Mashal Dhawan was always fascinated by brands and their style to lure the consumer’s minds. It so happened that, after completing her Engineering degree in Computer Science along with Executive Management from IIM Calcutta, Mashal got the opportunity to work with Smart Utility Systems (SUS) as a lead to the Marketing Team of the company. Grabbing the golden opportunity Mashal started towards fulfilling her dream to create an impact globally affecting everyone’s life.
It is her background in technology and management, which further enhanced Mashal’s understanding of SUS’s product solution, Energy & Utility business, its customers and importantly implications of the products on their customers. This helped her in laying out a clear roadmap of their brand promise and its vision which align to address the global challenge of Energy Sustainability & Water Conversation and connect globally everybody to get Educated, Empower in real time to save energy and water.
As a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) /VP Marketing at SUS, Mashal is responsible for product marketing and research, analyzing the overall market for new business trends and insights in the Energy & Utility Industry for SUS products. As a CMO, she is responsible for identifying the challenges in the Energy and Utility industry and help SUS determine what products and services utility customers require to address their current and future business problems.
On the ground of her extensive experience in the industry Mashal states, “After these many years, I have found out the business landscape has evolved entirely. The Energy & Utility sector is one great culmination of technology and customer sentiments. In fact, at SUS, we are constantly innovating our products to impact utility value chain and contributing our part towards energy and water sustainability. This side of business, where we are helping our customers and contributing towards the wellbeing of our environment is what motivates me to come to work every day and make a difference.”
‘Going with the Flowing Wind’
It can never be easy to get successful in a profession without hard work. The same happened with Mashal. On the business front, the utility industry is undergoing a rapid transformation with changing market dynamics, technological advancements, changes in regulatory requirements and increased focus on reduced emissions. Keeping pace with these parameters at a single time is hard.
However, a key factor that is molding the business model of utilities is changing customer expectations. Emphasizing on the same point Mashal says, “The utility industry is increasingly becoming customer-centric with an increased focus on customer engagement. At SUS, customer service is a part of our brand promise and we aim to deliver customer-oriented solutions to our utility clients. Thus, we envision developing cloud platform for our clients whereby empowering customers with data and allowing them to change their behaviors thus achieving energy sustainability and water conservation.”
‘Continuous Learning’, Key to Success
A hardcore believer of ‘Continuous learning is increasingly important to the success of any organization’, Mashal emphasizes, “Being a cloud-based platform provider with deep expertise in Big Data and Analytics, we continue to evolve and learn new age technologies to better our solutions for our customers.” SUS constantly scout for highly capable resources to join the market research, technology and other product focused teams. They believe in nurturing talent and evolve them for future leadership roles to instill in them a sense of belonging, and the same spirit of training new joiners.
SUS as a number 1 Energy and Water Platform have 3 major innovative products, Smart Customer Engagement, Smart Workforce Mobility, and Smart Big Data Analytics. Focused on addressing core challenges of global energy and water utilities and help create an energy and water sustainable future, in the five years since launch, SUS’ products’ have received multiple awards and recognitions for meeting utilities expectations.
Achieving the work-life Balance
While reflecting on the question of achieving the work-life balance, Mashal says, “For me more than just work – an overall vision is important. When you are living a dream- it hardly is work. It’s fun! Having said that, we all need an escape time to time to keep our energy levels high, and I don’t mind an occasional indulgence. When I am at work I make sure while being serious at work we all rejuvenate juggling our professional and personal lives in between. For me when you are satisfied at work, it becomes your life you don’t require any excuses. My family, my colleagues and friends keep me sane and help me to achieve perfect work-life balance.”
Explaining the importance of women’s role in business, Mashal elaborates, “Everywhere, women are excelling! On a positive note, I believe things are changing, more women leaders are coming forward and their success is nothing but the proof more women are ready to take today and future leadership role.”
