Ramjas College, University of Delhi

Cornell University ILR School

IE (Instituto de Empresa)

Compensation Leader at Cisco

San Jose, California, United States

As a Leader in the Global Compensation Solutions & Practices Team, I will be leading a global team of consultants, analysts and specialists who provide compensation consulting at scale to leaders across Americas – Central and West and EMEAR. As part of the comp leader community, I will also help shaping and leading key strategic priorities for the organization.

Cisco

Compensation Leader

- Security is one of Cisco’s growth businesses (>$3B in revenue), at the center of its transformation to SaaS and critical to the company’s future success. As one of the Community Partners (aka HR Business Partner) in Security Business Group, main responsibilities include establishing trusting partnership with the Security business leaders and helping them achieve business objectives

-  The work includes aligning people strategy to business objectives, partnering as trusted leader and advisor to the business leaders, identifying and deploying solutions that reflect the needs of the business, and being an advocate for our employees to enable their growth and success

HR Business Partner  -  Security Business Group

- Partnered with Sales & Marketing and ONEx (Customer Experience and Ops) orgs to provide consulting services to senior business leaders, HR business partners and talent acquisition teams on executive compensation related issues such as executive benchmarking, leveling, pay recommendations, promotions and external offers

-  Designed and implemented a robust, analytical pay parity framework for our executive population (VP+) to analyze, identify and pro-actively address any potential gaps across Executive Rewards portfolio (base pay, bonus, stock). Helped Cisco deliver on its pay fairness commitment

-  Proactively recommended improvements to existing processes to ensure our programs and practices remain innovative, leading-edge, efficient, and effective

Executive Compensation Consultant

As part of the 12-week internship, I was part of the client facing HR team that partners with Global Specialist (GS) sales organization to drive strategic and transformational activities.

-  Led a priority initiative to develop career path / people mobility plan for the GS organization to help with the business transformation towards multi-domain sales play, better clarity into opportunities @ Cisco and enabling cross-functional / cross-domain moves to make One Cisco Many Careers possible
-  Based on interviews globally, external research and data analysis, came up with insights, which drove my actionable recommendations presented to the Sales leadership and my HR team
-  Very well received and left an implementation plan behind that will be used by the team to implement many of the recommendations over next couple of months

As part of my group project, worked on a cohort-wide consulting project that culminated in a presentation to HRLT and we were appreciated for our creative, bold, and actionable recommendations. The opportunity at hand was understanding what makes employees participate or not participate in Cisco rituals and engagement tools and how can we further drive adoption since studies have proven better engagement leads to better performance. More details in below link.

HR Leadership Program Intern

Pursuing Master of Industrial and Labor Relations with Human Resources and Organization as my concentration. It focuses on people in organizations, including the roles of line managers, the HR function and HR professionals in contributing to organizational success, employee well-being and key aspects of organizational life such as leadership, decision-making, and conflict resolution. The emphasis is on both theoretical and practical applications.

Graduate Student

Cross-industry experience: Pharmaceutical, Retail, CPG / Tobacco, Technology

-  Led multi-million dollar accounts and attained 30% growth by acquiring new clients and scaling existing analytical teams
-  Partnered with Fortune 500 clients to define business strategies to be achieved and charted out analytical road-maps
-  Conducted problem solving and cross-industry learning workshops for executives helping them to ideate and innovate

Key Projects:
-  Services (Technology) – Build predictive capabilities to identify customers on the website probable to call the support center & pro-actively guide the customers to the resolution path on the website
-  Consumer & Marketplace Insights (CPG/Tobacco) – Set up analytical foundation to understand loyalty, brand interactions & inventory performance across retail chains helping clients devise marketing & product assortment strategies
-  Marketing Campaign Management (Retail) – Analytical design of CRM campaigns & its measurement methodology helping drive customer engagement & attributable revenue
-  Customer Insights (Retail) – Work with the central customer insights team to solve problems across business functions such as product line reviews, marketing segmentation & propensity models

Mu Sigma

Engagement Manager

Projects: Leading US based pharmaceutical and retail company; Mu Sigma Marketing Team

Key Responsibilities:
-  Coached diverse teams to leverage best in-class analytics to solve problems in a sustainable and scalable manner
-  Built strong and competent 30+ member teams by hiring and mentoring talent to meet account and company growth goals
-  Kick-started engagement with Gartner/Forrester to position Mu Sigma as thought leaders and initiated the company website revamp to increase web traffic during my 1-year stint leading the Marketing team

Key Projects Executed:
-  Account Based Selling (Pharma) - Better understanding & establishing strategy on influencing Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs), which are a network of well-knit healthcare providers with a centralized decision making body
-  Field Force Optimization (Pharma) - Supporting analytics to develop an enterprise level strategy by understanding the effectiveness of current sales force deployment and rationalize its efforts across brands & sales force
-  Prep The Market initiative (Mu Sigma Marketing) – Kick-started relationships with Gartner/Forrester to position Mu Sigma as thought leaders &  website revamp to drive more traffic by SEO optimization & better design

Manager

Project: Leading US based pharmaceutical company

Key Responsibilities:
-  Led a 6-member team and managed execution of multiple projects simultaneously to ensure timely and quality delivery
-  Provided analytical solutions to assist Sales and Marketing functions of a pharmaceutical giant in making better business decisions primarily about their US sales force strategy for various therapeutic areas
-  Improved project productivity and turnaround time by 15% after conducting training sessions and leading account wide initiatives such as Reusable Modules and Information and Visualization Repository

Key Projects Executed:
-  Placement Exercise - Designed and implemented an extremely complex, sensitive and strategic project. First ever sales force restructuring exercise done at Mu Sigma and results of the work were covered in US pharma news
-  Product Re-introduction in the Market - Helped regain lost market share by  devising a robust sample optimization strategy, with a short term aggressive sampling need, for reintroduction of a product in the market after a 9 month gap
-  Early Adopter Analysis and Hand Sampling Strategy
o Helped the client to shift to Hand Sampling strategy from mail sampling for its blockbuster product to reduce loss of opportunity, improve operational efficiency and  counter launch of a competitor product in 2013
o Performed an early adopter analysis to identify physicians at-risk of switching to competitor products and then prioritized regions for hand sampling deployment in a phased manner

Associate Manager / Senior Business Analyst

Masters in International Management, specialization in International Business (consistently ranked among top 10 Business Schools in the world)

-  Awarded “Leadership for Asian Nationals” scholarship
-  Won the prestigious IE - Nokia University Student Research Project competition held on Sustainable Development in Nov, 2010 thereby exhibiting entrepreneurial skills along with ability to understand the world’s environmental needs
-  One of the few selected for a short Exchange Program held in May, 2011 at London Business School

IE BUSINESS SCHOOL

Student

Project : Leading US based pharmaceutical company

Key Functions:
-  Designed, programmed, and conducted statistical analyses using SAS for various clinical trials indicating effectiveness and safety of the drug to enable clients to seek regulatory approvals and launch drugs
-  Illustrated great client management  and secured repeat business by demonstrating the value and cost effectiveness of our services by managing defect prevention, risk mitigation and pushing new effective solutions to be adopted as a standard

Key Project: TCS Pilot Project
o First project as Point of Contact, containing 263 reports, aimed at establishing standards and  processes
o Responsible for coordinating with stakeholders and tracking issues for meeting delivery  commitments on schedule
o Identified certain short comings in clients’ decisions and proposed alternative approaches and codes ensuring quick turnaround, increased productivity and effective utilization of resources

Sumit Prasad

Sumit Prasad