Women are fierce when it comes to weathering the storms of life. In the world of leadership, they are setting an example for others and encouraging up-and-coming women to step up to fulfill their leadership potential. An ardent leader, Anamika Gupta, Director and Head of Customer Marketing at Fujitsu America, Inc., is the epitome of such inspirational leadership.
Anamika started her career in a fairly male-dominated environment with few strong female role models; however, she had a few very strong male leaders, who not only guided her but often carried the torch in her journey to become a proficient and “fearless” woman in business leadership.
Outside work, Anamika has her mom and dad, both of whom are a big influence on her and a great source of inspiration. She was born in a fairly conservative society, where girls studied well only to get married well; but Anamika wasn’t raised with that mindset. She was always told, “Dream big and have the courage to follow your dreams. When you face a roadblock, be optimistic and creative to find a different route to achieving your dreams; you may not see your options at first, but with perseverance, you will find the path.” To this day, she follows this advice.
While working with and managing multi-cultural teams at very large global cross-functional matrixed organizations, Anamika realized she also has a natural passion for developing trusted, value-based relationships. She has this innate curiosity of understanding the challenge first and then getting to the solution. She believes that trusted relationships are built on the consistent delivery of added value, from interactions with customers, partners, and colleagues right through to friends and family. To deliver this value in every interaction, she always maintains her curiosity, empathy, and innovative spirit. It’s these traits, and a network of great mentors, that have helped Anamika progress through her career.
A Creative Marketing Professional
As a creative thinker, Anamika aims to blend the art of storytelling with the science of marketing automation. By using her experience across brand building, demand generation via field/industry marketing and account based marketing, influencer marketing, partner marketing, and customer marketing across three continents, she strives to combine the perspective of the 30,000-feet visionary with the on-the-ground executor.
While Anamika is most proud of building significant, sustainable, award-winning marketing programs and developing strong marketing professionals with an entrepreneurial growth mindset, she is also proud of the multiple learnings she has had in her journey so far. By applying learnings from her experience and developing new ways of thinking, she has helped organizations like Fujitsu to create trust-based, long term client relationships, while influencing a number of multimillion-dollar deals with complex, large-scale IT and consulting services. She also really enjoys sharing these learnings and experiences with others, including her team and as a speaker at a number of industry and marketing conferences and seminars.
Going Step-by-step
Fujitsu is dedicated to delivering a comprehensive range of digital transformation solutions and services to enable clients to meet their business objectives through integrated offerings and solutions, including consulting and professional services, systems integration, managed services, outsourcing and cloud services for infrastructure, platforms and applications; AI and data analytics; and quantum-inspired computing solutions.
Before jumping into making a decision on diversification of Fujitsu’s services, Anamika remains agile, preferring to take a step by step process. And she considers the first and most important step to be listening to her clients. She partners with her sales team to listen and step into her clients’ shoes to learn about their pain points and challenges. It helps the company not just be a good partner, but a truly wise partner. As a next step, she identifies how her team can deliver extreme value by carefully crafting a relevant solution (of services/products), then aiming to diversify to enable the client not only survive but thrive in this dynamic, ever-changing market. Her team also leans towards the company’s partner ecosystem; she knows they can’t do it all on its own if they want to present a genuine, holistic and future-proof business solution/services/products to clients. This leads her team to the next step in the diversification of services – getting her client’s attention.
A survey of Canadian media consumption by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span has fallen to eight seconds, down from 12 in the year 2000 – https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/. With the attention span of less than a goldfish, Anamika believes it is important for her and her team to identify the right content, channel, timing, and audience to get the message out and position it in a compelling way. She then engages them in a value-based conversation while building a trust-based long-term partnership. This process of diversification into its client ecosystem has worked quite successfully for Anamika and her team.
Giving Back to the Community
By her stakeholders, both internal and external, Anamika is known as “fearless, innovative, and passionate” leader. With her team here at Fujitsu, she is committed and focused on making sure she is continuing to make a positive difference in advancing the company’s purpose “to build trust in society through innovation”.
As an advocate for women in business, technology, mentoring and professional support in B2B sales and marketing, Anamika is passionate about sharing her knowledge and developing the skills of fellow marketers. She is an active member of the DFW *ATW (DFW Alliance of Technology and Women) community and Women’s Innovative Network (WIN) at Fujitsu, supporting women in technology, helping to create future business leaders, and influencing STEM curricula for girls.
She is actively involved in volunteering her time and support to non-profit www.fmsc.org (Feed My Starving Children). She actively supports an LGBTQ+ inclusive workplace and was delighted that Fujitsu was recently recognized as one of the “Best Places to Work for LGBTQ Equality!” (https://www.hrc.org/resources/corporate-equalityindex)
During the pandemic, she has helped to bring community and families together in an effort to foster a new sense of togetherness and happiness among local families.
Be You to Create the Change
In her advice to upcoming business leaders, Anamika asserts, “At the core, be you! Always! You, and only you, know who you are and what you’re worth. Nobody else! When you are being yourself, you have the power and confidence to create change, whatever the challenges. Be brave in chasing your dreams. There will be obstacles, and you will make mistakes. Make sure you learn from them and keep moving forwards towards your goal.”