Woman Power: Spreading Cheer All Around

Loquacious and brimming with innovative ideas, that is the best way to
describe Divya Jain of Orient Technologies. She is a people's person and
believes that the best way to do business is to treat your customer as your
partner. She has made it her motto to make her team happy to work with Orient
and wears this pleasure on her sleeve literally. Which is why she is now mulling
over creating badges that will say 'I Am Proud To Be An Orientian' and let
people voluntarily sport them

NAME

Divya Jain, Director-Marketing, Orient Technologies

JOB PROFILE: Though she is officially the Director of Marketing, Jain
wears several hats with aplomb. Part of the day, she is a coach as she guides
her team and educates them on how to approach clients and bag deals. Sometimes,
she is a strategist and sits with the other directors determining what path the
company should take and where should it invest further. Sometimes she is a
relationship manager, where she interacts with her customers directly, just to
exchange pleasantries. Then again she sticks to her forte and negotiates deals
with clients.

And she winds up the day with some number crunching and balancing targets and
achievements.

BACKGROUND: Courtesy her father's job with the Birla Group, Jain spent
a better part of her life in Nainital and then pursued her education in
Rajasthan before graduating from Pilani Institute. She is a graduate in
biochemistry and has done post graduation in food and nutrition. During the
course of her studies she got married and later moved to Bhopal where she worked
as a dietician with hospitals. Later when her husband moved to Mumbai to work
with Crompton Greaves, she tried to get a job as a dietician in the city, with
no luck. On the suggestion of a friend she took up the job of a sales executive
with Tangerine retail outlet, which marked her foray into the IT industry. This
is also where she got her ground level training of selling hardware. When
Tangerine closed, she moved to ACi and that is when she started interacting with
Orient Technologies, which was one of ACi's partners. Later she decided to join
Orient as one of the directors.

Challenges: “Most people assume that to be a Director of an IT
company, especially if you are a woman, you have to be married to the owner, or
be his daughter or have founded the company. I was neither, which often raised
eyebrows,” Jain stated. But she categorically maintains that she never faced any
gender bias in Orient. She did her best to understand the technologies Orient
sells and once she had her foot in the customer's door, she would impress him
with her sales talk and technological knowledge to such an extent that her
gender would not be raised at all. But she smilingly points out that her peers
in Orient sill treat her with kid gloves when it comes to working late hours and
she is always escorted home, if she leaves

after 9:00pm.

STRENGTHS: Jain has brought the woman's touch to what was earlier a
male bastion at Orient. She was the one who ensured that office timings as well
as time out for meals were defined, a dress code was established, marketing
spiel was polished and sales proposals were embellished with details of the
company's achievements. Recently, when The DQ Week recognized Orient as the Best
SI, she sent out a personal note of thanks to her customers for helping the
company win this award. She is also a motivator and spends one hour daily giving
coaching to the company's people. With a smile on her face, she has the
confidence and the wit to charm her way into getting a meeting with even the
surliest CTO.

Family: Having married at the age of 20, Divya was blessed with a
daughter at 23. For the first three years of her daughter's life, she chose not
to work. Today, she is glad to have taken that decision. She lives with her
mother-in-law, husband and daughter and is grateful for all the help her in-laws
have extended to her which helped her work harder in creating a niche for
herself in Orient.

Hobbies: She loves spending every single moment she has in the company
of her daughter. Jain is very fond of baubles and clothes, a passion her
daughter shares and the duo often share each other's accessories. She makes it a
point to take one vacation annually and is always game to take her daughter to
lunches, dinners and parties, whenever possible. Believing that every woman
needs some me-too time, she now makes it a point to work out in a gym and go for
some beauty treatments, whenever she can.

Future Plans: Jain wants to take Orient to the next level and help it
clock a turnover of Rs 81 crore this fiscal. She is also working with her team
to come up with strategies to tap newer clients while working at retaining the
older ones.

VINITA BHATIA