In Conversation with the CEO of the fastest growing Analytics Company

Convergytics is an analytics firm specializing in Advanced Analytics, BI, Digital, CRM and Marketing. It is geared to provide analytics or business solutions while keeping a focused view on how the solution will be consumed across business processes and having a framework for measuring the impact to correct for future actions. In order to understand customer completely Convergytics have frameworks to fuse multiple data sources like POS, Web browsing data, promotion data, social media data and more at each stage of Creation, Consumption and Correction which helps them drive sustainable decision making.

Convergytics has transformed itself into one of the fastest growing analytics solutions company by bridging the gap between creation & consumption resulting in analytics not yielding the optimum business impact. They have implemented their solutions for industry leaders across verticals including Retail, CPG, Banking, Healthcare, Social Media, CRM, Supply Chain and Telecom.

Sanjeev Mishra, CEO of Convergytics started the company with a mission to help organizations adapt to the constantly changing market landscape by going beyond traditional analytics to make actionable data-driven decisions and achieve decision-driven ROI.

In an interview, Sanjeev gives an overview about his company and his expectations from the India’s workforce in the field of analytics.

1. What is Convergytics focused on?
   We are a service based analytics company. We tend to cater to the needs of our customers to help them transform their business.
2. What are the challenges you face while hiring an Entry Level Talent?
   The biggest challenge is the lack of application of technical knowledge. In the field of analytics one needs to have a problem solving skills which we find lacking in most of the individuals. They take a lot of time to comprehend. Theoretical and practical application has a lot of difference between them. One needs to be prepared enough to cut through every problem and come up with a quick solution.
3. What Strategies are being used by Convergytics to bridge the Skill gaps?
   We provide freshers with training programs for 2-3 months where they learn about solving real life problems and acquiring good knowledge about the field of analytics. We also offer internships for around 3 months and offer them full time roles if their performance is excellent. The job roles are also being given according to their performance during the internship.
4. What expectations do you have from the entry level talent pool in terms of hard and soft skills?
   The three basic skills we look at are SQL, R, and Python with the former being most important. In terms of soft skills we look for people having good communication skills, logical ability, and curiosity to learn more.
5. What is your hiring Time Frame?
   We generally hire from campuses or through walk in interviews. We visit engineering campuses 3-4 months prior to their end of final semester. However, the hiring goes on throughout the year.
6. Do you believe Non Engineers can work wonders in Analytics?
   Yes definitely, if they have the problem solving Skills, Good Comprehension and also few soft skills that I mentioned earlier.
7. Any interesting projects happening in your company?
   A lot of interesting projects keeps happening in Convergytics which are focused in Business problem solving.

One of such projects involves understanding the contribution of different marketing channels towards sales and optimizing spends across each medium for generating incremental sales while reducing the overall marketing budget, thus increasing the marketing ROI. We not only optimized the overall budget for each channel, but also optimized the weekly spend pattern/ flighting pattern to maximize the ROI and meet the forecasted sales numbers for the year.

This required a multi-layered approach of first determining impact of broad reach/ brand building activities on brand health followed by analyzing the role of marketing spends on revenue versus growth due to pricing, distribution, improved product attributes and seasonality.

The final recommendation helped increase sales by 17% while creating savings of $11 M in marketing spends. The client was able to use this money in more proactive brand building activities.