Woman Power: Getting Attuned To The Channel

Gurpreet Kanwal

Head-Channels Marketing, Xerox India Ltd

Job Profile

As the newly appointed Head-Channel Marketing, Xerox India, Kanwal is
responsible for the execution of the company's channel strategy, expansion of
its partner network, product positioning and training programs for partners and
its direct sales force. In addition, she is also spearheading the various
channel initiatives like introduction of product marketing programs, channel
engagement programs, incentives and rebate management.

Gurpreet Kanwal

Background

A post-graduate from Mumbai's St Xavier's College, Kanwal also did a course
from NIIT. She started her career with Tangerine Computers, a company that was
involved in retailing computers, as a supervisor of its outlets. After one and
half year with them she moved on to work with Aptech, where apart from sales
responsibility she also trained IT professionals. She joined Xerox in 1997 and
three years later moved from Mumbai to head office in Gurgaon. During her stint
with Xerox for two years, Kanwal headed the Black Belt Lean Six Sigma projects
at Xerox India, which were used to improve business processes and ensure
consistent performance.

Challenges

Xerox is looking at expanding the channel base and she has taken this as her
primary challenge since Kanwal is fairly new to her latest assignment, she finds
the task daunting. She also feels that as a company, Xerox's biggest challenge
now is to find a foothold in the SMB segment. Kanwal elaborated that in Xerox
the topmost priority at the moment is to generate an extensive market for color
in office across segment in India.

Strengths

As a company Kanwal thinks that Xerox's strength lies in their IT oriented
channels. Personally she thinks that her extensive selling based experience in
color, and the resultant high understanding of the market will help the company
in leveraging the brand further. That apart the increase in channel capacity
will also help Xerox to gain popularity in SMB market also.

Family

Kanwal is a proud mom of a two and half year old son who is the center of her
life. Her husband was her colleague at Xerox, which shows why she has very
strong ties and fond memories of the company. He was working with ING Vysya till
recently. But following Kanwal's new appointment he has decided to branch out
on his own since her new position meant she would have to field more
responsibilities and work longer hours. He decided to work in the real estate
sector from home, to be near to their son. Kanwal makes sure that weekends are
exclusively for her family and tries to make sure that work does not intrude on
their time together.

Hobbies

As a working mom Kanwal ensures that all her free time these days is spent with
her son, which sadly leaves her with little or no time for cultivating any
hobbies. However, drawing and painting are two things that she enjoys immensely.
She also like horse riding and whenever she gets time she likes to read
non-fiction and management books. Some of the authors that she likes reading are
Jack Welsh, Shobhaa De, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Upamanyu Chatterjee.

Future Plans

While Kanwal does not believe in planning for the future she however reiterates
that her key focus for the next few years would be to continue doing what she is
doing now.

-S­hivangi Yadav