Abhijit Gangoli and the business of being asked back

An acquisition is a peculiar place to begin a story about keeping customers. In August 2018, Salesify, part of Ziff Davis, acquired DemandShore, the Pune business co-founded by Abhijit Gangoli and Milind Katti. The price was undisclosed. The arrangement was more revealing: Gangoli would continue leading DemandShore, while Katti would pursue DemandFarm as a separate entity. A partnership had reached a fork without needing to become a farewell.

DemandShore, previously QED Baton, worked in outsourced lead generation. Its daily concern was the beginning of a commercial relationship: finding prospects, making contact, creating an opening for a sale. DemandFarm addressed the work that follows, helping businesses plan and develop their important accounts. Put the two together and a career begins to take shape around a deceptively ordinary subject: how companies get to know one another.

Today, DemandFarm lists Gangoli as an advisor and Katti as CEO and co-founder. Gangoli’s connection with the business includes its founding and an earlier period as CEO. The changing titles describe different jobs. The underlying concern with customers has proved more durable.

A college with a quiet sales pitch

Gangoli studied at Pune’s Institute of Management Development and Research in the 1996-98 PGDM cohort. In his own reflection on those years, he remembers an institution whose humility could almost discourage applicants. That is an endearing complaint for a sales professional to make about his college. A place apparently reluctant to sell itself had persuaded him rather thoroughly.

He credits IMDR with teaching him humility, integrity and respect for other people. His account gives ethical values greater weight than ambition or functional expertise when considering a satisfying working life. He also leaves room for several kinds of ambition: entrepreneurship appeals to some people; a corporate career appeals to others. Both require sustained work.

The detail matters because it places his later business decisions beside a stated personal standard. He does not present company formation as a moral achievement in itself. A title can establish someone’s position very quickly. Credibility takes longer to accumulate, and other people have a vote.

“IMDR taught me humility and integrity”

Abhijit Gangoli, reflecting on his education

The difficult middle of a partnership

Before his ventures, Gangoli worked at Xerox and Castrol India. Sales and marketing became the territory he kept returning to. With Katti, he moved from an early direct-marketing venture into outsourced inside sales. Their route was less orderly than a retrospective career chart might suggest.

A pivotal opening came after a conversation about the time American salespeople spent arranging appointments. Gangoli suggested pitching an inside-sales operation from Pune. An initially sceptical prospective client eventually gave the partners a pilot. The idea acquired a paying test.

Then came the recession. In 2009, DemandShore lost roughly 40% of its work. Gangoli and Katti used credit cards and mortgaged their homes to keep the business going. By 2018, the company had grown to more than 800 people. Those endpoints contain a useful warning about founder biographies: a neat upward line can conceal several years spent simply trying to stay open.

The customer who already owned the answer

One of Gangoli’s ventures began with an almost comic inefficiency. Clients were buying marketing contacts that could already be sitting somewhere inside their own organisations. The trouble was finding and reusing them. Spreadsheets, customer databases and marketing systems had become separate cupboards, each with its own key.

LeadEnrich, developed by Santosh Abraham, Katti and Gangoli, tackled that problem. Backed by QEDbaton, it brought together tools for checking, cleaning and enriching marketing data. Its purpose included helping marketers avoid paying for duplicate information. Abraham, its CEO, described the recurring customer frustration behind the product.

The product names were practical: EasyLead for forms, DataEnrich for unusable records, DataDoc for assessing gaps in a marketing database. By November 2013, Abraham reported nine customers following an April beta launch. It was an early example of the founders turning a problem encountered in a services business into software. The customer had supplied the brief by repeatedly arriving with the same difficulty.

A detour from sales pipelines to water pipes

Software was not the only outlet for that practical streak. An early report on solar irrigation in Bihar names Gangoli among four friends who established Pune-based Atom Solar Systems. The others were Arjun Mundkur, Sajal Jassal and Katti. The venture drew on water-pumping experiments by Mundkur and his father, Colonel Vivek Mundkur.

Its intended customers were small and marginal farmers needing compact solar pumping solutions. The report described a lightweight system that could be manually installed in an open well or borewell. It also discussed combining the pumps with drip irrigation to manage water more effectively.

The setting is a long way from enterprise sales software. The commercial question is familiar: can a useful piece of engineering reach someone with a specific, persistent problem? This chapter adds a physical dimension to a career usually described through leads, accounts and databases. Here, the desired output was water.

After the handshake, a different job begins

The 2018 DemandShore transaction joined two lead-generation operations. Salesify said the combined organisation would employ 1,200 people. That figure belongs to the combination, rather than to DemandShore alone. For Gangoli, continuing to lead the acquired company meant that a sale of the business came with operating work still attached.

DemandFarm’s subject requires a different kind of attention. A large customer can contain many relationships, competing priorities and several opportunities at different stages. A contact record gives an account manager a name. It does less to explain who influences a decision, which relationship needs attention, or where a customer might need additional help.

DemandFarm’s tools bring account planning, relationship intelligence and opportunity planning into the customer-management environment. Its company description makes those three jobs central to its approach. The distinction is practical: teams need ways to organise what they know so that another person can act on it.

Gangoli and Katti discussed digital account planning in an August 2021 fireside conversation with Express Computer editor Srikanth R P. The discussion put their product in the context of Indian software businesses selling internationally. By then, their work had moved well beyond arranging the first appointment. They were discussing how a team could keep an account intelligible as it grew.

The people closest to the customer

Gangoli’s description of customer success is particularly revealing. Speaking in 2023, he described DemandFarm’s team expanding from support into revenue-related work. Its responsibilities included implementation, managing change, maintaining relationships and identifying account expansion opportunities. Proximity to customers also gave the team a role in product strategy.

That last responsibility deserves attention. A customer-facing colleague hears the awkward question before it becomes a product requirement. The same colleague sees the gap between a successful demonstration and a successful deployment. Giving that experience a route into product decisions makes the relationship useful in both directions.

A DemandFarm case study under Gangoli’s byline describes a US staffing company using organisational charts and relationship information. The company reported a 27% revenue increase. The useful detail is the work beneath the number: visualising stakeholders, sharing information between recruitment and sales, and operating within Salesforce. This was a customer result described by DemandFarm, rather than a universal promise about what a diagram can achieve.

His public conversations also put him alongside practitioners beyond his own company. A DemandFarm and Strategic Account Management Association webinar included Contentful’s Andrew Hazard, SAMA’s Harvey Dunham and DHL Supply Chain’s Richard Dunn. The agenda covered the skills and tools account managers would need as their work became more digital. Selling software and understanding the profession using it belonged in the same conversation.

The less glamorous decisions that keep things moving

Hiring provides another glimpse of Gangoli’s operating priorities. In a COHIIRE testimonial, he describes needing senior marketing expertise while DemandFarm was fundraising. A permanent CMO appointment would wait. The immediate need was for someone experienced who could begin work promptly.

He says an interim marketing specialist with two decades of experience joined within two weeks of the engagement starting. The example is modest beside an acquisition announcement, but it captures a recognisable founder problem: the work needs doing before the organisation is ready to create the permanent position. His chosen solution bought expertise for the stage the business was actually in.

There is a similar interest in the working environment. DemandFarm announced Great Place to Work certification following an independent assessment in the category for companies with fewer than 100 employees. The dimensions included credibility, respect, fairness, pride and camaraderie. Those are unusually human words to find beside enterprise software specifications, and rather useful ones for anyone expected to build the software.

Gangoli’s IMDR contemporary Harshawardhan Honmode remembers a cheerful first impression and a dependable colleague beneath it. The combination offers a quieter ending than the usual founder portrait. A person can enjoy the company and still take the commitment seriously. Across Gangoli’s ventures, the repeat business begins there: somebody has to trust the next conversation will be worth having.