Geetha Sathish Kumar

Life at Zoho

Describe your current role in the organization.

I have hosted global events in the US, Europe, ANZ, and APAC. I, now head the events management for the APAC region. My role includes ideation, planning, and execution of online and offline events, user conferences, thought leadership seminars/fireside chats, online marketing, and much more. I also coordinate and mentor a team of marketers across South East Asia, understanding their strengths and weaknesses. Being part of a large organization like Zoho, I am fortunate to work with a lot of people from different product teams and understand their work when traveling to events together. I joined as an Inside Sales Executive handling WebNMS, ManageEngine, and Zoho Sales for India. I have handled sales, retention (renewals), and partner management, and now moved to events—a part of marketing.

What role does Zoho's company culture play in your identity and the work that you do?

I had known about Zoho and its values long before I joined, and I wanted to contribute and be a part of its growth. Zoho has taught me a lot of values. It has brought out the people-management and leadership skills in me wherein I am able to groom team leads without micromanagement. It has expanded my ability to self-learn, unlearn, and relearn many work-related and organizational skills, along with the freedom to experiment and excel in all the roles I have played so far.

At Work

Tell us about a time you overcame a challenge you didn't think was possible.

When transitioning from sales to an event role, I started communicating with multi-lingual organizers, venues, and vendors to negotiate and seal the best deal. It was challenging to communicate with natives from Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, etc., and making them understand our requirements for Zoholics and other tradeshow conferences to bring out the desired output and run successful events.

Your most embarrassing blunder?

Two distinct instances come to my mind. These one-time mistakes teach you lessons that last a lifetime.

Events: A newsletter campaign was sent to the incorrect database.

Sales: I had to use a lot of persuasion to get a large corporate customer to recognize the error and approve a revised price quote because there was one zero less in the total amount!

Is there a project or an accomplishment at Zoho you're proud of?

I have hosted 35+ Zoholics events, 100+ tradeshows/conferences, and counting! My team and I were instrumental in hosting the following:

i) First edition of Zoholics, our business user conference, in eight countries—Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and New Zealand.

ii) First edition of virtual Zoholics using our own Zoho Backstage product. Attendees were joining from 10+ countries from APAC. We had to plan and execute events in different countries across South East Asia involving linguistic, cultural, operational, and logistical challenges.

Hosting an event every alternate day, managing travel for the entire team, handling logistics, setup, etc., despite variation in time zone, and coordinating with multi-lingual on-the-ground staff were the most challenging and rewarding.

Zoholics India in 2019 was the first ever all-India annual user conference hosted in Mumbai with two breakout rooms. Another first of its kind in this event was bringing sponsorship through partners and having an expo hall. It was packed with presentations, panel discussions, customers sharing their testimonials, fun activities, and one-on-one technical discussions running in parallel. This event brought together 700+ Zoho users in one place. It was a memorable event that was lauded by partners, users, and top management.