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Zee Entertainment Enterprises - National Sales Executive of the Year

 

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Company: Zee Entertainment Enterprises, Mumbai, India
Company Description: Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited is one of India's leading television media and entertainment companies. It is amongst the largest producers and aggregators of Hindi programming in the world, with an extensive library housing over 222,000 hours of television content.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Individual Categories
Nomination Sub Category: National Sales Executive of the Year

Nomination Title: Rejo Francis Thekkinedath, Circle Head National Sales

Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since the beginning of July 2017 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes: REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION

Rejo FrancisIs a Senior Sales Executive with over 24 years of sales experience across industries such as media entertainment, telecom, retail and durables. He has proven competence in growing businesses and scaling them into profitable operations. He is currently a C-level leader at Zee Entertainment Enterprises Mumbai, one of India's leading global television media and entertainment conglomerates.

Since July 2017, Rejo’s key responsibilities at Zee include:

  • Driving annual business to the tune of 35USD Million, leading a direct team of ten key sales account professionals.
  • Shouldering the entire Profit & Loss responsibility for two national level customers in India as well as the entire business across three key industrial states in India (Gujarat, Maharashtra and Goa).
  • Rejo realized substantial business growth for Zee through two national accounts

where Rejo grew the business by 41% from 8.26USD Million to 11.65 USD Million directing negotiations and engaging directly with C-suite executives. Since the growth expected was about 200% from a smaller base, the meetings involved leverage meetings with key personnel like the CEO and board members.

  • Another key player had started operations of the HITS platform under a separate brand name. The subscription revenue understanding that Zee had with this player for December 2017 was for a value of 13.33 USD Million and the normal expected growth on YOY basis was 25%, which was also the budgeted figure. Rejo achieved an outstanding 185% growth in the HITs division, from 1.4USD Million to 4 USD Million by thorough analysis of the estimated subscriber growth and resorting to tough litigation and piracy action against 14 operators who were found to be pirating some channels thus forcing the operator to switch off local content option to all these 14 operators. This helped to build pressure on the management to revise the revenue deal with Zee.

Rejo’s strength in customer relationship management and capability to generate more revenue from key accounts was also evident this last year by enhancing the deals with customers with an active viewer base of 1 million subscribers. Three of these customers were:

  1. For the first customer, Rejo was the key negotiator with this client that is based across the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka with an active customer base of 0.6 million and with repeated negotiations was responsible for growing the revenue Zee obtained from them by 45%.
  2. For the second customer - Based out the key market of Kolhapur with an active base of about 0.2 million, Rejo grew the revenue Zee obtained from them by 40 % by active contract negotiations.
  3. and for the third in Maharashtra with an active viewer base of 0.16 million Rejo grew the revenue Zee obtained from them by 35%.

Rejo has been winning awards throughout his career. Particularly from July 2017, he won the top performing award “The Hero Award for Sales” at Zee consecutively for the years 2017 and 2018. He also recently won the external “Emerging Leader of the Year Award” hosted by UBS forums, Mumbai in September 2018.

Rejo is also an internationally recognized as a business insights thought leader, most recently presenting at conferences at MICA, Ahmedabad, India in Jan 2018, the Strategy Execution & Innovation forum held in April 2018 in Dubai and the CXO Innovation Festival at Singapore in July 2018 where he spoke at both the Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Innovation Officer Summits.
Rejo is an avid blogger with 19 articles published on LinkedIn after July 2017 and is in talks with Forbes publishing.

Rejo is an Electronics Engineer with an MBA. However, he believes in constantly upgrading his skills and knowledge and completed a PG Certificated program in Media & Entertainment Management from MICA in 2017.