Guest: Rahul Maniktala

Could you name that one all-important thing that makes your relationship with your customers successful? Rahul Maniktala, Microsoft’s Strategic Account Director of Semi/Hi-Tech Manufacturing, can: As he tells our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, that all-important thing is “doing the day-to-day right.” Why? Because it daily reinforces the trust your customers feel for you and your company, which incrementally builds the credibility of your services and products. And with that credibility in place, you have a decent shot at an agreement with your customer when you propose bigger, more important initiatives. Take a listen to more insights shared by Rahul, who has been a Microsoft employee for eight years, as he explains the culture of collaboration at his company, whether he stands with human intelligence predictions or artificial intelligence predictions, and what job he wanted to do when he was a 10-year-old, on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Doing the Day-to-Day Right.”
Listen to the first half of this two-part interview:
Empathy, Goals, and Alignment of Purpose

What if you only had one account to sell to? One with a $100-million budget and a quarter of a million employees? Rahul Maniktala, Microsoft’s Strategic Account Director of Semi/Hi-Tech Manufacturing has that very job. He’s today’s guest on Market Dominance Guys, and Chris Beall and Corey Frank are curious about how Rahul goes about dominating his market of one. “Behind me is the might of Microsoft,” he explains, and the culture there lends itself very well to support for their customers. In addition, Rahul’s background in technical expertise and an understanding of high-tech products, which is the basis of his customer’s business, helps him gain an understanding of what his customer wants to accomplish. After that, “[t]here are a lot of people you have to align,” Rahul explains to Chris and Corey. He always starts with the customer, employing empathy in order to understand their goals, and then works with the people at Microsoft to create an alignment of purpose between the goals of this company he works for and the goals of the customer he serves. It’s a balancing act, and one that Rahul is very adept at, as you’ll learn in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Empathy, Goals, and an Alignment of Purpose.”