Vice President of Strategic Partnerships & Alliances at FACE Prep. For ten years I've helped engineering colleges across South India turn placement training into institutional outcomes, one long, multi-stakeholder deal at a time.
About me
I joined FACE Prep in 2016 as a Manager handling client relationships in Chennai. Ten years and six roles later, I lead Strategic Partnerships & Alliances as Vice President, working with vice chancellors, deans, and governing councils across Southern, Western, and Eastern India.
My work sits where academic priorities meet commercial reality. That means structuring multi-year contracts worth ₹2–6 Cr per institution, embedding aptitude and career-readiness modules into core curricula, and making sure what we promise in a boardroom actually happens in a classroom.
I lead a senior team of six AVPs and two Sales Operations leaders, with accountability for a ₹25–40 Cr annual pipeline across more than 30 institutions. Along the way I picked up a habit most sales leaders don't have: when my team needs a tool that doesn't exist, I build it myself.
Career journey
I own the national strategy for institutional revenue growth across degree partnerships, skilling programs, and enterprise-aligned education models. I lead a senior team of six AVPs and two Sales Operations leaders, hold accountability for a ₹25–40 Cr annual pipeline, and serve as the primary executive interface for vice chancellors, deans, registrars, and governing councils.
The year of building the machine. I structured territories, defined account segmentation, standardized playbooks, and established the governance rhythms that made our numbers believable. I drove UG and PG degree program partnerships, working with universities to embed aptitude, domain, and career-readiness components into their core curricula.
Ran Southern India: Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Kerala. The portfolio spanned large-scale government-funded skill development programs, corporate hiring projects, and tailored skilling programs. Led a team of Regional Managers, built go-to-market strategies, and implemented CRM systems and forecast planning.
A short, intense chapter managing client relations across two states, delivering customized training solutions and tightening CRM processes for the region's top institutions.
Nearly four years directing institutional skill development projects. Launched regional hiring drives with corporate clients, mentored a team of managers, and introduced the lead-generation approaches that grew the cluster's revenue substantially.
Where it started. First accounts, first partnerships, and the discipline of proactive client communication that everything since has been built on.
What I do
Higher education deals are slow, political, and worth doing well. I structure multi-year contracts with engineering colleges and universities around academic integration, delivery scale, and outcome-linked commitments. The goal is never a transaction. It's a partnership the institution renews because the results showed up in their placement numbers and their accreditation files.
A training program that ignores accreditation is a liability for the college that buys it. I design programs that fit NBA and NAAC frameworks from day one, with proper CO-PO mapping, Bloom's taxonomy alignment, and semester-wise integration into the curriculum. This is the difference between a vendor the college tolerates and an advisor the college consults.
Distributed sales teams drift without structure. I build the systems that keep them honest: territory design, account segmentation, standardized playbooks, weekly leadership reviews, and forecast discipline. Predictable revenue is a design outcome, not a motivational one.
Beyond selling programs, I help shape them. Recent work includes 42-hour Aptitude and Domain-Specific modules with defined course outcomes across quantitative reasoning, verbal ability, programming fundamentals, and career readiness, plus AI-focused training programs for universities moving their students toward AI-assisted development.
Colleges don't need another training vendor. They need someone who understands what an NBA audit asks for, what a placement committee worries about, and what a vice chancellor answers to. I've sat across the table from all three for a decade.
Things I build
When my team needs something, I build it, browser to production, and put it in their hands.
Built specifically for institutional sales, because generic CRMs don't understand a 9-month college deal cycle. Pipeline management, AI-powered deal health scoring, governance intelligence feed, WhatsApp broadcasting, OCR scanner, and role-based access.
Static pitch decks were putting deans to sleep. Demo Room replaced them with a personalized, interactive web experience for each college prospect, something leadership teams explore rather than sit through.
An internal news aggregator for the higher education sector with AI-generated summaries. The team walks into every college meeting knowing what happened in the sector this week.
Two tools that removed back-office friction: a reimbursement portal with multi-level approvals, receipt uploads, and offline support, plus an invoicing dashboard that tracks collections and follow-ups.
When we moved off our old CRM, a decade of relationship history was at risk. I built a read-only archive app that preserved every account, contact, and deal record, searchable and safe.
All built with React, Supabase, and AI APIs, deployed on Vercel. No engineering team required.
Recognition
Contact
If your institution is rethinking placements, let's talk.