Adil Doctor, recently promoted to lead Avaya?s SME business in Asia Pacific, is excited about leading the company?s expansion plans in the region. With 20 years of industry experience, Doctor describes himself as someone who loves the challenge of starting things from scratch.
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It is this appetite for taking up challenges that explains his association with various start-up businesses, including Avaya?s SME business. Doctor joined Avaya as director, mid-market and SMB sales, India and SAARC, in 2009. Prior to joining Avaya he was working as director, channels, Asia, Cisco Systems, Singapore.
Explaining his move to shift base from Singapore to India, Doctor says, ?Start-ups excite me. Joining Avaya, for example, meant that I had the opportunity of putting in place a team, establishing distribution and marketing channels and strategising for the business right from the beginning.?
In his new role, Doctor identifies key challenges that need to be addressed to promote Avaya?s SME business in the country as well as in the Asia-Pacific region. The first challenge is in retaining customers; the second, one has to think of ways in which the SME businesses can get the best out of employees; and the third relates to creating more awareness and visibility about the products and solutions available in the SME space.
According to Doctor, the key to retaining customers is to provide them with improved and customised solutions. Its products range from hybrid and analog to digital solutions. Also, he says that there is a need to create more visibility about the range of services that the company offers.
He is looking to promote Avaya?s business in the Asia-Pacific region. ?We are working towards building individual, regional and country-specific plans to grow our business in this region,? Doctor says.
Moreover, Doctor points out, for all the Avaya markets, the company continuously brings out upgraded versions of its products and services. To keep its products competitive and relevant to the changing needs of customers, the company invests about 16 per cent of its product revenue in research.
Growing up, Doctor always wanted to have a career in sales and marketing. He describes himself as a hands-on manager since he has to work in close association with not only his own team but also with other teams including marketing, finance and legal.
Doctor enjoys spending his spare time with his three children ? two girls and a boy. Doctor nurtures a dream to do something meaningful in the conservation space once he has more time on hand from his regular, though exciting, job.
