Mahak Khushalani, Senior Marketing Manager for Thomson Reuters India shares key B2B marketing insights. He discusses the challenge of shifting a legacy brand’s perception, the importance of “internal selling” to prove marketing’s value, and a future defined by human-to-human engagement.
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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Master “Internal Selling”: Proving your value to internal stakeholders is just as crucial as achieving external results.
- The Future of B2B is Human-to-Human: Move beyond broad strategies to create hyper-personalised journeys for individual prospects.
- Connect Tactics to Business Impact: To build your career, don’t just complete tasks; show how your work directly drives revenue.
Could you please give a quick introduction to yourself and your role at Thomson Reuters?
I am the Senior Marketing Manager for India Corporates at Thomson Reuters. In my role, I lead field marketing activations in the Indian market, primarily serving stakeholders in the tax and finance functions with our software solutions.
How did you get into marketing?
Marketing, for me, was always at the intersection of storytelling, cultural nuances, and human behaviour. Although I studied engineering, I realised I didn’t want to spend my life coding. This pull towards understanding people led me to pursue a post-graduation course in marketing at one of India’s premier institutes, MICA. From there, I began my career in B2B marketing, and for nearly a decade, I’ve worked with great companies like Wipro and Zycus before joining Thomson Reuters.
What is your main marketing focus at the moment?
My focus is twofold. The primary goal is to generate a pipeline for the business through our marketing activations. The second, which is quite tricky, is to build brand awareness for Thomson Reuters as a software solutions provider. Many people associate our brand with the Reuters news arm, so a key challenge is to break that mould and make people realise we also provide sophisticated tax and finance software. Ultimately, both goals tie back to using marketing to drive tangible business growth.
Are there any specific campaigns or initiatives you’ve run recently that you think have been very successful?
We’ve been running a very successful campaign focused on a specific industry. While our software is industry-agnostic, we identified a great deal of complexity in how tax is handled in certain markets. The campaign has been a mix of targeted paid promotions on LinkedIn, webinars, and in-person roundtables. The key to its success has been focusing our messaging on the specific pain points of the industry rather than just talking about our solution. This sharp, targeted approach has been a real differentiator in the market.
How would you define success in marketing?
I define success in two ways. First, there are the numbers on the dashboard—the tangible value you bring to the business. But the second part, which is equally important, is your ability to effectively communicate that value to internal stakeholders. Marketers can get trapped in focusing only on external communications, but we must also master internal selling. Regularly demonstrating how marketing is driving results ensures you maintain momentum and validates your contribution to the business.
What are your biggest challenges at the moment?
Externally, the key challenge is reaching the right audience within a set budget; every dollar must count. Internally, a significant challenge is building relevant business cases for your activations and navigating the ‘everyone has an opinion’ landscape of marketing. The marketer’s job is to cut through the internal noise, focus on what truly matters, and prove how your initiatives will move the needle for the organisation.
As a company, how do you stay ahead of your competitors?
At Thomson Reuters, our biggest differentiator is trust. This principle is at the centre of everything we do, including marketing. We don’t take shortcuts, especially concerning data privacy. Our engagements reflect this core value, and we’ve found that the market respects this approach immensely. In long B2B sales cycles, where relationships are paramount, building and maintaining that trust is how we stay ahead.
What are the biggest opportunities for marketers today that might not have been available in the past?
The biggest opportunity today lies in our ability to act fast and learn fast, thanks to the availability of data and AI. We can test concepts, evaluate performance, learn from failures, and adapt our strategies with incredible speed. The opportunity isn’t just about having access to tools like Generative AI; it’s about what you do with them. The ability to execute quickly and learn from those actions has improved tremendously and is a huge advantage for modern marketers.
What career advice would you give to someone starting in the marketing industry?
For anyone starting out, my main advice is to look beyond the specific task you’re given. Don’t just complete the tactic; understand how it moves the needle for the business. If you can connect your work to the overall business impact—leads, opportunities, revenue—and communicate that internally, you will pave the way for a bright career.
On being a generalist versus a specialist, it depends on your career goals. If you aspire to lead a team and manage a broader strategy, I believe you need to be a generalist. If you want to be an expert in a specific domain like digital marketing, that’s fine, but know that it can be risky if that one area isn’t delivering results. A generalist can tie everything together into a powerful story.
Is there any traditional leadership advice that you believe doesn’t apply to modern marketing?
The traditional advice that marketing is a cost centre or simply an ‘enablement’ function is completely outdated. Today, marketing is a core strategic function that drives revenue. The best companies prove this. We, as marketers, need to continue building a strong case for our strategic role and demonstrate that we are central to the business’s success, not just a support team.
What does the future of marketing look like?
The future of marketing will be even more data-driven, but its defining feature will be hyper-personalisation. We are moving beyond Account-Based Marketing to what I’d call prospect-based marketing. At the end of the day, we sell to people, not just organisations. The lines between B2B and B2C will continue to blur as B2B marketing adopts a more human-to-human approach, leveraging data and AI to create highly specific and individualised journeys.
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