Could you name that one all-important thing that makes your relationship with your customers successful? Rahul Maniktala, Microsoft’s Strategic Account Director of Semi/Hi-Tech Manufacturing, can: As he tells our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, that all-important thing is “doing the day-to-day right.” Why? Because it daily reinforces the trust your customers feel for you and your company, which incrementally builds the credibility of your services and products. And with that credibility in place, you have a decent shot at an agreement with your customer when you propose bigger, more important initiatives. Take a listen to more insights shared by Rahul, who has been a Microsoft employee for eight years, as he explains the culture of collaboration at his company, whether he stands with human intelligence predictions or artificial intelligence predictions, and what job he wanted to do when he was a 10-year-old, on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Doing the Day-to-Day Right.”

Listen to the first half of this two-part interview:

Empathy, Goals, and Alignment of Purpose
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About Our Guest

Rahul Maniktala is a technology executive, a sales engineer, and currently Microsoft’s Strategic Account Director of Semi/Hi-Tech Manufacturing.

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Christopher Beall (01:31):

So there's a big difference in the world of just regular old sales market dominance kind of stuff. People care a lot about forecasts. I don't care that much about forecasts because I think you handle those with a portfolio and you just don't worry about it. Have a bigger portfolio, the individual deal is not that big of a deal. It happens or it doesn't. Who knows? The world's full of all sorts of crazy stuff, right?

But it sounds like forecasting of a kind - prediction is a real key for you. And so when people talk about like, you've got to know what's going to happen next. You have to have that conviction, right? That I know what's going to happen next. I don't have to keep second-guessing myself and acting crazy about it. Maybe every once in a while, there's this surprise, but pretty much if I've done my job right, it kind of plays out.

So here we live in a world where everything that has the word "prediction" associated with it is now associated with AI, right? So if there's a prediction, somebody is going to tell you there's some ML that can do the prediction better than us human beings. So here you are, somebody who handles relationships, there's a political element to it, there are the rules of engagement, and then there are these predictions. Do you think an AI is ever going to come in and help with those predictions, replace your right arm or a lobe of your brain or something like that? You guys at Microsoft got no shortage of AI, right? You got AI everywhere. Do you actually use AI kind of predictive capabilities in the job itself, or is that more in the bucket of things that you offer to your customer that they can use in their business, and Microsoft can use it elsewhere in the business, but they're not using it as a prosthesis or anything else for Rahul?

Rahul Maniktala (03:20):

We do both.

Christopher Beall (03:21):

Oh, now he's talking.

Rahul Maniktala (03:24):

The technology,  and we rely on every human being for their own AI. So the technology AI gives a certain thing with some amount of predictability, but then our own AI, which is bent on those connections and rules of engagement helps us with how we engage. And some people do it more. Some people do less. I have a little line there.

Sometimes folks on the team would say that you come up with all these conspiracy theories and generally I would say, generally, those conspiracy theories are true. They come true with that element of AI. What we do, we do internally. There is a lot of in the last three, four years, we have seen those items helping us with the business as such.

Christopher Beall (04:10):

I can