technologies uh Innovation play into you know the businesses that you’ve worked

with is there a time a story that you can think of where there was a project or an initiative that made some

substantial change with a customer where they were like enthusiastic or they saw big

improvements I mean uh a lot of them come to my mind but a very decent one I

can talk about and it it is probably not a customer Cent one but more of an

internal uh project that uh we ran or ra rather initiative right

uh so two years two and a half years back uh my CEO he he gave me a on line

statement right I mean and we used to have all these leadership meets and uh there will always be a lot of noise

right where because people are not align when I say they are not aligned they are aligned towards goal but not on what’s

Happening day today kind of a thing different functions will have their own point of view and stuff like that so uh

he gave me two line statement cut the noise and optimize the revenue right so

so that’s where I went about setting up the revops as a function right and uh

uh the reason I call that out is that was one of the biggest uh change

management initiative that I have personally driven where you have to by Def definition when you talk about

Revenue you try to focus on sales team right because you can point out 50 things that sales team is not doing uh

or customer success team is not doing that they should be doing but when you realize uh building

of this cross functional team that it is all inter interdependent right so as

part of reop team I just created a cross function team with department heads from

uh product engineering GTM sales and customer success and then uh even

finance and right talent management teams and all those things and we went

about a very very pressed definition of business

outcomes kept on measuring it was a really really challenging first uh few

Sprints right uh for six to8 weeks I think everyone was on each other’s

throat right but event once you established that okay here is the

business outcome I’m measuring and I’m okay I’m at five out of 100 but I will

measure and I will show it to you all right and each cycle unless it is moving

we are not moving uh getting out of the room kind of a thing right and from

there on I think today that function is an autopilot I moved out of that function now and it is uh running our

own overall uh cost functional team to improve our uh better optimization of

Revenue as well as usage of resources so again uh it may not sound a very

technology Le Innovation although a lot of Technology was in I used uh things uh

latest things but uh it was more of an innovation in uh Thinking by bringing in

diverse Minds you won’t realize how sales problems were solved by

uh a talent management team or HR leader whereas Finance guy talked about GTM and

all that stuff right so they gave the ideas and it kept on training so Innovation at the idea level or a

thought level I think that’s where I was most happy about yeah I I think uh it’s

it’s often overlooked to consider you know the the big changes that happen

internally uh I I talked to a CEO recently he said that every time he joins a new company in the first 90 days

he thinks about the three ways that he can impact the company one is how can he impact the customer another one is

impact the team and then in the case of you know his role as CEO he thinks about how he can impact the board members um

and and you know each each one of those is just as important so I think that’s a a terrific

example um looking back at a young aille um you know I you’re still young I’m you

know we’re we’re close to the same age so uh but feel so nice

yeah um what what kind of thoughts or advice would you give somebody who’s just kind of getting

into uh customer success or data analytics looking to maybe eventually become a leader what’s the most

important thing they can do right out of the gate uh I mean apart from uh being a

subject matter experts right if you’re choosing data analytics as a field you need to understand the uh technical

landscape or a business land landscape but if you talk about customer success as a function right uh uh I would say

your existent existence is to make your customer successful right that’s about

right and one thing that has helped me in that uh in a customer success role

versus being a technical guy you have to take pride in your ignorance and not in your

knowledge right so when you do that you will start asking and not telling and

when you ask you automatically listen so listening is one of the uh biggest uh or

rather most underrated quality uh people think that they listen but I think uh it

doesn’t happen like that right I mean unless you have asked or you are really curious you don’t listen and once you

listen uh you start to understand the pain and you understand how cust

customer Define their own success and not how you define your customer success and from there on I think if you keep

the feedback loop on uh I mean I don’t know whether I answered your question

but I think that’s that is how I have grown I I think when you’re young um and

you’re a subject matter expert you know to your point it can often be hard to listen because you feel and you believe

so strongly that you know and then you know the the older you get um you realize you actually don’t know as much

as you think so I think that’s that’s a great point and one that I would definitely agree with especially on the

uh the side of listening um I I use this call Recording Technology that helps me

record my calls and then during the call it will tell me how much I’m listening versus Talking yeah I’m I’m often

surprised how much I’m listening or talking and then I kind of have to like pull back a little bit yeah I’ve started

doing that I I use a a bot to record my meetings and it giv me nice analysis so

I think some of these Technologies also do help when you are able to measure like okay you were talking 60% of the

time in the meeting that’s nonsense you shouldn’t be doing that or maybe today it would happen like that yeah yeah yeah

yeah for sure and that’s okay you know I I invited you here to do that um how about specifically for a

younger Akil like is there anything uh that you would tell him what what what

would you say you know to a I don’t know 18 20 year old a I will say but I I don’t know

whether he will understand really but I will say compounding Is For Real uh a

part of it I understood early on like when it comes of for wealth generation

yes because I knew math and I knew compound interest I understood that but in general compounding is real in every

facet of your life right so start investing early invest in your health

right in your well-being develop habits towards that right I mean it’s not a one-time activity and habit Can it can

be like once a week once a month kind of a thing so invest in healthy lifestyle

in wealth generation both physical as well as intellectual and also invest in network building right sooner you

start much bigger impact it has uh over a period of time right so uh I think I I

keep on uh thinking like okay if I would have done this 10 years back things

would have been so much easier and in case of health and wealth it was very obvious yeah yeah I I think

you’re you’re totally spot on I mean I’m I’m 39 now and I I don’t know I think I’ve been

exercising walking hiking just like you um since I was very young and I found

it’s really really interesting it’s like if I can do those things and if I can take care of myself and sleep well

everything else kind of takes care of itself for for me which is absolutely I mean you you cannot be in leadership

positions and uh not be healthy right I mean although my lifestyle was not a

very healthy lifestyle right a lot of parties a lot of things for good period

and good period of my life uh I think I woke up a little late in my late 30s

when you start realizing like okay you are not uh Immortal right so so you start to

realize and I now I realize if I wouldn’t have started 10 years back focusing on some of these things

probably I would not be doing half of the things that I’m able to do now that that does seem like the the age that

most people start noticing that they don’t recover it quickly and they’re like man that was really dumb yeah yeah

exactly um you know looking ahead a little bit uh towards the future if you had your crystal ball um when it comes

to AI Solutions what do you what do you hope to see what are you what are you looking forward to

seeing so I think uh uh there are few things which

uh I I’m interested in or rather given the the kind of things we work on right

as as a firm as a professional outfit right uh some of the things which are

drawing our attention is overall drisking this uh AI transformation or AI

business transformation there is a lot of uh caution there’s a lot of uh uh

what do you say distrust at this stage right for

various reasons and or rightful reasons right so I think that whole thing I see

uh I’m monitoring very closely on how it evolves right be it if efficiency right

overall cost of AR right or running the models Etc right so be slms instead of

llms and stuff like that right or be data security right we all know that we

live in the world where data security or cyber security no amount of investment

is enough in that field uh in general building trust into uh your AI

initiatives by explainability by doing ethical and responsible AI right so I think that whole uh whole Space uh I see

that next five years are very important on whether this remains a hype or whether we see uh changes at all levels

another thing is uh overall uh this field of data monetization uh I

think that is uh one thing which uh interests a lot of people now using in

data clean rooms and stuff like that right so for businesses to be able to uh exchange data securely to monetize or to

uh Drive their businesses better right so I think that is another space I me there are a lot of them but I

think these are two three things uh which at least in near term I am seeing

that uh will gain traction a lot more than of those yeah just just to kind of

double click on the um data mon monetization and sort of like teams I

guess um not swapping data you know what what goes into that is it like a complex

regulatory problem you know do the customers have to opt in how does that typically work I mean if you know much

about it again it’s a it’s an evolving field but yeah a lot of it is regulatory

governance related stuff as well but it is it usually happens between uh uh

business associate I mean I’m talking about uh Enterprises right so okay as a

vendor uh vendor and a client if they

have data that can help each other to do better and for them to be able to share

that data within the regulation within the privacy rules and all those stuff right

how do you do that how do you make it happen and think of it instead of one is to one there are multiple n is to n

relationship there right how do you do that how you expose your data without uh

compromising on your business interest as well as uh regulatory uh compliances

Etc right so it it it is an interesting field lot of technological advancement

is happening in that area as well so yeah super cool um well Akil it has been

great talking with you today and I just wanted to say how much we appreciate you spending some time with us thank you so

much I really enjoy and getting to know uh this whole thing about you as well in the process thank

you so much awesome talk you soon bye all right thank you