In this episode, we sit down with Manjusha Gangadharan, Head of Sales and Partnerships at MinIO, to explore her journey and insights in leadership, sales, and team building. Starting with an architectural background, Manjusha's career took a turn into IT, spending over two decades at Wipro where she held various roles, from engineering to strategy. She discusses her transition to MinIO, a leader in object storage solutions, where she has been instrumental in building the partner ecosystem and now leads sales as well.
Manjusha shares her experience in cultivating a collaborative, mission-driven culture at MinIO. As a small but dynamic team, she explains how every member is aligned with the company's vision, driven by a deep focus on simplicity and delighting customers. She emphasizes the importance of trust, transparency, and empowerment in leadership, lessons she carries from her previous roles at Wipro and Seagate. Her advice to leaders is to over-communicate and focus on simplifying processes to keep the team aligned and successful.
We dive into how MinIO’s approach to customer experience has led to a powerful inbound engine, drawing in enterprise clients through their open-source model and content-rich marketing. Manjusha walks us through their shift from offering identical open-source and enterprise versions to differentiating with a more feature-rich enterprise product while maintaining strong community support for the open-source version.
The conversation covers the evolution of MinIO’s sales strategy, moving from primarily inbound inquiries to building a small but effective sales team to actively engage enterprise clients. Manjusha discusses key milestones such as establishing a partner framework, contributing significantly to annual recurring revenue (ARR), and focusing on expanding the pipeline through partnerships. She reflects on how marketing and technical expertise have helped MinIO stand out in the object storage space, especially with their S3 compatibility and superior benchmarks.
As the episode wraps up, Manjusha shares her philosophy of "making things simple," both in business processes and leadership. She offers advice for leaders to focus on alignment and communication, ensuring the entire team is focused on the organization's mission.
To connect with Manjusha, reach out to her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/manjusha/. For more about our work, visit https://nextgengrowth.com.
