Interview with Akshay Arora – Founder and CEO at Euphoria

In today’s influencer interview, we had the opportunity to speak with Akshay Arora – Founder and CEO at Euphoria 

Akshay is a consultant to Startups, SMEs and few of the larger enterprises on creating an integrated marketing strategy, Digital Strategy, Designing and Investing on the Martech framework, Marketing execution across Digital and offline media for both B2C and B2B audience.

1. Tell us about your role and journey. What inspired you to take up the role at Euphoria?

I started Euphoria 4 years ago all by myself and since then have scaled it to be a reasonably well-known marketing technology consulting firm in UAE. We started as a full-scale digital agency and today work across the marketing spectrum from setting up a Martech stack to delivering and executing data-driven marketing campaigns. As the CEO, I take care of running the show and driving sales for the company. However, the real company is formed by amazing people who work within Euphoria. The journey has been full of learning, ideas, wins, and losses. And in one word I call all of that ‘experiences’! The best part has been to interact and build relationships with clients from various industries as we are industry agnostic.

Prior to starting Euphoria, I had worked with Fortune 500 brands like Samsung Electronics, HP and Larsen & Toubro. Having led various sales and marketing roles with a lot of people interaction, I realized I could do a better job at solving some of the real issues by being brand and solution agnostic. My motivation has always been to create something of value to people than trying to fit an existing solution to deliver a sale. Euphoria was therefore set up to deliver maximum impact and RoI of our client’s marketing investments.

2. What Are Some of The Challenges For You When It Comes To Growing the revenue?

Challenges are manifold and so are opportunities. One of the bigger challenges somehow has been to hire the right talent and also to time it right. As a small business, there is always a trade off between hiring a permanent resource and a freelancer or part-time. Increasing capacity in sales or execution teams becomes critical to growing the revenue or to control the quality of delivery. However, the sales funnel has to be fully functional with enough live projects to sustain permanent employees. There is, however, an inflection point when things become smooth and that is the time when one needs to scale up operations.

Apart from hiring, we do see that the sales cycle for marketing technology solutions is longer as the industry is maturing to adopt a Martech stack to lower their costs across the marketing function.

3. Tell us your Unique Skill which you think you have it as a Founder.

When I meet any of my potential clients, I go there as a consultant and a problem solver. Irrespective of the fact that I will be able to sell or not, I give them genuine advice on what they should be doing regarding their initiatives or issues. And it all comes naturally as I firmly believe that people buy from people they trust. And this approach has definitely helped us in building long-lasting relationships with some of the notable brands in the region as our clients.

Once an organization is our client, we make sure there are dedicated client services and success manager to ensure the objectives of the investment are being met. Within Euphoria, I tell all my teammates to consider the client as their real boss. The client can fire all of us by choosing to take the services of another company.

4. What is the best advice you’ve ever received, and you have implemented till now for Euphoria?

“Do not fear failure but rather fear not trying”, I live by this mantra and for any new initiative or step we have to take within Euphoria, we make sure we bet with the reasonable judgment of risks involved and we try. With an open culture within Euphoria, everyone is free to suggest wild ideas, take risks and take responsibilities, think big and align everyone to make things happen. As a result, we have been able to pick up challenging projects and delivered them successfully.

5. So, What is Next for You?

The sky is the limit.

Well, I believe this is the best time to be a Founder and more so in the Martech area. Technology has a bigger and direct impact across functions and industries. And marketing has been transformed completely with the world moving to digital acquisition, eCommerce and brand building.

We are seeing immense potential and traction for solutions like Customer data platform and marketing analytics. With brands facing the complexity of reaching customers across multiple touchpoints, it becomes more important to understand the audience and deliver omnichannel experiences. We are advising a lot of clients to choose a Martech stack that matches their needs and helps optimize the marketing spend.

In 2020, we hope to grow our clients bigger and scale new heights as a company.

Thank you, Akshay Arora! We hope to talk with you again, on Tech Research Online.

Read More Influencer Interviews.