Mukesh Kumar’ s key strengths is his ability to understand the Middle East market and what is important for customers operating in this region. His consultancy background, combined with an understanding of how Salesforce drives value for customers across different industries, allows him to identify the right partner to deliver customer success.

Mukesh Kumar is the Regional Vice President of Middle East Alliance and Channels, at Salesforce, where he focuses on growing and developing the partner ecosystem in the region. He is an exmanagement consultant from Accenture and also spent a few years at Oracle before joining Salesforce 14 years ago.

Across the Middle East, Salesforce has more than 250 partners who are an essential part of the company’ s go-to-market strategy. The investment made by Salesforce into the Middle East region has resulted in a strong collaboration with partners who jointly address the needs of their customers who have put Salesforce at the epicentre of their organisational transformation strategy.

Partners are a community of Agentblazers, who use Salesforce’ s solutions to transform business across multiple industries to drive a more customer-centric and efficient process. This is not only about successful implementation of customer projects, but also what regional customers require with respect to product-specific specialist skills and industry knowledge.

To ensure the partner ecosystem has the necessary product and industry knowledge, Kumar is closely aligned to regional upskilling programmes that help with achieving Salesforce certifications. These programmes are designed for anyone interested, from universities all the way to established delivery practices.

There are three partnership models: A consulting partnership model, which is based on implementation services that organisations offer; an independent software vendor, ISV model, where some partners have built a solution on the Salesforce platform that meets a specific customer or industry need; and an outsourced service provider, OSP model, which is where Salesforce works with organisations who provide managed services as a package to an end client.

What are your key strengths and abilities that you bring to the role?

Among Kumar’ s key strengths is his ability to understand the Middle East market and what is important for customers operating in this region. Kumar’ s consultancy background, combined with a strong understanding of how Salesforce drives value for customers across different industries, allows him to internalise and guide his team to identify the right partner to deliver customer success. A critical part of Kumar’ s role is to identify the business goals for Salesforce growth where customers are looking for support in the region, and how partners can support this strategy. It’ s important that projects are delivered to meet expectations.

By understanding the landscape of industry and project opportunities, it is critical to understand which Salesforce product skills are required to deploy these solutions for customers. Each partner offers their own USP, but it’ s important their Salesforce expertise is maintained at the highest level through taking regular certifications.

Kumar insists that a channel manager must be able to jump in at challenging moments. For example, if a project is getting derailed or is not meeting expectations of the client, this is where

Mukesh Kumar, Regional Vice President, Middle East Alliance and Channels, Salesforce

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