LET'S TALK ABOUT:

• Being a female executive in exclusively male tech companies.
• Transforming complex sectors such as defense manufacturing, oil and gas, government and food distribution through disruptive technologies.
• Creating strong vertical niche markets and building category defining brands that beat legacy enterprise incumbents.

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Sowmya quickly becomes a CEO’s top council anywhere she goes, given her undeniable passion for galvanizing a change-resistant organization towards new growth. In her current position as Chief Customer Officer at Seven Lakes Technologies, she has been the CEO’s operational partner in leading the company from a services business to a $7MM (ARR) SaaS product business, with 7 of the top 20 oil and gas giants such as ExxonMobil as customers. 

Sowmya orchestrated the JOYN platform brand, which is the oilfield market leader for mobile field services automation. From demand generation to sales negotiations, she personally facilitated their largest customer ($1.38M annual revenue), winning against tech giants like Microsoft and Salesforce. Sowmya’s imprint on the highly effective product delivery teams, customer success, and marketing teams shortened time to customer value from 18 months to 8 weeks. 

Today, in a highly uncertain world, Sowmya is yet again leading a cross-functional product, sales, finance, marketing, engineering and customer team to cut time-to-value experience from 8 weeks to 10 days.

A champion of change and growth, Sowmya successfully led multiple collaborations at Unisys across three services business units to establish market leadership for secure mobility solutions and two disruptive security and infrastructure product brands, namely Stealth and Forward. A thoroughly designed value-based product, marketing and sales strategy positioned, Forward, a new infrastructure platform as a niche player in Gartner’s Integrated Systems Magic Quadrant within four months of launch and before establishing a customer base. Stealth, A brand new software defined security software product, won the American Business Award (silver) for the year’s favorite product and Tech America Award for Cybersecurity Sector in the same year. She launched multiple campaigns to drive leads via targeted messaging, achieving 13top-tier global media mentions and up to 4M ad impressions per quarter, generating significant contribution to pipeline.

Known for building high-performance teams, Sowmya established a product marketing SWAT team from scratch for Unisys. She recruited 12 professionals and led them in creating a nimble digital content engine that produced 85% of in-house messaging, including differentiated brand messaging for four verticals, representing $1.2B in business. She and the team drove three global demand generation campaigns, generating $150M over three years for two strategic start-up products, Stealth and Forward. She guided the development of global campaigns on a tight budget and managed large technology launches, generating key strategic alliance investments and brand positioning.

Sowmya was also effective with existing teams, restructuring a global research team into a consultative, strategy team aimed at product innovation. She accomplished this by positioning the team to deliver analysis-backed pricing thresholds that informed for new Unisys disruptive technology launches. She coached the team to deliver market requirements that drove investment decisions. The team delivered 190 projects in 2014, encompassing market entry and exit, market requirements, and syndicated market research projects.

Earlier at Deltek, Sowmya led the global launch readiness team that delivered the company’s largest product release in five years. At the time, the company lacked a strong sales and product readiness program. Sowmya co-developed the program team and executed communications, training, collateral, and a lead generation plan. The product readiness program she implemented is still in use today.

She also developed a market case for investments in a profitable growth segment and gained executive buy-in, increasing Deltek’s footprint into a $483M market opportunity. Sowmya capitalized on home turf GovCon expertise, industry reach, accounting, and compliance proficiency. She closed critical manufacturing gaps in shop floor management, time collection, barcoding solutions by fully integrating with existing partners.

She is also credited with designing and building Clarity, signature GovCon CFO industry research connecting customers’ critical Day Sales Outstanding to the ERP product, a huge win in a cash-strapped government contracting customer market. She built board decks for customer CFO’s championing their ask for tech funding, built demand generation campaigns, and content for marketing events that surgically dismantled large ERP incumbents such as PeopleSoft and SAP to position Deltek for the win.

With exclusive thought leadership branding, the CEO hailed her work as key in transforming them from a ‘software vendor’ to a ‘strategic advisor’ for project-based businesses. Sowmya envisioned and implemented a new sales and marketing vision and process then crafted all change, communications, and training certification strategies. In the first 100 days of this new vision, Deltek achieved 60% training certification and adoption with a global team, driving $2M in new business and $7.1M in the pipeline.

When she isn’t in business suits, Sowmya explores outward bound mountaineering and trekking, seeking out high altitude mountain ranges and remote rainforests in Asia, North America, NZ and Latin America. Since 2007, she has climbed or trekked Ureweara, NZ; Macchu Pichu, Peru; Mt. Shasta, California; Mt. Washington, NH; Annapurna Range and Annapurna Base Camp, Nepal; Patagonia, Chile; and Sarawak Region, Borneo.

Her personal passion lies in life coaching for young girls who are climbing out of abusive, neglectful, poorly contained urban environmental conditions. She relishes in grooming first-in-the-family college bound girls.

To balance her drive with a rich inner world experience, Sowmya is an ardent poet, artist and dancer.