Director, Digital Sales, India & ASEANZK, Digital Sales Centre, Bangalore, IBM

Deepali Naair is the Director Digital Sales India and ASEANZK at IBM. Till Feb 2022, she was leading marketing as the CMO for IBM India & South Asia. Her key role is to enable key brand missions at IBM including Systems – Storage, Power, Cloud & Cognitive Software, Public Cloud, TSS Digital Sales and Red Hat. Deepali leads The Bangalore Center which focuses on Digital Sales across India, ASEAN, Korea and Australia.

Previous to this Deepali was the CMO for IBM in India & South Asia, where Deepali drove all marketing and brand initiatives, customer relationship management & execution since 2018. Prior to joining IBM, Deepali was both the CMO and the CDO at IIFL Investment Managers and was a Board Member at IIFL Wealth Finance. She has held leadership positions with L&T Financial Services Group & HSBC Asset Management. In her younger years she has worked with Tata Motors, BPL Mobile, Draft FCB-Ulka and was the Marketing Manager for Saffola and Mediker at Marico.

With over two decades of experience in sales, marketing, ecommerce and managing P&L, Deepali is especially known for her Digital Business Acumen and running Operations for Digital Sales

As the CMO for a holiday company, apart from her marketing responsibilities, she was independently responsible for Online Inventory sales. Through a unique model she developed with ecosystem partners, the revenues saw exponential growth.

At L&T Insurance, as Head of the D2C (Direct to consumer) Channel with P&L responsibility, she set up the e-portal and the call-centre based sales team. This included managing key B2B relationships with online aggregators.

She is widely known for her leadership and collaboration skills which come of great use when she manages multiple portfolios and matrix relationships. Her entrepreneurship skills are legendary as she has navigated cultures both at Start-ups and Established MNCs and Indian Companies.

She has won many awards over the years and has been on the IMPACT’s list of India’s 50 Most Influential Women three years in a row, has been on the IAMAI’s CMO Super 30 list in 2019 & 2020. She has been awarded Economic Times Tech CMO of the Year honor in 2020. In 2021, she has been featured in IMPACT’s Digital Power 100 – Marketing leaders 2020 and Business World’s Top 50 Marketers list.

Deepali also runs a podcast on aawaz.com. She is the first Indian woman podcaster in the mainstream leadership/business domain where she chronicles the leadership and transformation journeys of acclaimed CEOs through her podcast “Being CEO with Deepali Naair”. The episode can be accessed on https://www.aawaz.com/en/listen/being-ceo-with-deepalinaair/. This podcast was the top selling show within weeks of its launch and has won many awards – Best Business Content in Radio & Podcast category at India Content Leadership Awards by Inkspell Media and Streamcon Asia Award for the Best Podcast. Deepali was featured in the SheThePeople 40 Over 40 list for her podcast initiative.