Top 25 eCommerce leaders 2022: Ajay Shankar

Making the cut in our top 25 leaders list is Ajay Shankar (pictured), who has experience working with multi hundred-million-dollar businesses for brands such as Lenovo, Dell, 3M, and Essilor.

Shankar, who has been with Lenovo for more than four years, is the managing director of the eCommerce and digital businesses across this region. Within the role, he handles the brand’s eCommerce, e-tailers, inside sales and O2O brand flagship retail stores. He is also responsible for all Lenovo products such as laptops, desktops, monitors, workstations, accessories, tablets, services, and the Smart IoT range.

Through his myriad of experiences, Shankar has never been one to shy away from new areas of work such as promotion management.

At Lenovo, some of his core business objectives include driving eCommerce growth and sustainability, end-user engagement, digital marketing budget management, acquiring customers, new product launches, digital marketing, demand generation, and promotion management.

He also focuses on eCommerce marketing initiatives that drive both B2B and B2C customers. Alongside his team, he is especially focused on specific audience groups such as enterprises, gamers, students and Gen Z consumers, while offering more tailored and customised product offerings to this target audience.

Shankar is also tasked to drive the best in class customer experience and user experience both on the web UX and post-purchase.

Specific campaigns led by Shankar include the Lenovo pro ambassador programme which was a campaign demonstrating how Lenovo PRO (a loyalty platform for SMBs) was supporting SMBs to get their best tech solutions.

No stranger to leading the biggest sales of the year, he has led campaigns that have focused on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

During his time at Lenovo, he and his team have maintained more than a 95% impression share on its brand terms across devices.

“But all of this success didn’t come easy, during the last three years – especially during the period of the pandemic – we were impacted with supply constraints and longer lead times,” he explained.

However, the team took immediate action to create demand on the available products and portfolio. Over the past three and a half years, the business revenue has grown tremendously on high profitability levels.

Before Lenovo, he led the regional digital and eCommerce agenda at Essilor, 3M and Dell, where he steered the go-to-market strategies and execution across the Asia Pacific region.